[CWN-Summit] guifi.net awarded by the government of Catalonia

[Ramon Roca]

I'm very happy to share with all the freenetworkers friends here that 
guifi.net has been awarded by the Catalan Government with the National 
price for Telecommunications category, which was collected in the 
official ceremony yesterday.

Press Release (in Catalan):
http://www20.gencat.cat/portal/site/CulturaDepartament/menuitem.cc396c23f1b1adc20985bdb1b0c0e1a0/?vgnextoid=a73e20d66949b010VgnVCM1000000b0c1e0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=a73e20d66949b010VgnVCM1000000b0c1e0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=detall&contentid=bbd1a19ddf0f5110VgnVCM1000008d0c1e0aRCRD

This award, which also have categories for Television, Radio and 
Internet, has significant relevance here and is getting attraction of 
the local media.

Here I translate the extract which describes the reasons of why the 
price went to guifi.net:

"The jury awards Guifi.net with the National Award of Telecommunications 
because is an open network, with broadband access and neutral that under 
the respect of the current legislation is capable to provide high level 
features at a low cost, and provides universal broadband access to the 
information age and creates value add services where is deployed. The 
jury has also remarked the already 2.700 online nodes on a network which 
has a high growth rate in Catalonia, and therefore becomes a significant 
contribution to the territory development and to help in relief the 
digital divide."

Personally I would say that this is an outcome of a combination of 
several things, like a good job of lots of people, got a multi-thousand 
member community, using the right approach in terms of networking model 
(participative, open and neutral), and, of course, an outcome of the 
support we've got from the international communities, like the SAX-WSFII 
event we had this summer so please, consider that this award also goes 
to all of you and your communities.

We're planning to use the raised funds of this award (€15K) to create a 
foundation for helping the development of open free networks. We just 
think that this is another small step forward in the long journey of 
getting awareness of the open networking model, which we hope will 
increase over time and and over the world.

Thanks,
Ramon Roca.