The Works of DANTE - Issue 4

Partner profiles

This issue sees the introduction of a new feature where we talk to a project partner – to learn more about who they are and what they do, and discover the “hot topic” that is most important to their users. For this first profile, we spoke to Zoran Birimisa, Head of International Relations at CARNet, a project partner in GÉANT2.  

1) What is CARNet?

CARNet is the Croatian Academic and Research Network. It was created in 1991 as a project of the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Croatia. In 1995 the Government of the Republic of Croatia issued a Decree on the founding of the CARNet institution.

CARNet serves a community of about 150,000 end users (students, lecturers, researchers) and connects around 200 institutions from the academic and research community to the CARNet network. This number will rise significantly in the coming months, as we begin connecting primary and secondary schools.

Apart from 61 employees, CARNet has about 30 external associates.

2) What's new in research networking in Croatia?

At the moment, CARNet is extending connectivity to primary and secondary schools, which is a huge but exciting challenge. CARNet also recently completed the development of videoconferencing infrastructure in its member institutions. CARNet has also taken its first steps towards the establishment of a national CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team).

3) What's most important to your end users?

We have several groups of users depending on differing usage levels and the kind of service that is required. At the moment CARNet provides its users not only with the bandwidth they require, but also provides onward links to research and education institutes throughout Europe via the GÉANT2 network. This enables Croatian researchers to be a part of the wider European research community, which is of real importance to our users.

Advanced services are being developed simultaneously with growth of the number of users, and for that reason the process of upgrading the entire network backbone to support multicast or IPv6 will be slowed a little.

As the upgrade of our network is a continuous process, there will always be generally satisfied customers, but CARNet does its best to predict their needs and offer them the best available technologies and services.

4) What other activities do you undertake for the RN community in Croatia?

CARNet organises online courses and develops programmes for distance education, the latest of which is the eLearning Academy (ELA).
CARNet also maintains several national services, such as DNS, CARNet CERT, WWW.HR, News, NTP, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Distribution Lists, and Directory Services.

5) How do you communicate with your end users?

CARNet uses multiple channels to communicate with its users.

• Our PR service is in charge of the website and press releases, as well as organising press conferences and developing strong relationships with the media.
  
  
• Individual services and departments use different mailing lists to inform users about daily changes, news and other important issues. Internal communication within our community is a necessity for close collaboration.
  
  
• Our Marketing and Promotion department is responsible for the design, production and distribution of promotional materials, as well as organising specialised events.
  
  
• We also work hard to link pilot projects with external partners. These pilot projects are organised in co-operation with external partners who come up with proposals for technology usage in different aspects of science and arts.
  
  
• The International Relations department tries to connect CARNet institutional users with potential partners for international ICT projects that require advanced infrastructure on a wide scale.
  
  
• The International Relations and Marketing departments also handle our Internet Users Conference – CUC (CUC is an acronym coming from the original name – CARNet Users Conference).

6) What’s happening at this year’s Internet Users Conference?

CUC 2005 will be held at the University of Dubrovnik on 21-23 November 2005. CUC is an English speaking conference, with a 3 year strategic goal to become a regional conference for Internet users.

The 7th CUC will offer 4 keynote speakers, around 40 papers, 3 tutorials and 6 workshops, 2-3 round tables and panel discussions.

This year’s programme was shaped by an international Programme Committee. It will include Japanese, British, American and Dutch keynote speakers on ICT. The opening ceremony will see a presentation by Joichi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons International who will talk about "The Sharing Economy”.

On the second day of the conference Shirley Wood, Customer Support Director at UKERNA, United Kingdom, will discuss “Have we given the users’ what they want over the last 20 years?”  ”Understanding the Risks: Is Safe Computing Possible?” is the title of the presentation to be given by Robert D. Cowles on the third day of the conference. Cowles is the Computer Security Officer at a leading US research laboratory SLAC, at Stanford University, USA.

At the closing plenary Klaas Wierenga, manager of Middleware Services at SURFnet, the Dutch national academic and research network, will be presenting ”eduroam: towards a pan-European research and education federation”.

Anyone interested can register via this link.