Re: [gaia] draft-irtf-gaia-alternative-network-deployments. Mitar review, question #5: Community Networks

[Mitar <[e-mail]>]

Hi!

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 9:18 AM, Jose Saldana <[e-mail]> wrote:
> What about this?
>
>    The fact of the users adding new infrastructure (i.e. extensibility)
>    can be used to formulate another definition: A Community Network is a
>    network in which any participant in the system may add link segments
>    to the network in such a way that the new segments can support
>    multiple nodes and adopt the same overall characteristics as those of
>    the joined network, including the capacity to further extend the
>    network.  Once these link segments are joined to the network, there
>    is no longer a meaningful distinction between the previous and the
>    new extent of the network.  The term "participant" refers to an
>    individual, who may become user, provider and manager of the network
>    at the same time.  The addition of a new link in a Community Network
>    does not imply any modification of the BGP [RFC4271] peering of the
>    Internet.

This is getting stranger and stranger. There is not really any reason
why community network would not operate so that when new node connects
it auto-reconfigures some of its BGP peerings.

Anyway, I think the original text was better than this now. Old text
was at least redundant from my perspective, this now is adding invalid
claims. :-) Let's just leave it as it was. It describes Internet,
which community networks anyway are (a new generation of it). :-)

>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+
>    | Goals and motivation  | all the goals listed in Section 4.2 may   |
>    |                       | be present                                |
>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+

I like it.

> What about this?
>
>    In Community Networks, profit can only be made by offering services
>    and not simply by supplying the infrastructure, because the
>    infrastructure is neutral, free, and open (mainstream Internet
>    Service Providers base their business on the control of the
>    infrastructure).  In Community Networks, everybody usually keeps the
>    ownership of what he/she has contributed, or leaves the stewardship
>    of the equipment to network as a whole, commons, even loosing track
>    of the ownership of a particular equipment itself, in favor of the
>    community.

I like it.

> PS: This would be the whole subsection:
>
> 5.1.  Community Networks
>
>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+
>    | Commercial            | community                                 |
>    | model/promoter        |                                           |
>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+
>    | Goals and motivation  | all the goals listed in Section 4.2 may   |
>    |                       | be present                                |
>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+
>    | Administration        | non-centralized                           |
>    +-----------------------+-------------------------------------------+
>    | Technologies          | Wi-Fi [IEEE.802-11-2012], optical fiber   |

Maybe mentioning that it can be both standard and non-standard? So
community networks are probably the most open to hacking and changing
things to non-standard operations from all alternative networks. We
should convey that.

>    Hardware and software used in Community Networks can be very diverse,
>    even inside one network.

Diverse and customized?

Otherwise I like it (pending possible category of ownership).


Mitar

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