netCommons blogs

Commonswashing by information technologies and online platforms, the semantic appropriation of the commons

melanie — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 12:24:06 +0000

Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay gave a presentation in July 2019 at the Conference of the International Association on the Study of the Commons (IASC), Lima, Peru of the important concept of 'commons washing' (similar to green washing): claiming openness and the ethics of sharing for-profit endeavors, the appropriation of the concept and the values of the common in the dominant discourse by private actors.

While the enclosure of the commons and commodification is an old process, commonswashing is an additional phenomenon of semantic appropriation seen as an extension of the logic of greenwashing, an enclosure of the mind, a capture of the resources, of the language, but also potentially of the imaginary, and of the legal and policy frameworks in place to protect and sustain the social benefits of the commons.

Such appropriations lead to new forms of “enclosure” of common resources, as private actors come to dominate the governance structures for the commons-based production of a good, or the provision of a service, thereby perverting key features and values of commons-based production, takeover it is one that happens with the private actor pretending to work for the commons, or at least using its semantics.

The presentation was enriched by examples based on the research of the three co-authors, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Panos Antoniadis and Félix Tréguer:

Examples in France of regulations blurring boundaries between social solidarity and start-up statutes, recent illustrations of this process of commodification/financialisation/quantification of traditional approaches to funding "the commons" in France. This process of financialisation and neo-liberal interpretations of commons theory (with Jean Tirole for instance) is made possible by the insistance of commons theorists of shared/detailed rules for governance and accountability, which can lead to very formal governance processes, contractualisation, quantification, etc. Could French new status for corporations of "mission companies" be used by Monsanto?
Examples of appropriation in the information and digital realm, including: what happens when Community networks meet blockchains, based on Blockchain and Community Networks: friends or foes?, a netCommons blogpost; libraries, Wikipedia, and copyfraud, with memory institutions adding a layer of copyright protection on digitised versions of public domain work (Dulong de Rosnay, 2011); marketing smuggling, with the 2019 Northface hack of Wikipedia where the company swapped out the original Wikipedia photos for its own or in some cases, outright Photoshopped a North Face product into an existing photo of trekking popular tourist destinations.

In an activist scholarship perspective, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay asked the audience: "how can we protect both the commons and the concept of commons?" Solutions against enclosure, commodification and commonswashing include:

Public policy recommandations to maintain sustainability.
Legal defense positive protective status for the commons + sanction to avoid enclosure.
Legal hacks towards commons private regimes.
Public/commons partnerships and the partner state.

Resistance through political imaginaries and policy solutions protecting the commons may combine the following approaches:

Reform existing law, build legal de/fences: recognition of copyfraud status against the enclosure of the copyright public domain,
Subvert applicable law through legal hacks: copyleft licensing, ecocide for future ecological crimes.
Lobby to allocate a portion of public funding for commons: culture subsidies from collective societies to Creative Commons works, European funds for local connectivity for Community Networks, etc.

In this vein, a model story of reframing of the narrative and the political imaginary can be taken with Communia Manifesto redefining copyright public domain and information/digital/knowledge commons in a positive way (the public domain is the rule, copyright is the exception), inverting the legal maximalist narrative. Communica offers an example of copyright reform advocacy, with a community of researchers and activists going from research to campaigning at the European and international levels.

Slides of the presentation, including these examples of cases, can be downloaded here.

Reference of the communication: Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, Panos Antoniadis and Félix Tréguer, Commonswashing by information technologies and online platforms, the semantic appropriation of the commons, Conference of the International Association on the Study of the Commons (IASC), Lima, Peru, 2 July 2019.

Abstract:

This paper studies commonswashing, the appropriation of the concept of commons by private actors.

Enclosure of the commons by private actors is an old phenomenon. With information technologies and digital commons, we noticed a tendancy to coopt or claim elements of language of openness and the ethics of sharing to designate for-profit endeavours. Social networks such as Facebook are built on encouraging users to 'share' information with a 'community'.

