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Daurice Nyirongo

You can’t just be a techie anymore. You have to be a leader, says Michuki Mwangi, a network engineer who works in Kenya for the Internet Society, an international nonprofit dedicated to providing standards, leadership, and education.

Mwangi was among more than thirty participants in a summer workshop that brought engineers from three continents and seven countries to the University of Oregon campus.

“Governments feel like they’re losing a lot of control to this thing called the Internet,” he says. “Now you have to go beyond the technical, to demonstrate to leaders at the highest levels that, well, you’re not actually losing control. The Internet is giving you better opportunities.”

The UO’s Network Startup Resource Center hosted the weeklong workshop in which Mwangi took part. Daily labs challenged professionals from Ghana, Togo, Malawi, Kenya, Bangladesh, Nepal, and China, as well as UO computer science students, with designing, testing, and modifying university technology networks.

There is a tremendous thirst for such experience in the developing world.

It took Daurice Nyirongo, another participant in this summer’s international computer networking course at the UO, five hours on the road and more than thirty more in the air to travel from her home in northern Malawi to the University of Oregon campus.

The mother of four young children oversees all information technology at Mzuzu University in Mzuzu, Malawi. She’s tasked with everything from network design to PC repair. (Video featuring Nyirongo.)

The NSRC, a program based in UO Information Services, has been providing technical assistance to universities and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in developing countries around the world for nearly two decades. Although the NSRC has hosted individuals from all over the world, this summer marked the first time the program was able to bring engineers to the University of Oregon campus for a group workshop.

Over the years, Steven Huter, a UO research associate who oversees the NSRC, has worked with UO network engineers to build Internet infrastructure and establish technical education programs in more than 100 countries. He is currently working with the Association of African Universities and the African Network Operators Group on a project to assist several countries with developing national research and education networks in Africa.

“This workshop was a tremendous opportunity because (participants) not only exchanged information with our instructors, but also with each other,” Huter said. “Those relationships are a huge part of a sustainable skill-building effort.”

A combination of grants from the National Science Foundation, the Internet Society, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and additional contributions from nearly two dozen public and private organizations such as Google and Cisco Systems allow UO network engineers to travel around the globe to share skills in building and maintaining Internet infrastructure.

Above all, says Mwangi, computer networking is about relationships.

“It’s a challenge of both the technical and the political,” the Kenyan network engineer says. “You have to make sure people in the highest levels of government understand the importance of the technical side of networking.”