Efficient Collaboration between Government, Citizens and Enterprises in Commons Telecommunication Infrastructures
Résumé
Public administrations, citizens and enterprises are the three key players for the construction and management of any commons infrastructure. This paper discusses the interrelations between them, under the lens of the ongoing netCommons project, an H2020 research project entirely devoted to multidisciplinary research on Community Networks (CN). In June 2016 netCommons organized a workshop in Barcelona (Spain), to share views and discuss how these three actors can strengthen ties among them to contribute to the growth of community networks. The workshop analyzed tools ranging from governance strategies and regulation to implementation (at deployment and operation level) of networking infrastructures. Special attention was devoted to optical fiber, a key technology for achieving the coverage and penetration targets of the European Digital Agenda. Based on the experience and the work done so far, the workshop expanded the knowledge about this type of collaboration and identified specific lines of action to make CNs more e-cient in the future. The workshop was divided in three panels: governance, regulation, and implementation, with participants from the research field, public administration and practitioners that daily build CNs. We report about the topics discussed and some of the lessons learned during the workshop. 1 Motivation For the last century telecommunications has been a key infrastructure for societal development. The traditional model has been public or private enterprises in charge of developing, maintaining, operating the infrastructure and also providing services to customers: all citizens, anywhere in a territory. These infrastructures have been the core of a tussle between three key actors: citizens, companies and organizations willing to communicate, governments and public administrations with the mandate of regulating the public space and the rights of citizens and consumers, and the private interests of the service providers, typically driven by business interests. In the last decade, local initiatives have developed citizen-driven cooperative and self-organized e↵orts to develop network infrastructures for digital sovereignty and ensure the rights of communication and participation in the digital society: to connect the unconnected, or to provide sustainable and inclusive alternatives. As context matters, in this workshop we have focused on the European scenario and particularly in the scope of Spain and the guifi.net community network. Successive workshops in di↵erent regions and community networks will allow us draw a comparison across them. The aim of the workshop 1 was to build a shared understanding and find ways to optimize the interaction among these three actors, with the ultimate goal of optimizing the development of community networking infrastructures. Based on the experience and the work done so far, the workshop had two concrete objectives: i) expand knowledge about this type of collaboration and ii) identify specific lines of action to make them more ecient in the future. During the meeting these challenges were analyzed and discussed successively from the point of view of governance 2 , regulation, and its implementation, dedicating to each block a total of one and half hour with a set of short presentations and one panel session. 1 http://netcommons.eu/?q=content/workshop-community-networking-infrastructures. 2 Links to videos of each session (with English subtitles for non-English talks): S1 Governance, S2 Regulation, S3 Implementation.
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