This semantic appropriation can be seen as an extension of the logic of greenwashing (Kahle, Gurel-Atay, 2014), "a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that an organization's products, aims or policies are environmentally friendly" (greenwashing, Wikipedia, 2018), and a way for the capitalist logic to colonize spaces that still were outside of its ambit.

Commodification of the commons have been studied for hospitality websites (Schöpf, 2015). Our paper proposes to inscribe these trends within larger policy trends, while building on examples from internet connectivity and Community Networks. We argue that such appropriations lead to new forms of “enclosure” of common resources, as private actors come to dominate the governance structures for the commons-based production of a good or the provision of a service, thereby perverting some of the key features and values of commons-based production (for instance through financialization and quantitative management approaches). This takeover it is one that happens with the private actor pretending to work for the commons, or at least using its semantics.

The commons have become recognized and valued across many sectors of society and, as a concept, retains a strong heterogeneity – to the point where politicians and neoliberal economists now also feel talk about ‘the commons’ and claim the values of ‘openness’ for their projects, while maintaining a neoliberal extractive agenda. Why is that co-optation taking place? A working hypothesis is that we face daunting turbulences generated by capitalism itself (climate change, pollution, poverty, etc.), and as new generation of workers and consumers want to find jobs and products with a purpose, referring to the commons can convey the idea that the mainstream economy feels deeply about these issues, and has a solution.

We propose to study this process and to think about how to protect both the commons and the concept of commons. Analytical criteria can help to identify the different shades between commons-based peer production and user-generated content or crowdsourcing online platforms: "ownership of means of production, technical architecture/design, social organization/governance of work patterns, ownership of the peer-produced resource, and value of the output" (Dulong de Rosnay and Musiani, 2016).

Resistance through political imaginaries and policy solutions protecting the commons include:
Reform existing law, build legal defenses (recognition of copyfraud status against the enclosure of the copyright public domain; ecocide for future ecological crimes)
Subvert applicable law through legal hacks (copyleft licensing)
Lobby to allocate a portion of public fundings for commons (culture subsidies from collective societies to Creative Commons works; European funds for local connectivity for Community Networks.

References

Antoniadis, P., 2019. Blockchain and Community Networks: friends or foes?, netCommons blog

Capra, F; Mattei, U., 2015. The Ecology of Law. Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, Oakland, Berrett-Koheler.

Chiapello, È. 2017. La financiarisation des politiques publiques. Mondes en développement (178): 23–40.

Dulong de Rosnay, M., Access to digital collections of public domain works: Enclosure of the commons managed by libraries and museums, Proceedings of the 13th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), Hyderabad, India, 10-14 January 2011. Working paper http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00671628

Dulong de Rosnay, M., Musiani, F., 2016. Towards a (De)centralization-Based Typology of Peer Production. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. 14.

Kahle, Lynn R.; Gurel-Atay, Eda, eds., 2014. Communicating Sustainability for the Green Economy. M.E. Sharpe.

Papadimitropoulos, V. 2017. The Politics of the Commons: Reform or Revolt? TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. 15(2): 565–583.

Schöpf, S., 2015. The Commodification of the Couch: A Dialectical Analysis of Hospitality Exchange Platforms. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. 13.

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Blockchain and Community Networks: friends or foes?

panos — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 14:32:45 +0000

There is a lot of discussion and numerous initiatives that aim to explore blockchain technology in the context of Internet access sharing and more general Community Networking.

At the IGF 2018, I did a small intervention at the workshop WS279 "Scaling community networks: exploring blockchain and efficient investment strategies". This was a merge of two workshops, one of which was titled "Community networks meet blockchains: friends or foes?".

I tried to give my own answer to this original question in the IGF 2018 workshop WS279, based on the book chapter I co-authored with Jens Martignoni for the new DC3 book "The community network manual : how to build the Internet yourself" edited by Luca Belli.

In short, my opinion is that when blockchain solutions are linked to the global blockchain speculation ecosystem, they will inevitably lead to situations that are not compatible with the values of self-determination and empowerment of local communities that most Community Networks embrace.

In the following, you can read the text I wrote in preparation for my intervention slightly edited to be more coherent.

