Ecuador: Revisioning An Entire Nation State

THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL!
MAY - JUNE 2014
Ecuador: Revisioning an Entire Nation State

Towards a free, libre and open knowledge society
Volume XXIII, No.s 2-3 May - June 2014 ISSN 1071 - 6327
2014
COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA
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Dedication to a Better World

Gordon Cook: It strikes me that! Abraham Heinemann's following paragraph has captured with a flash of extraordinary brilliance every thing regarding FLOK since last September. Beun Vivir - a bright shinning star on an otherwise grim horizon.
Abraham Heinemann <abrahamheinemann@gmail.com>: Governments generally don't run on "living well" and this concept seems like it may be a shield, the good face turned towards the public and the 'mal vivir' or the 'living not so well' hidden behind it. My questions are, does Buen Vivir already exist in any society, indigenous or not and if so what does it look like? Can Buen Vivir even exist at the high standards it promotes? Or Can/are these concepts be/ing used as a model for new development strategies that will provide a space where different ontologies can freely and openly interact and work together to raise the quality of life where old strategies have failed. In between the exploitation and abuse of these concepts, will it be possible to harness something good that may help people to start working in new and positive directions? Michel Bauwens: Can Buen Vivir really exist in a capitalist society that promotes universal competition; the answer is in all likelihood - no. But are efforts possible?! Yes, Can these efforts be ultimately successful without a phase transition to cooperative models? the answer is again: no, But we can built signposts along the road, [to this transition] and in this sense, the FLOK society effort is of historical importance, Michel
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approximately June 1 Enhanced Science in the Netherlands
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Contents Executive Summary ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

p. 4
Part One: Is It Possible to Design a Humane Peerto-Peer System to Replace Global Capitalism?
The FLOK Project in Ecuador - A Preliminary Report ! ! Background of the FLOK Project - by Michel Bauwens How This All Began ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! p. 9 p. 10 p. 11 p.13 p. 15 p. 16 p. 16
Ren Ramrez as the Philosopher of Ecuadors Future ! !

Good Living as the Wealth of Nations !! Concept of Good Living! ! ! ! Toward Intellectual Independence ! !
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Framing the FLOK Transition Project in Ecuador: why open knowledge is not enough by John Restakis! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! p. 22
A Knowledge City to Enable a Social Knowledge Economy! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Jose Andrade on Yachay and Educational Policy Part Two: An Introduction to the FLOK Projects Substance
A talk by Michel Bauwens in Amsterdam on October 30 2013 ! ! Changing from a Feudal Hierarchical Relationship to One Based on a Participatory Commons Entrepreneurial Coalitions Create Value Atop the Commons Broad Based Open Commons Need Feeding Mechanisms Solidarity Co-ops Red Plenty as an Historical Comparison
p.26 p.29
p. 31 p.32 p.33 p.36 p.36 p.37 p.39 p. 42
The FLOK Project: Origins and Process

A Late March Interview with Michel Bauwens
Research Plan !
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The Transition as a Global Issue in the Context of the Four Technology Regimes! ! Preparations for the Summit Events Planned for April and May 2014
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p. 42 p. 45 p. 46
Part Three: Connectivity:

for Ecuadors Scientists to Global R&E Networks and for its Citizens to each other and the Global Internet Some Personal Editorial Observations p.49
Lessons learned p.52 Conclusion: Why a Desired Scenario Cannot be Arbitrarily Explained with Expectation of Any Useful Results p.54 The Solution p.54
Draft Policy Paper on Connectivity for the FLOK Project !

Introduction! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
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p.55
p.56 p.58 p. 59 p. 60 p. 61
Background Peering and Transit ! !
! ! ! ! Access for rural areas ! Access for citizens! ! ! ! Critique of capitalist models -- The capitalist way of doing things! Alternative Models Case study 1: Brazil, Netherlands" " " case study 2:"Gui.net ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
The Ecuadorian political and economic framework

Existing infrastru CELEC EP Transparency abd CEDIA Telco Net and CNT
p.62, p.64 and p.66 p. 67
Current Situation Regarding Broadband Access
p. 69
Policies to Assist the National Broadband Plan and Strategies for Expanding Internet Use Policy Goals of the Broadband Plan and the three Basic Strategies
Ecuadoran Policy Recommendations !! ! ! !
p. 70 p. 74 p.77 p. 82 p.98
Gui.net and i2cat Meet Again

Novembers Good Intentions Result in No Action in January !
I2Cat and Guinet Meet Again:

According to I2Cat ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
Kansas City Freedom Network update !

