Summary

  • AFRINIC’s public Member and Stakeholder Survey asks what is working, where the registry should improve and what it should prioritize in coming years.
  • The form estimates ten minutes and says replies are anonymous unless a respondent chooses to identify at the end; the public invitation gives no closing date or findings timetable.

On 16 October, AFRINIC’s homepage marked its Member and Stakeholder Survey “Now Open” and invited input on future priorities, services and community engagement. The survey introduction poses three broad questions: what works, where AFRINIC should improve and what it should prioritize in the years ahead.

The form estimates about ten minutes and says responses are anonymous unless a person chooses to identify at the end. That can make it easier to describe a service problem candidly. It also makes the method of interpretation important: anonymity protects a respondent, but does not by itself show who answered, how many people replied or whether experiences differ across groups.

The public invitation states no closing date and no date for a findings report. The homepage calls the survey only a few minutes; the form says approximately ten. Neither page explains how answers will be summarized, what service or decision process will receive them, or when respondents can expect an update. Those arrangements may exist elsewhere or be decided later; they are not set out on the public pages reviewed here.

That missing timetable matters because “how AFRINIC is doing” spans different operating surfaces. Its membership pages describe resource use, eligibility, fees and services for organizations using IPv4, IPv6 and autonomous-system numbers. A difficulty with account verification is not the same measure as a stakeholder’s view of engagement or an operator’s experience with a registry service. An open survey can collect useful observations across these areas, but its invitation does not explain how responses will be grouped or compared.

A survey is an input channel, not a vote. The public material reviewed does not show a response count, a defined sample or a method for estimating how closely replies match the wider member and stakeholder population. That is not evidence that the questionnaire is flawed; an opening page is not a results report. It limits what readers can infer until AFRINIC publishes the method and findings.

The practical test begins after submission. AFRINIC can make the feedback loop legible by publishing a closing date, whom it invited, the number and broad profile of responses where privacy allows, and a synthesis that separates service problems from preferences about future work. It should then say which items move into a service plan, which require a separate policy or governance process, which cannot be acted on, and when the next update will appear. The survey asks for priorities. A public return path will show whether those priorities changed anything.

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