What can blockchain do (and what not) for community networks

What is blockchain

Blockchain technology solves the problem of accounting of a variety of interactions without centralized intermediaries, through extensive cryptography, replication of data, and distributed computation. To achieve a truly decentralized, peer-to-peer, structure, it relies on significant investment of resources from the individual "peers". The more the network grows, the more resources are required by each peer to maintain its state, the blockchain, and ensure the integrity of the data.

This is one of the main reasons why blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have an almost built-in speculation element.

To say it simply, one only agrees to invest the enormous amount of resources with the expectation to get rich in the future! So, a typical bubble/lottery mentality has ingrained the blockchain narrative and its followers,making blockchain projects to look more like "ponzi schemes" than crowd funding for innovation platforms. And the actual, technical, political, or other reasons that would justify the use of blockchain in a certain situation often get lost on the way. It is all about money.

In addition, there are other characteristics that make the whole enterprise very questionable at a political level namely the fact that decentralization does not include proper governance structures, the replacement of institutional trust by encryption algorithms, and its severe impact on energy consumption.

Indeed, in the discussion about the impact of blockchain, "This changes everything" as Naomi Klein's recent book analyzes very eloquently, where "this" is referring to the "climate change", of course.

As I often point in conversations with colleagues, if your blockchain solution is not energy efficient, if it does not involve some people somewhere meeting in person to make decisions, and if it does not imply a structure for building trust at a human level, it is not "for good".

Most importantly, if it causes value to fly from local economies to the unknown, it can be very harmful at the long-term for those involved and beyond.

What happens when Community networks meet blockchains?

But let's see how all that is being played out today in the area of community networks.

And let's start by a Community Network born long time ago, when blockchain was not yet invented. Freifunk.net is a Community Network in Germany whose members have developed an alternative firmware for routers which allows to share your Internet connection without any cost for your own usage, and also create links between nearby routers, or a "mesh" network, to expand the coverage.

These community members do not only share their spare Internet capacity without any direct reward but it's quite the opposite case. They invest a significant amount of time and effort fighting for our right to share, despite the severe technical, legal, and political obstacles that such "natural" sharing practices face today.

On the other extreme, there are numerous blockchain-based initiatives like RightMesh, Ammbr, Skycoin, Wificoin, and many others, which have recently resurrected the narrative of making money by sharing one's Internet connection.

"One network accessed by anyone, owned by everyone", one can read at http://wificoin.net, or similarly "Better Internet for everyone, built by anyone" at hypermesh.net,

Skycoin is building "The new Internet for the new world", and Rightmesh puts "The power of connectivity in the hands of people". Ammbr is more direct offering a clear incentive to its potential customers: "Get paid to share your internet connection with the world".

Ammbr is of particular interest because some CNs like guifi.net and ninux.org openly support it.

In my opinion, there are many problems with this narrative, including the soundness of its economic model. But the worst of all is that it promotes the idea that the major obstacle for community networks are incentives for personal profit, which is inaccurate looking at the successes of current CNs with such motives, and EVEN if the face huge political, legal, and social challenges today, as José Bové mentioned in his intervention in the recent netCommons workshop at the EU parliament. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGwXUAyzRv4

An analogy with AirBnB

Let us thus make an analogy with housing, and how the AirBnB platform has professionalized the offering of accommodation through sharing. For this form of sharing,there used to be alternatives based on the "gift economy" model, for instance, 'couch surfing' being the most known platform.

Remarkably, renting one's apartment with the mediation of a global commercial like AirBnB is branded today as "sharing economy", while it is beyond any doubt just a "renting" (for financial profit) economy.

Through this successful business model, AirBnB did indeed influence also the political and legal sphere, lobbying to bypass laws that protect the hotel industry and the quality of urban living in residential neighborhoods.

It would need, however, another talk to explain how the overall impact of AirBnB is more negative than positive to local economies, with the recent struggles of the cities of Barcelona, Amsterdam and others to regulate its use, an evidence of the threats posed by such global intermediaries.

In any case, from a "user" perspective, sharing one's Internet connection is much easier than sharing one's apartment, isn't it?!

It is really (or could be) just a matter of configuration of one's router.

