Report on the Governance Instruments and their Application to CNs (v2)

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. This is the final deliverable of the task and it builds on the results of the previous documents that describe existing CNs and their organization framework (D1.1, D1.2), and existing organizational models, and organizational pat- terns and anti-patterns (D1.3). The work carried out draws also from the global and sustainability analysis of WP2, the legal analysis in WP4, but most of all on the developed software in WP3, which is used to extend the notion of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) related commons beyond the physical infrastructure of a CN to the services that can be built on top of it. This deliverable focuses on the application of previous results towards re-engineering: comparisons of internal and external models, patterns, and finally plans, progress and results of interaction with selected CNs in the processes to incorporate such governance instruments within the routine management of CNs. As part of that work we provide an analysis of both the internal and external organizational models of guifi.net, Sarantaporo.gr, TakNet/Net2Home, Zenzeneli, B4RN. We look at a mapping of the relationship to the organizational patterns to these and other CNs. We discuss about metrics for the evaluation and impact assessment of organizational changes, based on the models and patterns we developed, in several CNs, classified into three groups: under consideration (involving FFDN, Rhizomatica, W4C), under implementation (involving Zenzeleni, Net2Home, eXO, ninux), and under validation (several collaborations involving guifi.net: community clouds, municipal or- dinance, investment model for fiber deployment). The report presents the case of community clouds in guifi.net, formalized in the last 18 months as a framework for community clouds as open commons, and sustained by the software development in WP3. The results achieved in influencing CNs are extremely satisfactory. Indeed, not only CNs members and activists welcomed the interaction with netCommons researchers, but it turned out that in many cases they seek for external recognition and also external support and cooperation. Sometimes the impression that they are geek-based, isolated groups is only due to the lack of a proper legal/societal framework that makes it difficult to describe what they are, and also leaves the impression of them being always on the fringe of legality, thus nurturing a keep a low profile attitude.