CAIDA COMMONS workshop, Dec 12-13

Laura Forlano and I have been invited to attend and participate in the CAIDA COMMONS workshop in San Diego on December 12-13. CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, is holding the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) workshop as a means to figure out how community network organizations—builders, policy analysts, researchers, and supporters—can work together to push forward the science and practice of community networks.

CAIDA proposes a collaboration to simultaneously solve three acute and growing problems facing the Internet: a self-reported financial crisis in the Internet infrastructure provider industry; a data acquisition crisis which has severely stunted the field of network science; and a struggle for survival within emerging community and municipal networks, who are in an ideal position to address the first two problems but often lack resources and experience to make informed operational decisions, and are also continually threatened by incumbent-driven legislation.

We propose an experiment to build a cooperative national backbone to connect select community and municipal networks to each other, and to the global Internet. Peering would be conditionally available to county, state, and federal government entities, academic institutions, and community wireless initiatives. The conditions are two-fold: (1) the attached networks must make select operational data available to Internet technology and policy researchers under appropriate legal data sharing frameworks; (2) the attached networks must agree to cooperatively develop and abide by policies based on confirmed results of empirical data analyses.

Laura and I are going as representatives of NYCwireless (builders) and as researchers (especially on Laura’s part). While we won’t be blogging directly from the conference, I expect there will be lots of projects and collaborations that will come out of the workshop.

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