Granted - Empowering Projects to Improve the Internet
This year we kicked off the ARIN Community Grant Program that is designed to provide financial grants in support of initiatives that improve the overall Internet industry and Internet user environment and benefit the Internet community within the ARIN service region. In the very first year of the program we were pleased to receive 23 applications for funding which, in total, amounted to more than $350,000 in requests. Thank you to everyone who took the time to apply. After careful deliberation, the Grant Selection Committee and Board of Trustees selected four projects to receive funding.
In their own words, here are quick summaries of what each of these projects seek to accomplish.
DNS-OARC | Indianapolis, IN, USA | Grant amount: $7,500
Internet operations and infrastructure critically depend upon the DNS. While there are many vendor solutions available for implementing DNS service, the gathering, measurement, testing and debugging of DNS traffic, protocol features and vulnerabilities are no less critical a part of this. Part of DNS-OARC’s public benefit mission is to develop publicly available tools and services that support these capabilities, and these are widely used by the DNS and operator communities. Our open-source tools including; dsc (dns stats collector), dnsjit (captures and replays DNS), dnscap (network capture utility), dnsperf (performance testing), and drool (replays DNS), (and others). These need constant maintenance and improvements. The use of these open-source tools is free, and as a 501(c3) nonprofit, OARC seeks to fund development and hardware costs to support this public benefit work.
Many of these tools have been developed in-house over time by OARC and its contributors. Others have been developed externally, and either donated to OARC by the original owner, or in some cases OARC has taken custodianship for the community of DNS tools which have become ‘orphaned’ from their original developers.
Industry Network Technology Council | Fairfax, VA, USA | Grant amount: $20,000
Enterprise IPv6 adoption has lagged. One of the issues is that enterprise technicians don’t know how IPv6 works. The technicians want to get trained yet the management does not feel that they do not want to pay for such training because they do not see a business need for adoption.
This creates an unfortunate cycle where misinformation about the complexity of the IPv6 protocol and unreasonable fears about security and manageability combine with the perceived lack of urgent business needs to prevent adoption of IPv6.
We have a multi-pronged strategy. We can provide technical training on many of the core features of IPv6. We plan a series of webinars this year. We presented one such webinar last year which was attended by over 120 people from over 70 separate enterprises including outsourcing companies, “brick-and-mortar” Fortune 500 type enterprises, small independent software companies and others.
CrypTech/Stichting NLnet | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Grant amount: $10,000
Working since 2014 the CrypTech project has developed an open-source hardware cryptographic engine design to meet the needs of high assurance Internet infrastructure systems that use cryptography. Our open-source hardware designs are aimed to be of general use to the broad Internet community, covering needs such as securing email, web, DNSSEC, PKIs, etc. The project has produced a design and hardware boards that have been used in various experiments and test, and now an external product. We are proud to say that the current design has been the subject of a positive external security evaluation. The CrypTech core team are now beginning the process of designing next generation designs and ARIN community funding can help enable this process.
Global NOG Alliance | Apeldoorn, The Netherlands | Grant amount: $7,000
The Global NOG Alliance (GNA) is a non-profit foundation which has been set up to help Network Operator Groups and technical communities all around the world. We help NOGs by providing logistical support for their events and membership administration, thereby freeing up NOG organizers to focus on their core functions of growing and improving knowledge and expertise in their communities.
Our initial services to NOGs include providing technical support and hosting their websites, mailing lists, mailboxes, call-for-papers and event management tools. Now, while there are many open source tools capable of providing piecemeal solutions, there is nothing readily available that does exactly what NOGs need to free them from their administrative burdens.
Our project therefore is to integrate existing open source solutions into a cohesive, easy-to-use system providing single-sign-on access to a wide range of useful event planning and membership administration tools. As open source advocates, we would also contribute to existing open source projects to improve their value for NOGs. Where existing tools do not exist or where integration between tools is not yet available we are looking to develop those parts, and of course release them as open source.
Congratulations to these first ARIN community grant recipients!
We are excited to support these projects as they aim to improve to the health and well-being of the Internet and make a positive contribution to the ARIN community.
Stay tuned for next year’s program
We will begin accepting applications for next year’s program in the spring of 2020. Information about the program will be posted to our ARIN Community Grant Program page, and we will send out an email via arin-announce once the application period opens.
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