leonardo's blog

The Internet of People Dagstuhl Seminar

leonardo — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 16:21:00 +0000

Dagstuhl Seminars are international meetings for researchers and scientists that meet in an informal way to share their vision on a specific research theme, and open the way to new research fields. As the Schloss Dagstuhl website reports a seminar "is organized by at most four organizers, established leaders in their field, representing the different communities invited to the Seminar, preferably from different institutions. Dagstuhl invites on their behalf about 35 to 45 researchers of international standing from academia and industry, among them promising young researchers. Most seminars discuss an established field within computer science. However, Dagstuhl Seminars are also known for establishing new directions by bringing together separate fields or even scientific disciplines."

The seminar on the Internet of People came after the workshop realized in Vienna during the IFIP Networking conference in 2016, and was meant to be the place where to discuss how the Internet should change from a network of devices and IP addresses to a network of people, in which human beings play a central role. Two researchers from the netCommons project were invited to this seminar, Leonardo Maccari (UniTn) and Panayotis Antoniadis (NetHood), thanks to their visibility in the field.

The workshop was extremely productive, it alternated several themes, from the most technical ones to some social ones, and it was the chance to describe the work done in the netCommons project. The concept of Internet of People can be specialized in many flavours, one interpretation is about having a "digital twin", an IA-driven copy of self that interacts with digital artefacts on behalf of us, when direct interaction is not possible. Another interpretation that we gave, is that the network infrastructure should be representative of people, and managed by them. The idea that a community network is already an example of Internet of People is central in the netCommons project and was well received by the seminar participants.

Among the participants were not only top scientists from all over the world, but also professionals and representatives of the European Commission. This kind of seminar is a key place to shape the future of Computer Science research and it was essential that the netCommons themes were represented and contaminated the on-going discussion.

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The ninuxday 2017

leonardo — Wed, 06 Dec 2017 19:04:00 +0000

As it happened in 2016, in November 2017 about 20 people of the ninux community gathered, this year in the city of Bologna, to discuss about the state of the network and of the community. According to the participants the community is more or less stable, with some new islands (that's the way ninux communities are called) that are growing in the center-South of Italy, and some other ones, especially in the North that struggle to pass from one-man project to real communities. An interesting development comes from the organizers themselves, one of the activists bootstrapped a new network in Val Samoggia (50 km from Bologna in a rural and mountain area) which is currently used to connect a few houses in the territory, and is expanding mostly due to the lack of Internet connection in that area.

Leonardo Maccari from netCommons (UniTn) participated to the meeting, and made a presentation to discuss about the results of the project, and the way these results can help the various communities. Actually, more than one "ninux island" already had ongoing work related with netCommons activity. Among them, three are worth to mention:

Two of the ninuxers from Cosenza (more than 9 hours of car from Bologna!) described their current effort in re-designing the Pico-Peering Agreement, which is historically been used by the ninux community. Their goal is to introduce a few modification to make the agreement more binding, in order to encourage newcomers to participate actively to their network. Currently, the netCommons team from Trento is reviewing the agreement to clarify the legal status of some of the new clauses. This is a direct impact that the legal analysis performed in WP4 will have on the ninux community.
A large discussion took place on renewing the governance instruments that ninux uses. The more the community enlarges from the initial core of people residing in Rome, the more new tools to take decisions are needed. netCommons will help this process. We will simplify and summarise the findings from WP1 in order to fuel the discussion in the ninux community, and give guidance to make the community scale better.
The ninux community from Florence participated to a call for funding of community projects opened by RIPE. Leonardo Maccari was directly involved in keeping the contacts with RIPE and writing the proposal, which focuses on two themes, the first is the development of a hardware device needed by the community to auto-point antennas. This is a technological project that is currently undergoing and involves already several people in ninux Florence. The second is the extension of the OpenWISP platform to support community building functions, as suggested in the deliverable D2.7. The community was already testing OpenWISP to manage the network and will contribute to the improvement of OpenWISP if the funding will be granted.

The ninux community also agreed to participate to a new national event called merge-it. This new event is an Italian community conference on the model of the Fosdem international meeting. The organizers accept proposal for new tracks to be added to the already planned ones (led by the most important associations dealing with open source and open knowledge in general) and ninux proposed to have a dedicated half-day track. If the proposal gets accepted netCommons will surely support this event.

