Take a Brief Survey to Support Community Networks

The Internet Society has worked with NetCommons to promote community networks. They are a conducting a survey to examine users’ concerns about Internet use and explore the potential of alternative Internet provision.

The netCommons project funded by EU (EU Horizon 2020 project netCommons: Network Infrastructure as Commons) aspires to study, support, and further promote community-based networking and communication services that can offer a complement, or even an alternative, to the global Internet’s current dominant model. It involves a collaboration of six organizations, namely the University of Trento in Italy, The Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) in Spain, the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, the University of Westminster (UK), the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece, and the non-profit organization Nethood in Switzerland. 

Community networks provide citizens with access to a neutral, bottom- up network infrastructure, which increases the transparency of data flow, but they also represent an archetype of networked collective cooperation and action, mixing common or communal ownership and management of an infrastructure with a balanced set of services supported by the local stakeholders. In this way, they are a departure from the standard Internet, which is dominated by commercial Internet providers, global corporate Continue reading