Book Review Learning to Photograph ! ! !
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p.106
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Executive Summary
At the end of last summer Michel Bauwens accepted an assignment in Ecuador. It is one that we all have reason to hope might address what perhaps is the major unanswered question that underlies the content of the massive P2P foundation wiki of movements around the world -- scattered and isolated -but all designed in an attempt to mitigate the excesses of uncontrolled, unregulated, nancialized global capitalism. The clients of the P2P foundation are people everywhere who were trying to stand up against the centralized juggernaut of 21st century cognitive capitalism. The message certainly is that this cannot last that this is not sustainable that it is driving more and more people into misery while it continues to massive redistribution of wealth into the hands of a tiny minority. Could it be possible not just in a single aspect of society at a very local level to create comprehensive change that would affect the entire society of the nationstate? This is the hope of the project that Michel calls the third way. A way that need not entail a radical leftwing revolution of massive nationalization and redistribution of property. Also a way that need not entail continuation of the current unsustainable process of doing anything, at any cost, to maintain predatory neo-liberal state. Ecuador has a populist president elected in 2006 in a backlash against the Washington consensus and it has an education minister who helped author to national plans one in 2009 the second 2013 for what he called building a society of good living built in turn on what he dened as a social knowledge economy. Yet by current Western standards is denitely quite radical. It was founded on the idea that a just government that insured basic minimal standards for human decency, education, healthcare and housing might be possible. It was very much reminiscent of the great Society espoused a half-century ago by Lyndon Johnson before he allowed our country to be socked into the neo-colonialist disaster of Vietnam. Michel, it seemed, had an invitation from Ecuador to bring in a research team and the ll over a period of about six months a very ambitious research plan that would show why it made sense to try to build such a society as well as give some understanding of what such a society might look like. It was an idealized utopian goal and it barely got off the ground before it began to crash into some on the anticipated obstacles. Still the team that he put together has persevered and on the ock society wiki the research plan and associated documents are now being posted and the ve-day meeting in Quito originally scheduled for early March is now scheduled to take place over the last days of May. This issue informs its readers of how the project got started a bottom-up hack of an entire nation state and how against overwhelming odds it is moving forward. It deserves serious contemplation and study because the alternative is likely to be massive societal breakdown eliciting violent oppression by the 1% who have already co-opted the powers of the American national security state to destroy the privacy of all of its citizens and build electronic dossiers to engage local police departments militarized by the post-9/11 largess on behalf of the so-called security. This is a security not against terrorists but one designed to keep the ruling classes in the positions of power that they enjoy.
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I have included a transcript of a 20 minute session at a conference in Amsterdam at the end of last October where Michel lays out the ideas and goals underlining the FLOK society project in Ecuador. While intellectual property rights per se are not evil, the research developed shows how the rampant excess of patents recently granted is allowing the barons of corporate capitalism to impose arbitrary and predatory taxes to ensure continued nancial dominance of what Minister Ramirez describes as the wealthy north over subjects living in the the neo-colonialist South. They are attempting to use income from the sale of their natural resources to educate their brightest youth at foreign universities and bring them back to develop Ecuadorian ideas and, using free and open source knowledge and tools develop a local Ecuadorian economy where while no one will live as a plutocrat, Ordinary citizens may enjoy a decent standard of living based on the idea of community rather than dominance and power that the aggregation of wealth can give one control over the lives of those who have chosen loyalty to local community and fellow citizens and neighbors rather than worship selfaggrandizement. This issue also offers a translation of Ramirezs January 2014 essay: towards intellectual independence where he outlines what a society based on a social knowledge economy would look like and how it could take advantage of the revolution in the availability of decentralized, digital, open -source tools that would allow the development of an open-source society based on peer to peer contributions toward building common futures tied together by affordable broadband Internet connectivity. It also looks at the governments plans to build a small group of world-class universities while fueled by Chinese loans for local hydropower projects that, if things go amiss, could turn out badly. This issue shows also some of the unpleasant things that weve discovered about the current government. It is not as nice as the warm and fuzzy ideas February Ramirez might lead us to think. But as Michel points out regardless of what happens in Ecuador it is the rst step ever undertaken in the world to attempt to develop a comprehensive mapping of what a change might look like from the currently unsustainable madness of neoliberalism held together in a race to the bottom by extractive capitalism is dragging humanity. I was asked very late in the day by the project to study Ecuadors telecommunications and its approach to the Internet by taking the point of view that a very basic grassroots communications infrastructure was integral part of the social knowledge economy that Ramirezs claim to want to build. They say they want to develop a telecommunications infrastructure that would enable the best minds of their young people to participate and open global collaborative scientic research in the generation and development of new knowledge. They then intend to put into use at home in developing their own intellectual capital by means of which they can become more independent of the extractive economic policies of the wealthy North. What I found out is that unfortunately they do not seem to understand either the function of global research and education networks or the function of a well protected grassroots Internet. I learned a great deal none of which bodes especially well for the desired and hoped for outcome. Because while the government owns two out of the three companies that have substantial ber networks extending over the entire country, the policies of the electric utility network and the national phone company were developed at both companies by the boyhood friend of the current president Jorge Glas.
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This is also the man who negotiated nearly $8 billion in loans four hydropower from China. It appears as though the policies are based on using both companies as prot centers rather than seeking an understanding as to how they could be used in the national interest to attain the lofty vision on behalf of the good life of the Ecuadorian people as enunciated by Ren Ramirez. Still not all is negative. The very fact that on March 26 in Quito the group managed to hold a several hour press conference that publicly introduced the project to Ecuadorians and did so by very explicitly criticizing how the government. although it says it wants civil society to bloom, takes a paternalistic stance designed to insinuate its control of all such groups at every level. FLOK advocates what it calls a partner state for developing a role of government is not paternalistic but nurturing and balancing. In a section called the FLOK project origins and processes we dip into what Michel calls the Full Research plan. It is here that he attempts do do what neither he nor anyone else in the P2P movement has ever done before namely describe current forms of capitalism and of transition movements and depict what has to be done to get from here to there. A critical paragraph written by Michel is found in the FLOK wiki in the section headed The Socio-Economic Implications of a Social
Knowledge Economy.
He writes: Just as cognitive capitalism depends on the manifold institutional supports supplied by
government policy, legislation, free market ideology, and the collective power of firms and the institutions that serve them, even more so does a social knowledge economy require the corresponding civic and economic institutions that can support and safeguard the value of commons, of collective benefit, of open and accessible markets, and of social control over capital. These civic institutions are embodied in the structure of democratic enterprises, of peer-to-peer networks, of non-profits and community service organizations, of mutually supporting small and medium firms, and of civil society and the social economy itself. It is these social and economic structures, based on the principles of reciprocity and service to community, that can best utilize knowledge as a commons and safeguard its future as an indispensable resource for the common good and the wellbeing of humanity as a whole. The identification of these institutions and of the public policies needed for their development and growth is the overarching aim of this research. A few paragraphs later he continues: In a mature social knowledge economy, the state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature. Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their own commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation. In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by
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the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector.
Where does all tis wind up? Under what circumstances? Hard to say. Perhaps in the midst of constituent assemblies that may be held after the next global crash? And in Ecuador by design at the summit scheduled for May 26. The issue includes a translation of Renee Ramirezs important January 2014 essay Towards Intellectual Independence. It was done via google translate, my own attempts to edit and final clean up by Emilio Velis a fab labs engineer from El Salvador. I offer as well a summary of an interview of Jose Andrade and Ecuadoran who went to the US for his university education and is now full professor of Mechanical Engineering at Caltech. The conversation with Jose is intended to offer insight into government plans for Yachay University, for which an R&E connection will be critical, if Yachay is to have any chance of fulling government hopes to become an Andean Silicon Valley. The final part of the section on Ecuador is my connectivity policy study. Despite three companies of national stature that possess extensive fiber infrastructures, no one involved in any policy making seems to understand ether fiber optic technology or its fundamental role in creating a national telecom infrastructure that could become the basic foundation for its Plan for Good Living. The nation has a small R and E network but the politician appear to regard the networks existence as unwanted competition for the newly united national carrier CNT. Levels of awareness of the potential of the internet for building the knowledge society that Minister Ramirez wants are so low that it seems the best immediate course of action would be to create as a part of Civil Society an internet steering committee like that of Brazil that would spread awareness of the internet way of dong things as opposed to the telco way.
Guifinet and I2Cat. Also KCFN

