Tuesday 7 May 2024
(L-R): DICT’s Deputy Secretary, Digital Government Wing, Mr Russell Woruba, PNG UNITECH ICTS Director & .PG administrator Russell Harada, DICT Secretary, Steven Matainaho and ICANN Vice President Oceania region, Savenaca Vocea at UPNG for the DNS technical workshop.
A Domain Name System (DNS) Forum is underway at the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby.
The forum is split into two sessions; the DNS 2024 session is held from 6-8 May, while the DNS policy workshop will be held at Hilton Hotel from 9-10 May.
The forum is co- hosted by the Department of Information and Communications Technology and Papua New Guinea University of Technology’s Information and Communication Technology Service (ICTS).
DICT Secretary, Mr Steven Matainaho in his opening remarks yesterday (Monday 6 May), said such collaboration and partnerships between key stakeholders is important in the ICT space.
“For DICT, our objective here is to be able to bring in important partners together and facilitate workshops and forums to help in capacity building in the ICT sector.
“Such forums also inform us on policy matters ensuring that DICT is making inroads in this space,” Mr Matainaho said.
DICT supports a number of areas under the pillars of digital transformation, including looking after critical digital infrastructure, facilitating digital government, financial intuition and entrepreneurship.
PNG Unitech’s ICTS Director and (.PG) administrator, Mr Russell Deka Harada said the workshop and forum is aimed at promoting domain name; .PG.
“The domain name .PG is a public property, it belongs to the people of PNG, which not many Papua New Guineans know about and through this workshop, Unitech who administers and allocate .PG domain names for users and organisations in the country want to promote and market the .PG domain name.
“We want to inform the public, businesses and organisations about .PG and how people can be able to register their domain names,” Mr Harada said.
Mr Harada said this workshop is also important and will enable his team to get feedback for the .PG policy review currently being compiled.
Participants attending the 3 -day workshop include; digital transformation officers (DTOs’), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), telecommunications companies, academics and policy makers in the ICT space.
The DICT acknowledges the support and collaboration between Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) for conducting the important technical DNS workshop trainings.
ICANN’s vice president for Oceania region, Mr Savenaca Vocea who will be participating in the workshop sessions said it is important to bring up to speed DTOs’ about importance of DNS, the threats and security aspects of maintaining DNS as the ICT space is always evolving.
“For us at ICANN, we advocate security, stability and resiliency with the Internet and networks.
“It is important for us in the region to come together and collaborate and we hope that after this event, we will be able to set some benchmarks in the .PG domain while continuing the journey of creating awareness, advocacy and resilience in the ICT space in the region,” Mr Vocea added.