The ninuxday 2017

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.