Apart from Ecuador we offer a short interview with Roger Baig of guifinet that attempts to follow up on the second meeting between guifi.net and i2cat. It seems that nothing positive is happening. The hope had been raised for interconnection that would further the work of Artur Serras Living Labs. Less than a week before our publication Sergi Figuerola who actually runs the I2Cat network network read the January 22nd text and responded with extreme negativity to the idea that the networks had anything to offer each other. We close with an update on the Kansas City Freenet reproducing an exceptional January sermon by Isaac Wilder. Finally we conclude with a book review of Rocky Nook Presss outstanding two volume Learning to Photograph.
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Is It Possible to Design a Humane Peer-toPeer System to Replace Global Capitalism?

The FLOK Project in Ecuador - A Preliminary Report
Over the past decade, inspired and enabled by the Internet's horizontal, peer-to-peer communication capabilities, projects focused on the development of local political economies have sprouted all over the world. These projects are designed to make possible alternatives to the destructiveness of top-down global capitalism. Michel Bauwens, born in Belgium and living in Thailand, has become the globally respected curator of information about these people and their movements. He has done this with an organization named the Peer-to-Peer Foundation built around a wiki that is an encyclopedic description of what is happening. The most basic premise underlying the philosophical assumptions of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation is that global capitalism, dependent as it is on never-ending growth, no longer offers a sustainable future for humanity. The question of course then becomes one of what will replace the dominant role of predatory global capitalism? For a number of years, the members of the peer-to-peer movement have maintained that it will be replaced by a localized decentralized way of relating to each other where success is no longer measured by the amount of wealth that each individual accumulates but rather by the individuals collaborative contribution to the community which he or she lives. The question becomes whether and how the world can begin to transition from the current global capitalist system to this more sustainable peer to peer future avoiding, we all hope in the transition process, the destruction of violence and war that, in the past, has marked shifts in power among the globes nation states as they have been shaped by the nearly three centuries that have passed since the Industrial Revolution. What so far has been unexamined is the question of what an entire society and economy at the nation state level would look like, were a transition from global capitalism to a peer-to-peer society and economy to be achieved. An overriding question is could such a transition be achieved and how might humanity go about doing it?
Daniel Vazquez, Co-Founder FLOK Society
For the past six months a possible answer has been taking shape in Ecuador. It has been something of a bottom up hack. The purpose of this COOK Report will be to shed some light on how the Ecuadoran FLOK Society process began as well as to describe what has happened since it was announced in Quito last September. There have been many ups and downs and bumps in the road. But what we should all hope is that it will be shown to be possible to gather together a small group of experts to collaboratively design and describe the path by which a nation state could work its way out of the difficulties into which global capitalism has trapped humanity. If this can be done, it will turn out to be of long lasting global importance.
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Here is how Michelle Bauwens described Ecuadoran the setting on March 6, 2014.
Background of the FLOK Project

