[wsfii-discuss] Economic Sustainability of Community Wireless

Fri Apr 6 17:20:35 UTC 2007

Apologies for the confusion on names  (Ashram/Ashish) :(

I had also no intention to open a flame. Just tell people what we 
experienced here with a very specific company mentioned and a distinct 
point of view, which is in fact a freedom of speech  not the negation 
:), and recommend people to analyze business models since not all of 
them are good, and of course not because I'm against business models!.

Now, talking in general terms, I'm sure there are lots of opportunities 
to collaborate between individual people, cooperatives (marco, I was not 
missing that, I simply was not talking about that), NGO's, small and 
medium enterprises and even, why not, corporations. I would say that's 
being a key point of the growth we are experiencing at guifi.net.

In any way, in order to build a strong partnership for that ecosystem, 
it's important to understand everybody's roles and play their own 
respectfully with the others. Invading other's roles might be dangerous.

It's important to build trust and gain credibility. Being more specific 
on wireless communities, sometimes I think that one of the common 
mistakes (talking from a people based community perspective) is to trend 
to develop a conventional telco, or a "micro-telco", which is fact is 
very difficult to sustain because of the own nature of a telco and the 
lack of critical mass, when maybe acting as a 
people/communities/cooperatives makes more sense to develop 
professionals and service providers (as more, better), there might be 
some formulas which enable same results, like network 
neutrality/unlicensed spectrums.

Cheers!

Ramon.

En/na marco ha escrit:
> jeff buderer wrote:
>   
>> Marco,
>>
>> I think we need your perspective to bring this process forward at least
>> in Ghana so please do continue to engage those people you mentioned.
>>
>>   
>>     
> my general opinion is, that it is very possible to deal with even big
> companies, when have good idea of how to play the "game". we have to
> consider the arguments of vickram crishna very well, to get that kind of
> good idea about it ...
>
> i do think, that we can create a space, where in we can set the rules to
> a certain extend. we have to have a look at how the market and its big
> player work, how ecomical, social and psychological processes are
> shaping the world in order to capital investment and profit maximising.
> if we understand what will stab in our back and what will benefit the
> community in the end, we have the basics to deal with corporations. also
> i want to point at the several ethical investment facilities we have in
> US and Europe ... the conditions are fantastic (compared to SERO). its a
> matter of collective WILL in my eyes ...
>
> when we want to have an economical sustainability FOR THE PEOPLE, we
> will need tools designed for exceptionally this goal. these tools
> already exist. certain types cooperatives belong to these tools as I
> believe. NGOs can help as well. loose networks as well.
> my suggestion is to focus on the founding of a half global / half local
> hardware supply cooperative and a similar ISP-cooperative. i wonder if
> we should go in details ...
>
> grts, marco pompe, berlin
>
>
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