Re: [gaia] draft-irtf-gaia-alternative-network-deployments. Mitar review, question #1: Motivations

[Mitar <[e-mail]>]

Hi!

On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 2:47 AM, Roger Baig Viñas <[e-mail]> wrote:
> "Guifi.net's infrastructure is managed as a “commons”: it is legally owned
> and commercially run by a non­profit foundation (on behalf of its users)."
>
> is not true:
>
> 1) the contributor keeps the ownership rights over the contributions
> made, so, he/she/it (e.g. public admins., enterprises, etc.) can keep
> the ownership or he/she/it can donate them to the Foundation (this has
> become the preferred/recommended practice by the Foundation as is the
> best way to ensure that these contributions will never be removed from
> the common pool resource) among any other actions the holder of the
> ownership rights is permitted to take by law.
>
> 2) commercial activity is essentially done by ISPs (we call them "the
> professionals")

Hm, I do not see this conflicting at all? This is more or less what I
was proposing to be said about community networks and ownership: that
people own it, or they donate it to the network as it is.

This forms a commons which is cooperatively managed.

But I agree that the snippet from the paper looks more like the only
way to do it is by donating it to the Foundation. And I agree that
"commercially run" might not the right choice of words there. But
"commercially" does not necessary mean for-profit. It can also mean in
the scope of this document that the Foundation is one behind the
"commercial model / promoter".

Anyway, I did not reference this paper as a paper which describes
everything correctly (as you might noticed, that is a really hard
process) and we should cite for descriptions of the networks, but as
an example of analysis that what community networks are build can be
seen as commons. If a particular network does or does not see what
they are doing as commons is a separate question. I do know that we
see it as such in wlan slovenija. And that this paper talks about how
you can see it as such and explain what commons would in this context
mean.


Mitar

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