By Michel Bauwens: The National Plan of Ecuador recognizes and stresses that the global transformation towards knowledge-based societies and economies requires a new form for the creation and distribution of value in society. The National Plan's central concept is the achievement of 'Buen Vivir' (Sumak Kawsay) or 'good living'; but good living is impossible without the availability of 'good knowledge', i.e. 'Buen Conocer' ('Sumak Yachay'). The third national plan for 2013-2017 explicitly calls for a open-commons based knowledge society[1]. President Correa himself exhorted young people to achieve and ght for this open knowledge society[2]. The FLOK Society is a joint research effort by the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent, the SENESCYT (Secretara Nacional de Educacin Superior, Ciencia, Tecnologa e Innovacin) and the IAEN (Instituto de Altos Estudios del Estado) to develop transition and policy proposals to achieve such a open commons-based knowledge society. FLOK refers to: Free, meaning freedom to use, distribute and modify knowledge in universally available common pools; Libre stresses that it concerns free as in freedom, not as in 'gratis'; Open refers to the ability of all citizens to access, contribute to and use this common resource. A free, libre and open knowledge society therefore essentially means organizing every sector of society, to the maximum degree possible, into open knowledge commons, i.e. the availability of common pools of knowledge, code and design that are acceptable to all citizens and market entities, to create dynamic and innovative societies and economies, where knowledge is available without discrimination to all who need it to develop their civic and economic activities. The FLOK project is commissioned by the Secretary of Knowledge Rene Ramirez and SENESCYT, and carried out by the IAEN under the leadership of its rector and Dean of Research, as well as the FLOK Society team leaders Daniel Vazquez and Xabier Barandiaran. Michel Bauwens, the author of the research plan in collaboration with the FLOK Team, is the research director, assisted by ve research stream coordinators. The aim of the research plan is to combine the best advice from the global commons, and Ecuadorian civil society, in order to propose an integrated transition plan and the associated policy framework and proposals. The research plan builds on the original FLOK Proposal[3], i.e. Designing the FLOK Society, by Xabier E. Barandiaran & Daniel Vzquez. It builds on this proposal and specically calls for an integrative or 'wholistic' approach, which goes beyond technology, and calls for measures that take into account different aspects of social change that need to occur if not simultaneously, then at least linked a positive feedback loop in which various measures reinforce each other. It also broadens and deepens the call by looking at commons-based infrastructures not just for knowledge, but for other social and productive activities. COOK Report: The overall research plan and results are found as a portion of the FLOK Society wiki.-- here.
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How This All Began

COOK Report: Trying to follow all of this and understand what is going on from my position in central New Jersey 4000 miles to the north of Quito has been extremely difcult. I think that one of the key issues in getting an accurate understanding has been my lack of background as to how the entire project germinated. What was happening just did not seem to make sense. Early on I had what now looks like a mistaken impression that the project began with the explicit knowledge of Pres. Correa and his implicit endorsement. What I now realize is that the President in trying to govern a nation of 15 million people has been dealing with a widely divergent political spectrum. He has pursued a divergent collection of policies some of which are very unattractive but overall ones with a populist leaning and ones that contained an openness and receptivity to the idea of designing a replacement for neoliberal capitalism. The National Plans of 2009 and 2013 make very clear an interest on the part of President Correa in building a society of good living and creating a society of good knowledge that is necessary to enable the good living. Thse ideas are explained n more detail in the next section.""" " " It was within this context that In 2012 two Spanish hacktivists, with long experience promoting social organization within the Commons came to Quito for a conference called LabSurLab. (LSL) The conference ran from June 15- 23 and advertised itself as a scenario of conuence, dialogue, creation and production of knowledge among initiatives and projects that are brewing around free culture, art, science, technology, free software and communities, in order to weave a network of networks in Latin America connected to the world. This network, in constant construction, had its rst meeting in the Museum of Modern Art of Medellin in 2011. Daniel and Xabier had attended the 2011 meeting as well. Having become very intrigued by the ideas contained in the National Plans of Ecuador, they had, while in Quito, a long conversation with Carlos Preto an adviser to Rene Ramirez. They returned home and, quite a few month later, they came back to Quito on May 15th 2013 to talk with Carlos Rieto who in mid March of 2013 had become the new Rector at IAEN. Between May and August of 2013, they had discussions with IAEN, SENESCYT and MCCTH about whether a budget could be put together support bringing Michel Bauwens and a small team of global experts to Ecuador for a minimum of six months. The goal would be to put together an extensive set of policy papers! that would describe how Ecuador's economy, its politics and its society -- under the guidance of the National Plans of the Correa administration -- could be refashioned to actually achieve the goals of open education; open housing and social organization; open science; and open agriculture. As an outside observer I would say that the project seems to have as its very ambitious over all goal: a real reform of the Ecuadoran political and social system away from the typical Latin American rule of a landed aristocracy. I say this having read the 2009 National Pan that contains a 25 page section on Ecuadoran political economy and history of the last two centuries. That history traces a path that began with a landed aristocracy in the early years of the 19th century and, as the importance of agricultural exports declined, became more of a bourgeoise state dependent on exports of raw materials like oil. Looking at local politics from this point of view, one finds multiple contradictions both outside and inside the government. The government is an alliance of different forces, and the traditional forces are still very strong. The
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Ecuadorian government can be no more or no less trusted than governments and politicians in other countries. As an outsider, when one takes a close look at what is publicly reported there are recent hydro power loans of almost 8 billion dollars from China. There is also a high stakes tug of war with Chevron over present oil reserves in the famous Yassuni Basin and past problems of Chevrons pollution in Ecuador. A recent default on 3 billion in loans shut the country out of normal nancial markets. Having ambitious plans with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars at stake, the nations politicians have talked to a wide variety of potential backers. At rst this seemed quite troublesome, but as I have come to understand the origins and development of the FLOK project it is quite clear that the project itself is happening outside of and apart from the ongoing high stakes economic initiatives just mentioned. Lets go back then to the project which is being executed under the guidance of the FLOK Society. The project is to come up with 10 major policy papers to be written in English and translated into Spanish and disseminated broadly within Ecuador. The next step would be to gather together the authors of the papers and other invited experts from around the world into a weeklong conference in Quito where they would meet with Ecuadoran citizens and with national lawmakers from the National Assembly. In that environment they wll try to hammer out an overall program that this the Assembly would support and could be instantiated into policies that the sponsoring ministries would support as well. Michel Bauwens was invited on August 8, 2013 and signed on not long there after. The FLOK society website and program announcement went up on the web in September. Michel arrived in Quito in mid-September and stayed for about two weeks. ! During October he fullled obligations in Europe and returned again to Quito in early November where the entire project team Michel and six others John Restakis, George Dafermos, Janice Figueiredo, Jenny Torres, Paul Bouchard and Daniel Araya assembled. Paul returned to Canada in early 2014 while the others are still at work. For a snapshot of the situation see the March 22 interview with Michel on page 39 of this issue. The way the FLOK project has been put together as a peer-to-peer effort that crosses boundaries of the three Ecuadoran agencies that are more used to being run in a top down fashion. This has wound up creating some unanticipated budgetary difculties that have caused nancial hardships for the research team. Consequently, this has put the project approximately eight weeks behind its original schedule. As of this writing they appear to be resolved. As we are about to publish, the announcement of an April 1, 2014 seminar at IEAN is welcome conrmation of this resolution.
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Ren Ramrez as the Philosopher of Ecuadors Future

