Report on the Governance Instruments and their Application to CNs (v1)

This deliverable is part of Task 1.2: “Improving governance: impact on Community Networks (CNs)”. The ultimate expected outcome of the task is the improvement of the governance models of CNs. The outline of the deliverable is: 1) An analysis from the social science perspective about the notion of community and community organization, with a particular attention to the most relevant contributions emerged in the field of organizational studies; 2) An analysis and identification of good governance tools, as a result of collaborative research about several representative CNs: guifi.net and eXO (mainly Spain), ninux.org (Italy), FFDN and Tetaneutral (France) already covered in our previous research, and new CNs: Wireless For Communities (W4C) (India) and Rhizomatica (Mexico). We look at governance, from an outside view of the surrounding environment, and from an inside view of internal coordination, identifying governance bottlenecks and organizational developments. 3) Synthesis: Recommendations and good practices (to improve the platform in D1.2) to take into account in any re-structuring in terms of organizational patterns and anti-patterns. 4) Re-engineering: Plans for Work with selected CNs to incorporate such governance instruments within the routine management of CNs. The results will be reported in deliverable 1.4. D1.4 is a related deliverable, due in M24 (December), that will refine and complete the work reported in this document. It will provide a more elaborate analysis of the re-engineering of organizational tools, including their evaluation and impact assessment.