[wsfii-discuss] Press Release: guifi.net has reached the thousands!

Tue Oct 31 12:35:36 UTC 2006

Dear Malcolm,

I am encouraged by your coments about broadening the focus. It is not 
just about access but how that access is developed so that it will eable 
communities and cities to discover themselves (in the sense of seeing 
the value of their own indigenous knowledge) as well as discover each 
other (moving towards more south to south collaboration and get past the 
colonial and neocolonial patterns of the north-south top-down model) and 
in the process discovering and embracing relevant global best practices 
shared via a open source development network.

> I have followed this with interest as this goes to the very heart of 
> the OPLAN <www.oplan.org> proposition, namely that although the 
> attention to date has been almost exclusively been focussed on 
> 'internet access', the real 'prize' I believe from open local access 
> infrastructure is that it will enable communities and cities to 
> discover for THEMSELVES how to use the network to further support and 
> enhance their EXISTING social and economic activities and help them 
> 'dream' of new ways of being a community.  

New ways of being a community could be seen as promoting more 
flexibility in the community (seeing the role of virtual communities 
that span the globe) while not sacrificing community cohensiveness. 
Indeed the idea of where the process of this modern technological 
transformation will take them is up to each community itself to learn to 
be able to see that it is within each person's each network's and each 
communities destiny to be the best in doing what is important to them in 
this life.  The idea of destiny and sustainability is that we can and 
should determine our own destiny so long as it is does not interfere 
with other creatures human and nonhuman to exist as is their destiny in 
the universe. I see this as the Prime Directive of post-industrial human 
development.

> As Walter Lippmann, the influential US writer, journalist and 
> political commentator said, "The role of a press is to keep a 
> community in conversation with itself".   I suggest that likewise, a 
> primary function and benefit of a local open access (neutral) network 
> is to keep a community in /even richer /conversation with itself.  
> Indeed, despite the current lemming-like swarming towards the likes of 
> G-Mail and Yahoo - the opportunity for communities, once they have 
> established an OPLAN, to house their own local e-mail and other 
> servers - will emerge.  This localisation will not only have benefits 
> of security and trust for the community itself but also ease the 
> amount of traffic needlessly transitting the internet.

Many of us have known for some time that there was a challenge brewing 
between those forces in the world that see the Internet as a way to 
develop an alternative more authentic and community oriented models of 
development and those whose simply see the Internet as a more advanced 
tool for exploitating human beings. The Rand Corporation reported years 
ago that the net is a notable new source of media power that threatened 
to chip away at the international consensus for developing the 
neoliberalism agenda of which groups like the Trilaterial Commission 
were the foundation of - serving as a bulwark against countercultural 
forces in the early 70s and their attempt to stimulate a more authentic, 
ecologically sustainable and community oriented development process. Not 
surprisingly there have been efforts by powerful institutions to coopt 
the Internet as a authentic tool for the empowerment of the grassroots.

Yet what is most interesting is the possibility that the net cannot be 
controlled like previous media systems because of the intent of its 
founders was so firmly grounded in the countercultural community and 
through mimicing ecological systems design. And so in a vitrous cycle we 
now see that more ecologically and socially appropriate technologies can 
and are being supported through the net to promote sustainable human 
development. Whats more there is compelling evidence that the evolution 
of an integrated approach that combines the best appropriate 
technologies with an ICT system to effectively evaluate, modify and then 
replicate them, has led to a development model that may actually be more 
competitive than existing practices which tend to focus on individual 
problems and focus the solution purely the application of better 
technologies that often later turn out to be quite toxic and destructive.

In terms of potentially disruptive technologies, wireless is one example 
that many of you are a familar with. However they are other areas of 
equal importance such as distributed power and waste recovery and food 
production. I have been breaking things down in terms of the core areas 
of human need to try keep things at the preliminary stages as basic and 
elementary as possible:

   1. Information - We need information to make the best most informed
      decisions about how to build sustainable societies - that where
      wireless and ICT comes in
   2. Energy - Distributed power makes power generation more efficient
      and less impactful on the environment by relying on more renewable
      sources of energy like solar wind and biogas. and integrated these
      technologies with the built environmet.
   3. Farming - Integrated Farming Systems reduce the need for expensive
      inputs like tractors, fuels, chemicals and fertilizers. This is
      particularly important in developing regions where the costs ot
      those imputs are what is putting the small farmers out of business.
   4. Buildings and Shetler - Similarly in many African communities you
      see metal, wood and concrete blocks. Many of these materials are
      imported from industrialized countries despite the fact that all
      the materials needed to build these buildings exist in these
      community.

The problem is the locals have been encouraged by western development 
institutions to literally forget their indigenous ways of doing things. 
This pattern repeated in all the sectors mentioned above is a major 
reason why local communities have no money for improving their local 
infrastructure and indeed improve their lives in a meaningful way. They 
are making bad investment decisions by listening to the advice of many 
western development agencies. We also need to see that the difference 
between the so called developed and undeveloped worlds is a false 
paradigm and that the same patterns of dependency are encouraged in 
affluent regions - albiet the income and amenities differenc is 
obviously staggering and significant..

> Although we certainly need to fight to maintain  INTERnet -neutrality 
> - we need to fight to WIN LOCALnet neutrality.

The bottom line is these terms net netrality etc are really about 
whether or not the net is about helping people to realize their human 
potential and in that process their destiny or about top down 
instiutions gaining even more power from communities via parasatic 
institutions under the control of national and international elites .