Still, some might rightly argue that network systems like Freifunk are an exception, and if we really need to solve the problem of Internet affordability, more explicit incentives need to be provided. It could mean that people will need to invest in more performant and robust infrastructure than just sharing their spare capacity.

The good news

The good news is that there are already in function "pragmatic" (market based) models, like Guifi.net that operates a region-wide (and beyond) infrastructure, through which members of the network contribute in a fair way to the (market) cost of their common Internet gateway. Freifunk.net includes also such subnetworks in their ecosystem.

Again, the main obstacles in the expansion of this model are legal and political. Guifi.net is very often refused access to public infrastructure that would allow the CN to expand their backbone network. Along these lines, they have recently submitted a complaint to the EU ombudsman and, by the way, we should all help them defend their cause for the benefit of all Europeans!

In short, as Guifi.net has solved their sustainability problem, but their further growth is prohibited for questionable legal (national) grounds, against the EU legislation. Even more importantly the network does not even have to scale itself. Other communities can replicate the same model, as scaling through replication is a very sustainable and resilient option for "growth".

As for the "trust" building, from which blockchain "relieves us", is one of the most important benefits of systems like guifi.net. They engage people in deliberations, and develop appropriate methodologies for resolving conflicts and build consensus, and real, community, trust.

Taking this process away from communities is in the long-term producing more and more unsolvable issues like we have seen in the transformation of localities through homogeneous cookie-cutter / standardized solutions.

Decentralization will work "for good" if the "nodes" of the network are, rather than somewhat helpless individuals addicted to the ups and down of the bitcoin and ethereum prices, well organized communities that are aware of their rights to the Internet, sharing knowledge on how to build their own customized community networks.

Blockchain can help to make transactions easier and more credible, but only if it is designed to be independent of the global blockchain speculation market.

* Thanks to Ileana Apostol, Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, and Félix Tréguer for feedback in earlier versions of this talk preparation draft.

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Universal deployment model

leandro — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 13:53:39 +0000

There is interest in the deployment of cable and other networking infrastructure for private use in public land, but the lack of clear guidelines to regulate deployment in public land can block authorization decisions, which can be controversial due to the consequences of the private ownership and use of a private infrastructure in public space. The guifi.net Foundation proposed a universal deployment model for municipalities, where new deployments by a private requester are allowed as long it provides paths that simultaneously allow for three uses: self-service for the city council, private for the requester, and shared or common use for everyone else. The principle can be extended to apply to any other regional or even international infrastructure deployed in non-private land, although the proportion of resources for each uses can be adjusted. The effect of this model is that the deployment of private infrastructures generate a direct return as infrastructure for shared use by everyone can contribute to deliver universal connectivity.

Feedback and the generalisation of this work, as part of the netCommons project, was introduced at the GAIA IRTF WG meeting Slides as part of IETF 102, with an open access report in English and a publication in the PoliTICs journal in Brazilian portuguese.

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Encounters in the hybrid city: Berlin

panos — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 21:41:33 +0000

‘Encounters in the hybrid city’ is an ongoing series of events that started in March 2018, initiating encounters between different activists claiming the rights of citizens in the digital and physical domains. They have much to learn from each other's practices, challenges, and expertise, but also can support each other's agenda through various forms of collaboration.

On May 13, 2018 took place in Berlin one such encounter in the context of the ‘battle of the mesh’, a major event in the Community Networks scene returning in 2018 to the famous C-base, one of the CN scene's birthplace back in the early 2000s.

The Prinzessinnengarten is ten-minutes walk from C-base. It is a key location for the right to the city movement in Berlin, and hosts in a very central node of the city a wide variety of activities and organizations. Its wooden structure "die Laube" is both a symbol and a visible functional space for hosting events and workshops on various topics related to the right to the city movement. Moreover, die Laube is the base of the MAZI project's pilot run by the UdK's Design Research Lab and by the Common Grounds' project Neighbourhood Academy. This made much easier an otherwise very challenging task: to bring urban activists at the C-base and digital activists to the Prinzessinnengarten. Interestingly many of the local actors in these two “activist hubs” have not visited the “other” one.

