[CWN-Summit] Specifying Network Ownership

[Ramon Roca]

Very interesting and key question. I would like to comment on this.

We faced at guifi.net this discussion quite often since we have been in 
collaboration with many municipalities.

Our conclusion, which I think is a *KEY*, is that what really matters is 
the nature of the network (open vs closed or proprietary), not the 
ownership.

In open networks, makes sense and even is desired that the ownership 
figure should be highly distributed between many contributors who agree 
to interconnect between them building as a result a big global network, 
is a key because in fact is what provides sustainability and growth.
Therefore the ownership at the end doesn't matter very much, only 
reflects who paid certain devices/network segments and very likely who 
is responsible for maintaining them, but not anything else.

If you don't do it on this way will be very difficult to grow a 
cooperative atmosphere which remains permanently open to new 
contributors to join: In general people don't like to give away the 
ownership of something to someone else, who is unique, and without a 
clear compromise.

In other words, following our schema, IMHO my recomendation is that if 
the City of San Diego is who gives the money, will be much easier if 
they retain the ownership (or whatever public/collective ownership makes 
sense), and you should focus in be sure that the network is built on a 
condition that will be open for ever, so later other municipalities, 
enterprises or individuals can join by contributing and keeping the 
ownserhip of what they own or paid, but using it in an open and common 
behavior.  To setup this we wrote what we call the "Comuns Sensefils" 
agreement, which is simply a derivation of the concept of the peer to 
peer agreements.

The danger of not doing the things in this way is that once the network 
becomes something tangible, at some point will appear somebody with a 
great idea: To sell what is owned, simply because it's since it's a 
property can be object of trading, and can provide a large variety of 
excuses for doing so: Outsourcing, privatization, sustainability, 
private-public-patrneships etc, but at the end is all about money. This 
clever guy can even come from your own community. Unfortunately I can 
give you dozens of examples of this, where although at some point 
someone did a business, at the very end the result was a collapse... 
while think that at the end of the day, a neutral/open network will 
always greater value add than any proprietary network, look at the 
internet itself...

I realize that can be other approaches/points of views out there, but 
I'm confident that it's a key in our case (guifi.net) because as a 
result of adopting this model of distributed ownership over an open 
network, that enabled us to build a network with thousands of nodes, in 
cooperation with dozens of municipalities and enterprises, by simply 
summarizing very modest contributions. That doesn't means that 
everything is wonderful, we still face other issues (or I should say 
challenges), but not the ownership one anymore ;)

SAX!

En/na x.l at headsonfire.org ha escrit:
> Absolutely Matt.  I'm buying.  Although, you did just share that message
> with the entire CWN and Air Jaldi lists, so we might have some company...
>   
>> I'm gonna be down in San Diego to do a wireless workshop for Toorcon
>> <http://toorcon.org/>.  We should get some beers.
>>
>> -matt
>>
>>
>> x.l at headsonfire.org wrote:
>>     
>>> My community wireless group is close to getting a very favorable MOU
>>> with
>>> the City of San Diego approved. I'm hoping it will be a good template
>>> for
>>> others.   We included the following phrase to indicate that our group,
>>> The
>>> Golden Hill Intelligent Community Project would be the owners of the
>>> network: Ownership of the wireless network is retained by the GHICP.
>>>
>>> The City Attorney wants specification as to what constitutes the
>>> "network."  One of my main reasons for wanting to include this part is
>>> that I didn't want anyone to restrict us from doing something like
>>> allowing CAIDA to study our network data.
>>>
>>> If any of you have had to specify ownership this way, or have
>>> suggestions
>>> of useful ways for us to do it, please let me know.
>>>
>>>
>>>       
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>>     
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