It is of course not so simple as to say that all top level leaders and 
institutions are corrupt as we see even Tony Blair recognizes that 
Global Climate Change is a threat to humanitys future, but in my view it 
is not just about finding a solution to Global Climate Change but doing 
so as part of a process that paves the way for a new global development 
model that translates into more power for the common people at the 
community level. I do believe the kind of system you are talking about 
here can be pivotal in that process.

I share with you the work I have done at a wiki space that was given to 
us. It is a work in progress but begins to sketch out a model that I 
think compelments what you are saying: 
http://www.findbetterways.info/wiki.cgi?UnityCenter

I hope that on a practical level we can build an online infrastructure 
that can serve a knowledge base repository (to complement the physical + 
wireless Resource Centre infrastructure part of the wsfii vision). I am 
inspired by Doug Engelbart's vision to improve not just the level of 
technology held by people in these communities but more importantly to 
use that technology to improve the ways that they use existing 
technologies by facilitating greater community collaboration to improve 
humanity collective intelligence. This on a global level is needed to 
truly and sustainably solve world urgent issues like Global Climate 
Change and AIDS.

Jeff

> Regards
> Malcolm Matson
> The OPLAN Foundation
>
> Ramon Roca wrote:
>
>>
>> Thanks Julian, we do fully share same points of view. I think this is 
>> never will an old thread, instead is one of the main topics.
>> Just let me add a few comments. I'm seeing quite often when talking 
>> about service providers over neutral.networks people do imagine we 
>> are talking about global big ISP. And really that's a part of the 
>> story, but not all.
>> We are experiencing that the openness facilitates a much varied 
>> ecosystem of small and medium enterprises, and that's a quite obvious 
>> opportunities. In fact their support is a key, although their 
>> investments are quite limited or localized to their interests, by 
>> aggregating them is a key of success.
>> By that I mean just network participants, such as farmers, or very 
>> likely any activity with dispersed but local branches or facilities, 
>> like small retailers etc, as well as the universe of service 
>> professionals and local companies who provide services to those SME 
>> as well to the citizens.
>> On neutral networks in some cases they can find better ROI and even 
>> better quality of service.
>> And this have to be taken instead of a competitive issue (neutral 
>> networks never can compete against anybody by its own nature), as a 
>> prove that help in enrich local business in a fair environment.
>> For going there, neutral networks have to gain some credibility, and 
>> very likely a current battle is there.
>>
>> Ramon.
>>
>> En/na Julian Priest ha escrit:
>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 11:23:36PM +0200, Ramon Roca wrote:
>>>  
>>>
>>>> At wifi we decided to make a press release at the point we reach > 
>>>> 1.000 thousands active nodes. That happened last Thursday.
>>>>     
>>>
>>>
>>> Congratulations Guifi!
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>> A LOT MORE THAN JUST A LIST OF ?HOTSPOTS?
>>>> guifi.net isn't just a list of access points. Is much more: Is a 
>>>> big neutral network where the nodes use to have stable wireless 
>>>> links between them and therefore creating an autonomous stable mesh 
>>>> network, either on urban areas or rural areas where in some cases 
>>>> there was no High-Speed internet access before.
>>>>     
>>>
>>>
>>> This neutral network aspect looks like a good one to publicise right
>>> now with the efforts in the US to fight for the net neutrality bill's
>>> passage into law and the http://savetheinternet.com campaign.
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>>> AN OPEN AND NEUTRAL FREE NETWORK
>>>> In the current times where the original universal spirit of the 
>>>> internet is being mediated by private telecommunications operators, 
>>>> by having neutral networks in the last mile guifi.net is 
>>>> contributing to counterbalance the strict commercial driven 
>>>> interests. To provide warranty on this commitment guifi.net adopts 
>>>> the Wireless Commons License.
>>>>     
>>>
>>>
>>> The early wireless freenetworks always discussed that the creation of
>>> a neutral wireless access network was partly as a counter to potential
>>> control of the internet by the owners of the core network. The net
>>> neutrality fight in the US is showing that sadly this _was_ a real
>>> threat after all.
>>>
>>> The legaslitive fight in the US to enshrine net neutrality in law is a
>>> fantastic initiative, but the growth of municipal wireless and
>>> networks like guifi maybe shows that there is an effective
>>> practical/market approach as well.
>>>
>>> It seems to me that building net.neutral access networks where
>>> services (like internet access) are made available by third parties -
>>> provides two mechanisms for users to put pressure on backhaul
>>> providers to be net.neutral.
>>>
>>> The first is that the net.neutral network organises groups of users
>>> (aggregation).
>>>
>>> These groups can then have political and group purchasing power which
>>> creates a viable negotiating position with backhaul network owners (or
>>> perhaps even a basis for building backhaul networks).
>>>
>>> This is going to be the best way to operate where there is only one
>>> backhaul provider (or none).
>>>
>>> The second is that a net.neutral access network effectivley creates a
>>> competitive market for backhaul (and other) services across it. Users
>>> can the choose the services that have the properties they want,
>>> neutrality, high speed, low cost etc.
>>>
>>> This will work better where there is the possibility for multiple
>>> backhaul service providers.
>>>
>>> It seems pretty weird to me that municipal wireless had such a bad
>>> time with anti-competition law. I would have thought that providing
>>> net.neutral access networks provides precisely the possibility for a
>>> deep competitive market for services that competition law tries to
>>> establish with flawed measures based on duplicating infrastructure or
>>> artificial unbundling.
>>>
>>> .. appologies if this feels like an old thread ;)
>>>
>>> cheers
>>>
>>> /julian
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
>>>   
>>
>>
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