The one person who, more than any other, appears to be setting the public policy for the redirection of Ecuadoran society towards a humane post capitalist future is Rene Ramirez. The FLOK project has been built on the foundation of the agencies that he has either headed or been closely involved with. His is the voice of the basic populist ideas, principals and beliefs of the Correa Administration. Hiowever, let me only add that the over all situation seems to be far more complex with bitter disputes involving the question of oil extraction from Yasuni. Ramirez himself is the author of a paper on the plan published in
New Society Magazine of January-February 2012,. Alberto Acosta put forth his own ideas last September in the Guardian. Yvonne Baki has enjoyed both praise and criticism for her involvement with the politics of the Yasuni. Finally there was this that while deeply troubling does not in anyway invalidate the writings of Ramirez himself. Still, as the last days of March go by (3/17/14), there was this on the FLOK list from Abraham Heinemann - I have just joined this list, I am a research student in anthropology and conservation, at the University of Kent in the UK. I have been following this project and I have quite a general question I wanted to ask. How does the FLOK project fit into the striking contrast, if not contradiction, between the rhetoric of Ecuador's government and its appropriation of the concept of 'Buen Vivir' and its ongoing persecution of indigenous leaders opposed to development of oil in their lands in the Amazon and the increasingly violent repression of dissent: see, for example: (1) [repression of indigenous people t to drill for oil] and (2) Decree 016 forbidding NGOs from disagreeing with government policy. With this in mind, one is left wondering what kind of 'open-commons based knowledge society' Rafael Correa is envisioning? Governments generally don't run on "living well" and this concept seems like it may be a shield, the good face turned towards the public and the 'mal vivir' or the 'living not so well' hidden behind it. My questions are, does Buen Vivir already exist in any society, indigenous or not and if so what does it look like? Can Buen Vivir even exist at the high standards it promotes? Or Can/are these concepts be/ing used as a model for new development strategies that will provide a space where different ontologies can freely and openly interact and work together to raise the quality of life where old strategies have failed. In between the exploitation and abuse of these concepts, will it be possible to harness something good that may help people to start working in new and positive directions?
Apologies if these questions have been raised already and I have missed them :) COOK Report: Michels reply was certainly honest - which given the high wire from which the project found itself suspended at the end of March 2014, was about all he could say: Bauwens: as you intuited, these questions have been raised, in fact, it's probably the rst
thing people ask us, when we meet them rst <g>
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The most easy answer, which you may consider a copout is this: Ecuador, and its government is full of contradictions; the country is divided by various interests, and so is the government; some people want FLOK fully, others want it partially, and some are dead set against it. There are things we like, things we don't like on our side, but we are focusing on our project and cannot get involved politically in areas outside of our project. These imperfections and difculties would be the case nearly everywhere; as you probably realize, westerners do not live in a true democracy either What is interesting for me is that despite those contradictions, there are some forces willing to go in the direction of FLOK, and that very fact is a historic opportunity. We have no idea how many of our proposals will go through, but we're making a fair bet that some of them will be realized; at the same time, our work is the rst time in the history of mankind that an integrative transition program can even be worked out, and it has the potential to become a global open platform for this type of policy-making elsewhere Also positive is that we have been entirely free in our research and proposals. COOK Report: Thinking about my nearly full time work on the connectivity document that began on February 4 and has continued through the end of March I see two issues. First no restrictions placed. That is true. But I encountered an extreme reluctance to go on record with anything that could be seen as critical of the current situation. Second, the last paragraph at the end of page seven above is a real euphemism for the actual situation. I know many but likely not all of the details of what has happened. What the research team in Quito has experienced is extremely unpleasant to the extent that it, plus the additional information I have found out about the politics and governmental players mentioned in passing above, cannot help but color my views of the people involved. Nevertheless as they have asked me not to go beyond Michels statement to the FLOK mail list of March 4, I will respect their wishes. The list is private - but the archive is public. investigacion@listas.oksociety.org March 4, 8:35 AM
Dear researcher friends and colleagues, Apologies for sharing some personal details here but they are necessary to explain a situation which affects my continued engagement here. As some of you may know, most of the researchers here, including myself, are as yet not paid by our institution or the Ecuadorian government. This is not without causing all kinds of practical problems, especially for activist-researchers many of whom have a history of precarious income in the years before. However, in my case, I accepted a six-month contract here in Quito and a 12-week contract in Germany, on my capacity to send my family here for two months. I do not consider it acceptable to leave my children and family for nearly a whole year. I was planning to use my own income for this family priority. However, without payment, I cannot purchase the tickets and a last attempt to secure a loan in my home country of Thailand failed (as I'm not there to perform the necessary administrative checkups). Without a last minute loan from any supporting entity to purchase the tickets (we need Euro
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4,500), I will send in my resignation early next week, for departure March 31. The reason I make this public is indeed in the hope that the wider network might find a solution for this. I will of course focus my remaining time on finalizing the transition narrative; and even continue it afterwards, as FLOK remains my priority. The project remains a strategic priority for the p2p/ commons/flok movements as a whole, in my opinion, and certainly for me individually. On March 5 at 12:35 pm Michel announced a resolution: Dear friends, Apart from a speeding up of payment processes and a new funding round for the researchers from April to June. (I will let Daniel [Vasquez] confirm this.) A p2p-loan from the flok research team and project leaders will allow me to resolve the family issue I mentioned yesterday, This means I can stay on the project.
COOK Report: Definitely good news. But this should not have needed to have happened. However the old saying of the pioneers taking arrows in he back seems very relevant here. With this out of the way lets turn to Rene Ramirez as the good face.
According to Wikipedia Ren Ramrez Gallegos! (n.! Quito,! Ecuador, March 20, 1975) is the current Secretary of Higher Education Science and Technology and Innovation Ecuador, a position he has held since 2011.! The! Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation! is an organization that provides leadership in public policy in the eld of higher education, science, technology, innovation and ancestral knowledge.!Also, at present, is Chairman of Yachay, the City of Knowledge, and Chairman of!the Higher Education Council!(ESC)!.
[He] was National Secretary of Planning and Development SENPLADES between December 2008 and November 2011. During his tenure was devoted to the formulation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of the National Plan for Good Living (NDP) in coordination with the entire public sector. He was also Vice Chairman of National Planning Council, responsible for the Annual Investment Plan of the Government of Ecuador, responsible for the construction of the National Informa-
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tion System and coordinator of the reform process of the executive branch and the process of rationalization and decentralization ministries.
Good Living as the Wealth of Nations

