Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
344 lines (276 loc) · 9.8 KB

2018-07-14-Our-Networks.md

File metadata and controls

344 lines (276 loc) · 9.8 KB





Our Stable Networks

Jenny Ryan and Grant Gallo
State of Our Networks Conference
July 14, 2018





What is a community network?

What makes a community network stable?

Freenet Movement (1986 - 1999)



"The Cleveland Freenet has discontinued operation.

The project has concluded.

Thank you for your participation." [[1]]

- message to Cleveland Freenet users on September 30, 1999





"A year is an eternity in networking."

- Anonymous

alt-text

List of Community Networks known [[2]]

alt-text alt-text

List of Community Networks known [[2]]

alt-text

List of Community Networks known [[2]]

alt-text

List of Community Networks known [[2]]

First Wave (2000 - 2004)

  • Seattle Wireless (WA, USA)
  • NoCat (Sebastopol, CA, USA)
  • NYCwireless (NY, USA)
  • Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (IL, USA)
  • Personal Telco Project (Portland, OR, USA)
  • Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (Greece)
  • Freifunk (Germany)
  • FunkFeuer (Austria)
  • Ninux (Italy)
  • Wireless Leiden (Netherlands)
  • Village Telco (Johannesburg, South Africa)
  • Nepal Wireless Networking Project
  • Melbourne Wireless (Australia)

Second Wave (2009 - 2014)

  • Guifi (Catalonia)
  • Rhizomatica (Mexico)
  • Federation French Data Network (FFDN)
  • wlan-slovenija (Slovenia)
  • Sarantoporo.gr (Greece)
  • AlterMundi (Argentina)
  • Network Bogota (Colombia)
  • WirelessPT (Portugal)
  • Red Hook WiFi (Brooklyn, NY, USA)
  • Detroit Community Technolgy Project (USA)
  • NYCmesh (USA)
  • MetaMesh → PittMesh (Pittsburgh, USA)
  • Sudo Mesh → People’s Open Network (Oakland, USA)

Third Wave? (2016 - present)

  • TOmesh (Toronto, Canada)
  • PhillyMesh (Philadelphia, USA)
  • MassMeshTech (Boston, USA)
  • OlyMesh (Olympia, USA)
  • OpenFreeNet (India)
  • Coolab (Brazil)

Two Styles of European CNs



Federated and peer-produced

Federated CNs

  • Cooperative governing body, legal entity for network
  • Member collectives/companies provide services
  • Maintained by volunteers and professionals
  • Shared belief in the commons

  • Examples: Guifi, Federation French Data Network (FFDN)

guifi.net

  • Started in early 2000s
  • Federated under Guifi Foundation in 2008
  • 26 companies provide services on the network
  • Currently over 32,000 active nodes
  • Mostly located in Catalonia [[3]]

Peer-Produced CNs

  • Loose associations of small networks
  • Unifying principles, technologies
  • Rooted in hacker/hobbyist communities
  • Fully flat, volunteer organized
  • Value peer-production over ideology of the commons

  • Examples: Freifunk, Funkfeuer, Ninux

Freifunk

  • Began in 2002
  • Developers of batman-adv, enables Layer 2 routing
  • More than 400 communities
  • largest include,
    Muenster (>4000 nodes)
    Aachen (2000)
    Munich (1657)
    Stuttgart (1335) [[3]]

North American CNs



are...all over the place...

NYCmesh

  • First public node in 2014
  • 185 active nodes
  • Non-profit project of Internet Society (ISOC-NY)
  • Operate two 'supernodes' in Manhattan and Brooklyn

PittMesh

  • Began in 2013
  • 67 active nodes
  • Volunteer project under auspices of MetaMesh
  • Donated time, to gain experience
  • Compensated for-profit work, subsidizes non-profit efforts

Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP)

  • started in 2012 with stimulus funding
  • collaboration of Allied Media, Open Technology Institute
  • spawned...
    Equitable Internet Initiative (EII)
    CassCo WiFi
    Digital Stewards Training

Red Hook WiFi

  • Inspired by DCTP
  • 15 active nodes in Brooklyn, NY
  • No longer holding regular meetings
  • Trouble maintaining Digital Stewards training

Latin American Alternative



Cooperative, communal, disaster-resilient, and sometimes underground



Examples: Street Net (Cuba), Network Bogota, AlterMundi

Street Net (SNET)

  • Used almost exclusively for gaming in Cuba
  • Enitrely illegal, informally permitted to operate
  • Zero porn, politics, or links to larger internet

  • When all else fails, there's El Paquete! [[4]]

AlterMundi

  • Started in 2012
  • Grassroots organization
  • Bottom-up approach to deal with communal problems
  • Most members belong to QuintanaLibre CN, in Cordoba
  • Developers of LibreMesh firmware

Community Networks are

infrastructure that is owned, created, managed, maintained, used and expanded by a community



infrastructure that serves a community...

and that may or may not be managed, owned, created, maintained and used by the community.

Community Networks are

collective goods,

socially produced,

governed as common-pool resources. [[2]]

~ Leonardo Navarro, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya

Stable Networks are

collective goods shared freely or 'at cost',

socially produced and continuously replenished,

governed democratically as common-pool resources __ that are utilized sustainably__.

A pratical approach to stability

  1. community involvement
  2. sustainability
  3. training
  4. use
  5. robustness

    in that order

~ Nicolas Pace, organizer, AlterMundi

A more pratical approach to stability

  • have fun
  1. community involvement
  2. sustainability
  3. training
  4. use
  5. robustness

    in that order





"It doesn't make sense to make too many distinctions now that we are a few."

~ Nicolas Pace

Global Network of Community Networks


Open hardware and software collaborations:




Collaborative research initiatives:

Recurring community network events:

International Summit for Community Wireless Networks


Supporting organizations:

References

[[1]] THE END OF CFN, cfn.tangledhelix.com [1]: http://cfn.tangledhelix.com/end_announce.html

[[2]] Navarro et. al, Report on Existing Community Networks and their Organization, netCommons [2]: https://www.netcommons.eu/sites/default/files/

[[3]] "What is guifi.net," guifi.net [3]: https://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet

[[4]] "Community finden", freifunk.net [4]: https://freifunk.net/wie-mache-ich-mit/community-finden/

[[5]] Martinez, Antonio Garcia, "Inside Cuba’s D.I.Y. Internet Revolution", Wired [5]: https://www.wired.com/2017/07/inside-cubas-diy-internet-revolution/