AFRINIC Board Elections will be held during the Africa Internet Summit (AIS'20).
The final candidate slate was published a few days ago. I was particularly interested to see who are the candidates running for Seat 3, representing the Indian Ocean. The candidates are:
I was surprised to see Kaleem Usmani as candidate again.
I have never seen Usmani participate in the public mailing lists of AFRINIC, whether relating to the community or resource policy discussions. A quick search on Google to cross-check that is easy.
Kaleem Usmani has zero participation in AFRINIC mailing lists. Also, based on past experience I had in Mauritius, during events organized by the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-MU), where I did not obtain satisfactory answers to my questions back in 2014, I would not expect the AFRINIC community to obtain answers from him should he be elected as board director.
I knew Kaleem Usmani as the officer-in-charge of CERT-MU the past few years and as per his CV posted by AFRINIC I see that now he is the Head of CERT-MU. I have a bad experience in getting answers from Usmani. There is this time when he ignored my question regarding the rise of Email Spam in Mauritius and actions by the CERT-MU.
Today, I also posted how CERT-MU requested Google to delist a webpage that mentions a former Minister of Technology in a domestic violence incident. That was the only request that CERT-MU ever made to Google regarding takedowns as per Google's transparency report. It is a pity and shameful at the same time that CERT-MU ignores its constituents (home users) but would provide a more helpful hand to a politician. 😐