The presence of the CN community in such an important location for the CN movement, and close to an equally important location for the right to the city movement in Berlin, was very promising. The encounter started at the C-base, at the end of a week long ‘battle of the mesh’ full of events, discussions, and tests. Sunday being the last day the number of people present at the C-base was significantly smaller than the previous days. Only one technical presentation was scheduled for that day, after which the invited guests from the local urban activism scene, around then, entered the main room of C-base.

We introduced this non-conventional workshop with two provocations, one for each side:

Urban activists will not be able to defend our rights to the city if they don’t include in their claims the right to the digital infrastructures
Digital activists will end up offering just cheap labour for providing affordable access to the Internet, and more specifically to Facebook, Google, and the like, if they do not address locality in their narrative and do not integrate their efforts with the wider right to the city movement.

A circle was formed in the center of the room, which was joined only by few of the “locals”, the rest staying outside the circle observing the round of introductions. Many interesting urban initiatives were represented like Nachbarschaftsakademie, Stadt von Unten, MetroZones, Mietshaeuserssyndikat, Tesserae, INURA Berlin, Bizim Kiez, Tempelhof Vision, and more. In the beginning it felt like a foreign body entered the C-base and started talking between themselves, including statements by all participants allowing to get to know better each other (e.g., What is the battle of the mesh? What is the prinzessinnengarten? What are the current challenges/tactics of urban and digital activists?).

After the end of the ‘inner’ circle in which only a few digital networking projects were introduced, like Freifunk, La quadrature du Net, and hackerspace Athens, the debate started quickly with many people questioning the dichotomy created by the description of the event, separating the digital with the physical space, and indeed the digital with the urban activists. Jochen from MetroZones gave as example collaborations already from the 1990s Botschaft, Bar + Disco and Katrin proposed that looking at past experiences would help to understand how the movement could be strengthened.

We defended this framing stressing that the only reason for making a distinction between these “inseparable” today spaces (refer to the introductory section of this document) is that in reality many people actually don’t reflect upon their close interrelation, and most importantly, upon the many inspiring analogies and potential complementarities and synergies.

This clarifying intervention broke the ice and people out of the circle started participating and sharing their experiences and possible tactics to defend our rights to the hybrid city. For example, the Mietshaeuser Syndikat is an interesting case study of using existing institutions and laws to create alternatives like various forms of non-speculative, affordable housing, and more specifically to take housing stock “out of the market”.

On the technology side, the important role of a “playing” attitude was highlighted by Adam Burns, the Free2Air’s founder, and netCommons advisor. Adam also highlighted that community is a tricky word and thus it is critical to keep experimenting.From a policy perspective, Virginie from netCommons and La Quadrature du Net highlighted the need to participate also in policy and regulation activities at the EU level but also the national and global. There are many important constraints or openings that could be created by bad or good legislations, respectively.

Then the example of the project genuino clandestino in Bologna, was given for synergies between different forms of resistance, including mesh networking, and also between content, organization and communication within the movement. And the situation in Greece was discussed as an example on how the economic and other crises could become also drivers for resistance and offer opportunities, like the abundance of empty spaces in the city of Athens.

Mary Dellenbaugh-Losse, co-author of “Urban Commons: Moving beyond State and Market”, highlighted the concept of the commons as the 3rd way between the state and the market. She identified as one of the most important finding of hers and others’ research the fact that, in most cases, it is a core group of twenty or even less people running most commons-based initiatives, which are highly depended on them.

At this point was identified the key role of infrastructure as an important common aspect of both domain of action, digital and urban. Interestingly, the idea of the “infinite” digital or “virtual” space was contested as artificial since the energy limitations are important constraint for the digital space that shouldn’t be underestimated. Along these lines, see also JoPP article on the Tupello collective in Genoa.

Actually, many of the urban activists like Konstantin Stergiou have been recently involved in actions against the moving of Google offices in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighbourhood, “consuming the neighborhood collective product” as someone noted. A very telling manifestation of how the digital and urban rights become more and more interrelated. But what is the alternative to Google someone asked? How can one compete in terms of usability and economies of scale?

