Report on the Results of the Socio-Technological Experimentation of Open Source Software

This report is the follow-up of D3.2 and D3.4 in which we documented the state of the software development carried on in netCommons at the end of M12 and at the end of M24. In these reports we introduced and described the advances in the Cloudy, PeerStreamer and the CommonTasker application (now re-named AppLea), that are the open source applications being developed in netCommons. While the first two were started in previous EU-financed projects (the CLOMMUNITY and NAPA-WINE FP7 projects) the latter is a new application developed from scratch in netCommons. This deliverable reports on the development of these platforms in the third year of the project, in which we tested them with the help of some selected communities, and continued their development. It also gives additional feedback to the methodology described in T3.1. As such, this deliverable describes the lessons learned from the usage or our open source software in the communities, the feedback we received and how it helped the software to become fully usable. Summary of Development: The Cloudy platform was further expanded to support the IoT world. Chapter 2 reports on this new direction we opened in order to make Cloudy even more appealing to the users of Guifi Community Network. Furthermore, Cloudy was at the center of the development of two new technologies, Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and Blockchains. In the first case, the Umobile project1 used Cloudy as the base platform to test, for the first time the use of ICN on mesh networks. We report on these advances and current ongoing publications. In the second case, UPC was involved into the experimentation of Blockchain for mesh networks by the AmmbrTech start-up, which is a recently created company investing in Blockchain-based mesh networks. The PeerStreamer-ng application was completed with PartyHub, a component to realize many-to-many video- conference. PartyHub is now included in the main tree of PeerStreamer-ng and it can be used both on-line and within community networks. We have tested PeerStreamer-ng and PartyHub in several occasions and it was used in two groups of the ninux community network. Finally, AppLea has been completed. The app was largely modified compared to the initial design, thanks to constant interaction and feedback received from the members of Sarantaporo-gr community network. It is now stably used by a group of farmers in the Sarantaporo-gr community network. Furthermore, additional developments emerged in the interaction with CNs (ninux in particular) that netCom- mons followed and nurtured, fostering dissemination and impact of the project. As for D3.2 and D3.4 all the source code released during the project is available in our Github organization2 Summary of Adoption: Our initial goals for WP3 was to have at least two community networks to test and adopt our software. In this deliverable, (together with D3.6 for the part dealing with the participatory method- ology) we describe how we were able to involve four community networks from three countries to adopt, use and co-develop our software. We show that not only we had our open source software used by a community of users, but also how the influence of the project and the methodologies we proposed were of interest outside of these specific communities and outside the world of community networks. Update on the Multi-Disciplinary Methodology for Applications Design: Albeit the work of T3.1 officially ended with D3.6, NetHood continued the development of the methodology to produce a stand-alone booklet with the latest version of the methodology. The booklet is an investment we deemed necessary to produce a publication that is easy to use and read for any CN member, without the involvement of people from the project. The current version of the booklet (which by nature will change and update in the future) is included in this deliverable.