CAPIF 5 in Dushanbe
CAPIF 5, the Central Asia Peering and Interconnection Forum, met in Dushanbe on 24–25 September, the forum’s first meeting in Tajikistan. In the History of the Internet session on the second afternoon, Jim presented Central Asian Stories: How AI Tools are Changing the Way We Study Internet History: the Reading Room, and how agentic researchers used it, together with primary data from RIPE, RouteViews, and PeeringDB, to draft a history of the Internet in Central Asia. The session included a live agentic coding demo, which built a wall of Internet history facts and comments on the panel discussion as it happened in the room.
The book that came out of that work, The Wires of the Steppe: Peering, Transit, and Exchange in Central Asia, 1990–2026, was announced at the meeting. It is available in English, Edition 1.1, with a Russian draft. It was prepared with AI research assistance, as its author’s statement explains, and every factual claim carries a footnote to a machine-checkable record.
The collection’s CAPIF shelf holds the first four meetings, 2022–2025: 135 talks and documents, 89 of them with a floor record of the speaker’s Russian paired line by line with labelled machine translation. The fifth meeting is being accessioned as its materials publish.