Monic Meisel, co-founder of Freifunk and an advocate for local applications in CNs since the early days, admitted that engaging people in using such local applications has proved extremely hard. The examples of austici and framasoft, the french approach the “dégooglisation of the Internet”, creating server coops collectively (self-)managed, but also the MAZI toolkit, were brought as good examples on how technology can help to reduce the barriers to entry.

Thiago Novaes, a political scientist dealing with related digital legal issues, brought the experience from the Amazon, explaining how communities manage to build their own networks with very little resources, and highlighting the fact that it is the process that it is the most important and not the final outcome, the infrastructure by itself.

This part of the discussion was concluded by Ileana from NetHood, proposing to collectively develop and promote a broader perspective on sustainability, through various initiatives and projects, affirming differences and creating a diversity of choices for the livability of the urban system.

The discussion then moved to some ethical dilemmas that activists might face in their effort to engage people in their actions. For example, the use of aggressive advertisement tactics was discussed, with some being in favour seeing it as an only way to compete for attention with the big corporations, and others against, considering that such tactics are not compatible with the values and principles of the movements. Even more controversial was the proposal to use local networks as a means to block access to Facebook and Google. This seemed to be a very sensitive topic for the digital activists that led to a heated discussion about the meaning of Internet freedom, and whether those that jeopardise this freedom should be actively excluded from alternative infrastructures.

After this introductory round, we all walked together toward the Prinzessinnengarten in small groups, some of them already “mixed”, engaging in more informal discussions. For most of the digital activists it was the first time to visit the Prinzessinnengarten and they were offered a guided tour when we arrived. It was interesting to know that one of the principles of the garden is to allow easy access to experimentation by making it “easy” to make mistakes and thus learn, which is one of the main principles of hacking. The need for compromises was also brought to the fore, with the description of the necessary commercial activities developed in the garden that subsidize non-profit project like the Neighbourhood Academy.

During the reception that followed at the wooden construction “Die Laube”, more mixed groups were formed and interesting discussions took place. For example, some urban activists were impressed by the resistance of digital activists to the temptation of “blocking google” from their local networks, something not so obvious in political movements in which the exclusion of “racism”, “violence”, etc is typically tolerated as a defense mechanism.

The pervasiveness of the internet and the rights of some groups to remain disconnected, if they wish so, wasalso brought to the discussion. The resolution was that the strong will of some of the activists to keep tryingand connect the disconnected should be accompanied by instilling values and raising awareness on issues likeprivacy and data manipulation.

P.S. Read the full report on "Community networks and the right to the city" for more hybrid encounters in Heraklion, Greece and Zurich, Switzerland and the concept of the "right to the hybrid city".

P.S.2 At the time of writing of this blog entry there were news that Google cancels its tech campus project in Kreuzberg. See https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/10/google-cancels-tech-campus-kreuzber...

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netCommons guidelines for telecom policy-makers

felix — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 17:28:20 +0000

After two years of working with Community Networks and policy-makers, the netCommons project is proud to announce the release of our policy brief entitled "Enabling the Telecommons: Guidelines for Policy-Makers."

DOWNLOAD THE POLICY GUIDELINES (PDF)

This brief is basically an extension of the work started early last year. These guidelines are meant for European policy-makers working on the telecom sector. They address various steps that can be taken to support the development of Community Networks and adapt the regulatory framework accordingly. The document takes stock of the new rules agreed upon this summer at the EU level as a result of our work with European Community Networks and digital rights groups. These provisions, and our guidelines released today, can be appropriated by Community Networks to start a dialogue with regulators and other stakeholders.

Many members of the netCommons team are attending the Internet Governance Forum this week in Paris, and we'll take this opportunity to make these guidelines known to a wider European and international audience. And if you want to help us translate it in your own language, please go to this page.

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Network infrastructures: The commons model for local participation, governance and sustainability

leandro — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 12:59:36 +0000

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) published an Issue paper, based on results of the netCommons project. The abstract is:

Network infrastructures provide connectivity, a critical resource for our digital lives, and are therefore key for social inclusion and public participation. There are many technical, economic and operational ways to provide internet connectivity. In this paper we describe a model to develop network infrastructure as common property, governed under the principles of common-pool resources.