COOK Report: To a very signicant extent the FLOK policy papers focus on how taking the ideas of the National Plans of 2009 and 2013 (the contents of which he had a major role in shaping and writing) might serve as a foundation on which the people of Ecuador can build a society founded on those ideals.
Concept of Good Living

Ramirez appears to take a fresh view of what exactly is the Wealth of Nations by stating that Good Living is based not only in having but also in being, do and feel: in living good
and living fully. If we consider that the definition of good living entails being aware that this is a complex, live, non-lineal concept; and that it is historically built, and as such is in a constant process of re-signification, then we can try to sketch what good living or sumak kawsay means: namely meeting basic needs, the achievement of a quality of dignified life and death, to love and be loved and the healthy blossoming of everyone, in peace and harmony with nature, in order to prolong indefinitely human cultures and biodiversity. Good living or sumak kawsay implies having time for contemplation, friendship, emancipation, the amplification of the possibilities of socialization as well as the amplification and flowering of real freedoms, opportunities, capacities and potentials for both individuals and collectives so they can allow simultaneously what society, territories, the diverse collective identities and everyone seen as human being/particular and universal collective at the same time cherish as object of a desirable life (both material and subjectively, without producing any kind of domination over another human being). The concept of Good Living force us to rebuild the public and the common to recognize, understand and value each other - and nature -, as diverse but equal, so the possibilty of reciprocity and mutual recognition can prosper, along with the viability of self realization and the construction of a shared social future. Translation by Jorge Andrs Delgado Ron and Source Ren Ramrez, (Good) Living as the wealth of nations, Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, 1st edition, 2012 Quito.
COOK Report: According then to Ramirez philosophy, You build an environment on which good living may be attained via good knowledge and the need for and definition of good knowledge is elucidated in toward intellectual independence.
Toward Intellectual Independence

