Nathalie Trenaman trained local IPv6 teachers as RIPE ran out of weeks

Summary

RIPE NCC ran 48 face-to-face IPv6 training courses in 2016. Nathalie Trenaman identified a second bottleneck beside staff time: requests for courses taught in local languages.
Her Train-the-Trainer programme selected 11 from roughly 25 qualified applicants for a five-day workshop in early 2017. Two supervised teaching outings and an evaluation stood between workshop attendance and certification.

The calendar had 52 weeks

Forty-eight classes in a year leaves four weeks for everything else: planning, travel, illness, maybe sleep. That was RIPE NCC’s 2016 IPv6 training pace, as Nathalie Trenaman wrote in a March 2017 account. Engineers across the service region kept asking for more. They also wanted someone who could explain IPv6 in a local language. Sending the same Amsterdam-based trainers on more flights would have stretched the calendar; it would not have solved the language problem.

Trenaman’s project, begun in 2015, treated teaching capacity like network capacity: put it nearer the people who need it, and check whether it works. The Train-the-Trainer scheme sought instructors in the MENOG and ENOG regions who could deliver RIPE NCC material alongside its own trainers and build local IPv6 communities. After a call for CVs and an online test, about 25 applicants qualified in the early-2017 intake. Eleven were chosen for five days on the curriculum, labs, English and presentation skills. This was a selection into a pipeline, not a graduation ceremony for eleven certified instructors.

The gate after the classroom mattered. Trenaman said participants would teach twice with RIPE NCC trainers before evaluation for certification. At the time she reported one certified trainer from the earlier Dubai group and four Moscow participants who had already accompanied a regional course. The Iran group was preparing for teaching work in the following quarter. Those are modest numbers, yet they reveal the operating design: selecting, rehearsing, co-teaching, evaluating, then sending people back into local networks.

The underlying curriculum was substantial. A 2015 Beirut workshop that Trenaman co-taught with Massimiliano Stucchi and Jad el Cham ran for three days. Its agenda moved from address plans to BGP, DHCP-PD, 6rd and security labs. A trainer had to help another engineer build a working plan, not merely pronounce “IPv6” with conviction. That is why the supervised outings count more than the group photograph.

Trenaman later moved into routing security, as her RIPE Labs biography records, and a RIPE 78 staff page carries her named photograph. This earlier episode captures a less glamorous form of Internet infrastructure: a person who can teach the next person, nearby, in a language they use at work. The five-day course supplied candidates. The real multiplier began when they stepped into other people’s classrooms.