The model is based on the principles of cooperation instead of competition – because universal connectivity can only be achieved if everyone has the right to create their own connectivity. There are many examples of how communities have succeeded in organising to achieve this. The result is local community network infrastructures that are open, sustainable and adapted to local conditions, which can produce abundant connectivity and support local socioeconomic development, everywhere and for everyone.

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netCommons at EuCNC 2018

merkouris — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 12:31:10 +0000

In the week of 18-21 June, netCommons participated in the EuCNC 2018 conference, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. This was the 27th edition of a successful series of technical conferences in the field of telecommunications, sponsored by IEEE ComSoc and EURASIP, and financially supported by the European Commission, focusing on communication networks, systems, and services/applications.

The project contributions were multi-fold including: (a) a technical tutorial about community networks (CNs), their potential role in the future telecoms landscape and crucial considerations and analysis of their economic sustainability; (b) a position paper iterating critically on the priorities of the 5G vision and the questions it has left open, and describing how CNs could provide answers to them; and (c) a poster presentation of the AppLea mobile farming application, developed in the context of the project for the community served by the Sarantaporo CN, Greece.

All contributions well well received in a event with a strong technological flavor and considerable industry participation.

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Yearly Meeting of the French Federation of Community Networks

felix — Fri, 11 May 2018 16:02:58 +0000

Last week, I traveled with my colleague Virginie Aubrée from the University of Trento to Ariège, a rural district one hour south of the city of Toulouse. We arrived at an old castle lent to a joyous crowd of geeks and activists who had come here for the General Assembly of Fédération FDN (FFDN), the French federation of Community Networks (CNs).

In this great environment – with stunning views over the hills at the footsteps of the Pyrenees –, about 70 participants had come to recount the successes and failures of the CN organizations taking part in the federation (see Deliverable 1.2), work on existing projects, start new working groups and discuss the governance of this federation uniting about 30 non-profit organizations, and gathering about 3000 members in total.

Regarding governance, one key focus this year was on inclusion, with the goal of making FFDN's member organizations more welcoming for women, non-whites and disabled persons. As underlined in another report netCommons released last year on governance, this has been long-running concern at FFDN and this year, participants decided to launch a new working group to tackle these structural challenges. Another focus of the discussions on governance was how to fund the growing joint actions taking place within the federation, and how to build financial solidarity between member organizations. One challenge in this regard is to account for the diversity of financial situations among them while preserving local autonomy and equal representation at the federal level. On last point on governance: We witnessed a growing willingness on the part of many participants to start focusing again on growing existing organizations and seeding new ones across France. Founded in 2011, FFDN indeed underwent a fast-paced growth at the beginning and then capped at about 30 member organizations. But time now seems ripe to expand the initiative. A working group has been set up to start developing a new strategy to that effect.

On the technical front, the three-day event was extremely fruitful as well. On the first day, a small team worked on sharing the castle's WiFi network with a circus troop established down the hill and deprived of any Internet access. To that end, the castle's own WiFi network – connected to an ADSL access in a nearby village through a radio link – was expanded thanks to a new antenna installed on the castle's roof. Other workshops focused on starting new development efforts of the “Internet Cube”, a device allowing for self-hosting functionalities (thanks to the Yunohost operating system) and channeling Internet traffic to a CN's VPN services. We also took part in a demonstration on fiber optic soldering.

Finally (and most importantly for us), we had many fruitful interactions on the legal front. We gave an update of our work on legal guidelines for data retention obligations and data protection. Several participants gave us very positive feedbacks on our guide on legal aspects of open access points (based on French law), and in particular the fact that the guide was already helping local public authorities and libraries resist pressure to implement illegal surveillance measures and better protect the rights of Internet users. We also discussed the findings of our recent report on how to develop advocacy capacities to influence regulation in the interest of CNs. As we stressed in that report:

"Building internal skills might be enough to engage in policy-making in front of local authorities, which of course can be key in providing CNs with the legitimacy and resources to scale up their projects locally. But at the national and European level, effectively engaging in sustained political advocacy will require creating better coordination between communities."