Lets look then at his thinking in Hacia la independencia intellectual (Toward intellectual independence) that appeared in his blog in early January 2014. I am unaware of a good English translation. With thanks to Google Translate, some further edits on my part and the generous help of Emilio Velis, Industrial Engineer from San Salvador, El Salvador, associated with Open Hardware El Salvador/Fab lab El Salvador, here are a few of the ideas he expresses.
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First of all: What does it mean to build a knowledge-based economy? One of the central issues in the program of government investment in the economy is the range of choices that must be made between a focus on resources that are nite" or those that are "innite. That is, should a nation focus on physical and therefore nite resources or should it focus on building a knowledge-based economy, built on the human creativity and talent of its citizens? Natural resources are nite and perishable. Consequently, rather than depending on exports and imports, the nation should focus on knowledge-building because ideas, innovation, creativity and culture have a priori no real limits other than those of ethics. [emphasis COOK Rerport]. It was not by whim that the government gave so much importance to higher education and scientic education: scholarships, education credits, strengthening of universities, and technical and technological institutes, assessment and certication of universities, salary improvements for professors and researchers, the investment of almost a 2% of the GDP in higher education, the building and nancing of Yachai, Ikiam, Unae, Uniarte, etc. This set of reforms aim to create an academic and intellectual environment which is more favorable for the development of education, culture, science, critical thought and high-end knowledge. To guide a society, in this context, it is necessary to work on two systems: higher education and innovation. The Ecuadorian government, in over almost seven years has made signicant progress in the education system (although still much to do), but still has not yet built a system of social innovation. Secondly: What can be the components of this system of social innovation? The way in which innovation operates in a society depends, as always, on fundamental political choices. In advanced capitalist countries, innovation goes hand-in-hand with the monetary accumulation, the needs of large companies and multinationals. Universities and scientists attach themselves to these dynamics and eventually investigate according to particular interests (it may be true however, that in some cases this may end up helping broader interests). Indeed, the current rules of global trade have produced a perverse phenomenon: the "tragedy of the anti-commons." This has involved hyper-privatization by means of voracious patenting and the hyper-focusing of capital by institutions that fund research and innovation, all of which has generated a social underuse of good knowledge. To break this tragedy, to regain a sense of the public goods and to democratize access, and to create results from these assets is the core a social-knowledge economy and of the resulting system of social innovation. The ultimate goal of innovation should not be maximizing prot but the generation of an economy which will satisfy needs, ensure and enhance social rights, and to advance individual, collective, and territorial capabilities.
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In order to achieve said goals it is necessary to develop, as part of the social innovation system, the following subsystems: human skills, research, nancing and scientic/innovation infrastructure, and management of property rights. Specically those four subsystems offer a scope and integral treatment of the pathway followed for the generation of know-how and knowledge in a way that enables its free access and social use. As our third point: The President noted that the presented proposal involves a change in the approach of cognitive capitalism to what is called the "social knowledge economy." What are the main differences? Capitalism generally seeks to privatize everything, to commodify everything. If it could commodify the air, it would. (Actually I have already heard of rooms where people pay to breathe fresh air). However, one can argue that the true nature of knowledge lies in its character or condition as a public good: it cannot be excluded or rivaled as a private good. It is an innite resource that can be freely distributed very easily were there not any institutional barriers. For example, a book or software can be posted on the internet for all to make use of them. Notwithstanding how much a person uses it, there should not be, initially, any obstacles preventing its use by others. In addition, having no ad hoc barriers, there would be no way to exclude anyone from its availability and enjoyment. This is exactly the main point that it represents and therefore regulates a social knowledge economy. In the case of cognitive capitalism, it has put together a global regulatory regime that enables the privatization and commodication of good knowledge. This has been processed through the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Bilateral Investment Treaty and bilateral/multi-party trade agreements. It is obvious that industrialized countries seek these commercial systems of knowledge and technology, since they are the possessors of the knowledge. Meanwhile, for us in the South is reserved only the role of "being consumers" of science, creation and innovation that is accomplished in the North. Since Ecuador is a nation of late development, and by its ideological principles, its new knowledge management must seek to build an institutional framework to recover the sense of the public good and common knowledge. In other words, we not only propose to build an open, free and public system of knowledge because we believe that it is right to do so but because we need to do so at this historic moment in the country. We basically speak of a sovereign effort to break the historical and contemporary dependencies in the cognitive elds, and to programmatically change the production matrix and the industrialization processes associated with it. Let us recall, for example, that the U.S. had a quasi-open system of knowledge management during the early stages of their industrialization. The US only recognized national patents and
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not patents belonging to foreign companies. This position enabled them to freely copy their own technology. Other countries that have recently developed their industries, such as India, did not even accept the international regulation of the WTO until a few years ago, when its pharmaceutical industry had already well-developed generic drugs. The rulers of this country knew that if they accepted a proprietary intellectual property regime, they could not develop this industry, jeopardizing not only the manufacturing development of their country, but also the health of its population. Russia is another example of a country that only recently agreed to WTO rules. This implies that both the agreements we have signed internationally, and the new organic code of social knowledge economy will seek to build a system of intellectual property to develop creative activity and socioeconomic innovation. Such innovation must facilitate the transfer of technology and open knowledge and access to culture in order to break the cognitive dependency that we have suffered up to this point. We have clear awareness of our limitations as a small country we cannot change the international division of labor. However, we must not fall into that appeasement in which, as mentioned by the President, "we offered not only to wear the collar and bell but we graciously stuck out our head and neck in order to be given more bells. For example, if we were asked to recognize patents for 15 years, we offered to recognize them for 20! Our current national legislation even more restrictive than the international agreements we had signed. Therefore, we are developing a new law aimed at democratizing knowledge to be a good accessible to all and allowing the development of national industry. Nowadays, although we are given the option of keeping the current intellectual property system governing the use of seeds, there are agreements already signed by countries neighboring Ecuador to further deepen the ownership regime so as not to allow people to replant seeds that are purchased from abroad if they are patented. We must move away from such a perspective. Instead, we have to play with the exibilities that leave those conventions and obviously change the national intellectual property legislation. This legislation only demonstrates the subservience and subjugation of the elites who ruled us. These elites proved themselves to be the most outstanding students of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. Hopefully at some point as the Latin American region acting with southern countries of the world, we can agree on the need to re- negotiate collectively and jointly those agreements in world trade which are bonds of ignorance and under development. Until we reduce the technological, scientic and / or cognitive gaps, we will not be able to break the structural dependence to the wealthy North of this planet. Moreover, we must be clear that biodiversity cannot be patented. It is a heritage of this world, not to be confused with inventions that are generated from it. That is why the social knowledge economy, through its regulations, declares that biodiversity is treated as intangible heritage of the nation and the State, as pointed out by the Constitution. Likewise, we will protect the knowledge of native peoples through special sui generis schemes. These guidelines aim to
