Kenic has set its Annual General Meeting for Friday this week, to rubber stamp the board’s decision to fire all employees and start afresh.

Contrary to past practices where the AGM comprised of registrars, government, internet businesses and basically anyone interested in domain issues, this one will be a closed door session, open only to parties that play nice and don’t ask questions.

The meeting comes after a stormy two months for the .ke country code Top Level Domain registry, where board members have left and a change manager appointed to run the affairs.

Kenic was constituted as a multi-stakeholder body, where all parties concerned with the critical internet infrastructure would have equal say. Maybe the idea of .ke being critical doesnt sink in but can you imagine if KRA.go.ke failed to work for a day because someone deleted it by mistake or deliberately? No filing of returns, clearing and forwarding services and all other services that we enjoy at the click of a mouse.

The Permanent Secretary in the ministry of information and communication, Bitange Ndemo says he was blindsided by Kenic board’s decision to fire all staff but more facts will emerge after the AGM.

I wonder whether there will be security guards to keep other people from attending 🙂

Technical services handed to TESPOK

When the cracks at Kenic started emerging, TESPOK tabled its proposal to run technical services for Kenic. Indeed, immediately Kris Senanu took over as TESPOK representative on the board, his first order of business was to address the proposal. Details are contained in my previous post.

In retrospect, TESPOK must have foreseen that at some point, Kenic will come to such a position and TESPOK expertise will be needed. That is what happened. After the technical staff were let go, they were asked to send passwords to TESPOK, who are now in charge of technical functions at Kenic.

This was expected because its not like any other aspect of tech. That part of the resource is scarce. I am not sure there are many techies who you can call one morning and say, “hey, come in this morning and run the registry, deletions are this time, DNS updates that time,” and the person will hit the ground running. I may be wrong but they may need experience in such settings.

I guess much of the details on who handles the technical functions, whether the open multistakeholder model continues and leadership direction will come out after the AGM.

🙂