Now, the federation's General Assembly was very receptive to the idea and we are expecting new proposals and initiatives on how best to coordinate European networks in the coming weeks or months.

Once again, we are coming back from this event extremely motivated to ensure that the last months of the netCommons project can deliver useful research and tools for the sustainability of these grassroots initiatives. And, also, convinced that, thanks to them – as was overheard during the event –, it is possible to “make the Internet great again!”

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Data retention and telecommunication providers: New EU Parliament meeting

virginie — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 13:10:00 +0000

On April 11th, netCommons's legal team was at the European Parliament for a strategy meeting on "the Future of Data Retention and Targeted Criminal Investigations".

In line with the workshop netCommons organised at the EU Parliament in October, this new event delved into one issue identified last year in an open letter sent to EU institutions by EU Community Networks: the abrogation of blanket data retention obligations. As a reminder, the open letter advocated that:

Community networks strive to safeguard human rights in communication networks, and in particular the right to privacy and the confidentiality of communication. While we welcome recent rulings by the Court of Justice of the European Union holding that indiscriminate retention of metadata violates the Charter of Fundamental Rights, we are concerned about several member states’ willingness to circumvent these rulings to protect capabilities for indiscriminate surveillance. As EU lawmakers start/ARE discussing the overhaul of the ePrivacy Directive, we call on them to oppose any blanket data retention obligations and close existing loopholes in EU law to ensure that only targeted and limited retention obligations can be imposed on hosting and access providers.

This new strategy meeting welcomed NGOs defending digital rights, members of the European Parliament (Greens) and also academics. First, netCommons focused on the recent developments around data retention at the national level. The overall conclusion is clear: the legal framework of almost every member states is in breach of EU data retention law, and the rulings of the Court of Justice protecting fundamental rights are not applied.

There are several positive moves however:

In France, two community networks from the FFDN federation have pending cases before national courts (1).

In Germany, an administrative court set aside a national law, regarding it as non compliant with EU law (2).

But these isolated cases are not enough. We figured that a coordinated effort at the European level was needed. In this respect, netCommons suggested a common initiative launched with several European CNs. It is a bit too early to discuss the specifics. Suffices to say that, thanks to this meeting, we were able to reach out to more people to extend this project. We will be able to say more about this this summer.

So stay tuned...

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(1): Their legal brief, in French, along with and all the updates about this pending case are available here: https://exegetes.eu.org/recours/

(2): The case law, in German, is available here: https://www.webshoprecht.de/IRUrteile/Rspr2799.php

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netCommons Endorses and Supports the "Mesh is in the air"

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 15:20:00 +0000

This year, the "Wireless Battle of the Mesh" and the "Wireless Community Weekend" have joined forces and realized a new event, called "Mesh is in the air", merging the best of both events.

The Battle of the Mesh is the historical meeting of all European Community Networks, this year in its 11th edition (every year it changes its location). The Wireless Community Weekend is instead the annual meeting of the FreiFunk German wireless Community, and this year the two events merge in Berlin. It is the best occasion to meet all the practitioners, developers, and maintainers of CNs around Europe (and not only).

For netCommons it is a unique event where to showcase the results of our project. We will be there to share with the communities all the results, gather feedback and involve them in the experimentations, which is something we will do in 2018 for the third time (after 2016 and 2017).

netCommons endorses and supports "Mesh is in the air" not only for the efforts made by its community to advance the field of wireless mesh networking and foster the development of grass-roots community networks, but for their contribution to digital freedom rights movement, humanitarian aid, empowerment of peoples tech/net/media competency and a free and open civil society.

Some of the things we will concretely do to support the event are:

help to promote the event
bring people to the event to help setting-up the network, and to experiment with protocols, software, and help organizing the results, as we did with the final report for the 2017 edition
give talks about the results we achieved, both technical and legal
we will provide 6 Ubiquiti Unifi AC Pro to realize the testbed

and probably more, as the event comes closer and we find ways to contribute.

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