The ninuxday is a very important moment to gather all the active people in ninux, and it was proposed that the next ninuxday be held in some new island, in order to help their development. Alternatively, it was decided that the next ninuxday will be held in Rome, which is also candidate to host the next Battle of The Mesh. In any case, the community recognized the importance of increasing the frequency of meetings (and thus, the merge-it proposal) and work together to grow and involve new people.

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netCommons at the NinuxDay, the meeting of the ninux Community Network

leonardo — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 09:10:00 +0000

On November 26th and 27th in Florence the ninux community organized the third NinuxDay. The NinuxDay ("the only day that lasts for a week-end") is the aperiodic national gathering of the ninux community, the last one was organized in Rome in 2013.

Ninux is one of the oldest community networks in Europe and it has always been peculiar because it is primarily focused on the network itself, rather than on Internet access. Ninux people try to buid a network for hackers and experimenters, without a specific interest in addressing digital divide, but with a participatory and horizontal organization. Many ninuxers consider their network as the translation into networking of the principles of free software.

In 2013 several ninux "islands" (this is the name of each separate Italian community) were present from the South and the North of Italy. This time only three active islands were represented and in general, a decrease in the activity was observed. The ninux assembly was focused exactly on this theme: why the network is stalling and in some cases decreasing instead of growing like other European experiences and why young hackers do not join ninux.

Among the themes touched in the assembly some key questions were addressed, and partly answered:

Does it make sense to have an experimental wireless network in 2016? When ninux started, early 2000s, it was impossible to have a 10Mb/s uplink between two houses, and a direct wireless link was outperforming any home ADSL. Techies were interested in the performance of their networks, and were attracted by this new technical innovation. Today Italy is being connected with fiber, and the performance of a wireless link is now comparable to the performance of a fiber-to-the-home connection.
Is wireless itself enough today to attract youngsters? "wireless" is not anymore appealing as it was, as it become a standard communication media, and young hackers are not passionate about this technology anymore because they give it for granted. ninux needs to hybridise with new technological innovations (makers, devops, etc.) that are more appealing, and break the limit of being a *wireless* community network.
Does it make sense to re-focus to an Internet access network? The majority of the people of the community still do not see this as a real goal of the network. Given the availability of fiber broadband connections that is enlarging in Italy this theme did not motivate many of the people present in the assembly.
Does it help to structure the community in a better defined way? ninux is currently completely flat and unstructured. It has no legal entity, not even any sister association that can be used when it is necessary to expose a legal identity. In the past, some unrelated formalized associations agreed to shield ninux when it was necessary to have some legal identification, for instance to participate to research projects. This sparked a long discussion: in the past many ninuxers were utterly against this approach. The feeling today is that if some formalized structure can help to be rooted in the society and thus achieve higher visibility and attract new people then it would have been better accepted. The primary condition is that the association does not represent ninux itself, but remains a separate entity, an instrument to access to some possibility that is today precluded.

Another important theme that was introduced, but only partially analysed is the definition of the community: ninux people gather around a manifesto that is extremely generic, derived by the pico peering agreement. With the growth of the network, and the extension to locations other than Rome (that was the initial core of the network and still contains the majority of the nodes) the need for self-definition of the community raised, and it was touched again in the assembly. Many felt the need to better understand what ninux is, in order to understand how it should change to survive in the future. This task was started collecting the various motivations of the people present in the assembly (that will be futher evaluated) and thus identifying the drivers for the community. It is the beginning of a process that may lead to a better internal view of the community network but needs much more future work if it wants to reach self-determination and be the basis to some form of governance.

It was also the occasion to showcase what netcCommons is doing and in what way it can help the development of the community. We did a brief presentation of the goals and the composition of netCommons and some technical analysis that was carried on on the ninux network and community, that will be included in deliverable 2.5 (the deliverable will be available in January at this link). The community was very interested to the analysis and to the tools used for the analysis, a discussion followed on the way such tools can be integrated in the ninux monitoring tools, or in some more general community monitoring tools such as Grimoire Lab. The feedback gathered is extremely important and opens the way to factual collaboration and adoption of the open source instruments provided by netCommons in the ninux community.

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leonardo's blog

The Internet of People Dagstuhl Seminar

17412.01.l.jpg

The ninuxday 2017

programmaninuday17_vbassa.jpg

netCommons at the NinuxDay, the meeting of the ninux Community Network

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