[wsfii-discuss] guifi.net awarded by the government of Catalonia

Wed Nov 7 23:53:33 UTC 2007

Hey Ramon,

You did great job! Congratulations!
It is allways very good to see stories of success.
Motivation and enthusisasm take big part in projects we are all working on. 
These stories give us more power to carry on.

Best wishes,
Bogdan

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ramon Roca" <ramon.roca at guifi.net>
To: "Discuss list on the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructure" 
<wsfii-discuss at lists.okfn.org>; "National Summit on Community Wireless 
Networking Participant E-mailList" <cwn-summit at lists.cuwireless.net>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 11:33 PM
Subject: [wsfii-discuss] guifi.net awarded by the government of Catalonia

I'm very happy to share with all the freenetworkers friends here that
guifi.net has been awarded by the Catalan Government with the National
price for Telecommunications category, which was collected in the
official ceremony yesterday.

Press Release (in Catalan):
http://www20.gencat.cat/portal/site/CulturaDepartament/menuitem.cc396c23f1b1adc20985bdb1b0c0e1a0/?vgnextoid=a73e20d66949b010VgnVCM1000000b0c1e0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=a73e20d66949b010VgnVCM1000000b0c1e0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=detall&contentid=bbd1a19ddf0f5110VgnVCM1000008d0c1e0aRCRD

This award, which also have categories for Television, Radio and
Internet, has significant relevance here and is getting attraction of
the local media.

Here I translate the extract which describes the reasons of why the
price went to guifi.net:

"The jury awards Guifi.net with the National Award of Telecommunications
because is an open network, with broadband access and neutral that under
the respect of the current legislation is capable to provide high level
features at a low cost, and provides universal broadband access to the
information age and creates value add services where is deployed. The
jury has also remarked the already 2.700 online nodes on a network which
has a high growth rate in Catalonia, and therefore becomes a significant
contribution to the territory development and to help in relief the
digital divide."

Personally I would say that this is an outcome of a combination of
several things, like a good job of lots of people, got a multi-thousand
member community, using the right approach in terms of networking model
(participative, open and neutral), and, of course, an outcome of the
support we've got from the international communities, like the SAX-WSFII
event we had this summer so please, consider that this award also goes
to all of you and your communities.

We're planning to use the raised funds of this award (€15K) to create a
foundation for helping the development of open free networks. We just
think that this is another small step forward in the long journey of
getting awareness of the open networking model, which we hope will
increase over time and and over the world.

Thanks,
Ramon Roca.

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