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prevent bio-piracy and to recognize, as appropriate, that such information belongs to Ecuadorians and /or our native peoples. We cannot allow corporations to steal our knowledge and then return to sell it back to us. For example, Epibatidine, a painkiller derived from our multicolor frog. The usefulness of this frog was only discovered through collective, ancestral knowledge of our people. However, it was exploited by international pharmaceuticals without any benets for our country and without the participation of our national researchers.
Likewise, the social knowledge economy considers the plurality of properties stipulated in the Constitution. Unlike cognitive capitalism that only recognizes private ownership of knowledge, what is sought in the socialism of good living is to take into account public, mixed, collective, republican and of course also privateownership, (i.e., a range of forms of intellectual property) and that its mode of production is mostly collaborative (in networks) with, and for society and humanity. We must remember that in this context, the Regulation of the Academic System was created for institutions of higher education, on which it promotes the creation of millions of knowledge networks, linking millions of brains. This is, to build social intellect, the collective intellect, and the general intellect. [Editors Note: See the New York Times article Garage Universities Are Bracing for School Reform. Only three universities in Ecuador give Ph.D.s and they grant a total of about 20 a year, according to Ren Ramrez, the government secretary of higher education, science, technology and innovation. This is the government website covering the reacreditation process.
If we really want to transform the productive matrix and emancipate socially, we must change the ways in which we have been managing and valuing knowledge and technology. The industrialization process sought by the Citizen Revolution needs legislation, as well as disaggregation and technology transfer dynamics that are usually hindered deliberately by holders of patents, technologies and knowledge through the agencies that ensure intellectual property rights. The motions of opposing voices will appear wanting to confuse the public by claiming that the new law seeks to discourage private sector investment when in fact it is the complete opposite, the utter opposite. The social knowledge economy seeks to protect the domestic industry so that it can develop through the elimination of costs related to non-free enjoyment of knowledge; costs that are in reality just barriers to its potential development. Perhaps the only group that will be harmed is the importers. But this agenda is a sovereign wager for the country. We prefer to generate industry in Ecuador and that employment and value be added in Ecuador. We also want to prevent a drain of foreign exchange abroad. Therefore, every businessman and entrepreneur who is involved in this proposal of industrialization will be supported. To illustrate and put into perspective, we can summarize by noting that while in cognitive capitalism is the most important banking is the "capitalist" one, in a social knowledge economy we speak of "banks of ideas" hotbed of the social innovation system. Also, while on the former the goal of any bank is the accumulation of capital, on the latter it is about the well-being of its people and of the entire planet.
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So what is the relationship between the change in the production model and the social knowledge economy? As mentioned above, a change in the production model implies a change in cognitive matrix. Personally I think that in the Southern countries there is a second neo-dependency theory that is far more deadly than the rst which was based on industrialized goods. This new unit is structured through knowledge, the mind-bill. The market and its visible hand, in this new phase of capitalism, makes for more planning: program obsolescence and deterioration of goods in the market. When you buy - for instance, a cell phone, usually the corporation that has manufactured it knows for how long the product will work, when will they offer their new product to consumers and when the newly-offered technology in the market will be deemed as obsolete. Ecuador currently imports hundreds of millions of dollars in technology. Therefore, unless we aim to be forever a banana republic, we sign international agreements and we have a legal framework to allow us to make technology transfers and breakdown of different products and services. We cannot, for example, allow them to sell equipment without including a repair manual, so that we must always purchase repair services abroad. Also, the intellectual property system must ensure that the process of patenting does not render impossible the systematic development of national industry. Not only does the basic proposed program of this government seek to change the production model in an isolated manner, but rather It is necessary to generate more and better jobs in Ecuador, to ensure that the greatest amount of value added stays in the country, that we do not leak brains, and that no currency is lost through the process of importing different goods that we could have made at home, effortlessly and long ago. To the above we must add that the dollarized system requires us to have this development strategy. For, in the medium term, failing to do so could put the current monetary system in Ecuador structurally at risk. The aforementioned change may not take place without having the State, as a collective action on behalf of all Ecuadorians, playing a strategic role to encourage scientic and technological research and rewarding investment in assets that are in the public interest to society, such as food, medicine or education aimed at strengthening technology processes. Finally, it should be noted that the investment Ecuador is doing and will continue to do on issues related to higher education, science, technology and innovation, plays a strategic role in the change of the production model. The economic effort in scholarships , educational loans, in universities and technical and technological institutes, in Yachay, in Ikiam [Amazon University], or in the Prometeo Program, would have little impact on the strategy of creating a new accumulation pattern for the country by not shifting from a intellectual property corporation system to a system that freely manages access to it. If the change in the production model sets its horizon on the innovation system, it would be truncated through the current property scheme or any force that deepens its perverse effects, given the high entry costs and institutional envel-
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opment of patents imposed by force in the global economy. In this case, investment in scholarships or in Yachay would bring about very little change in the production scheme. 5. How important is the socialism of good living to this new way of managing knowledge?
There are scholars from the ivory tower that would have us believe that you can separate the world of reason and ideas from the world of the material and political economy that exists globally. This not only demonstrates the lack of understanding of what is currently happening on our planet but the absence of political realism to find a real social transformation.
In cognitive capitalism, given the collapse of the traditional division between subject and object given the non-separability between mind and body, it becomes necessary to construct a system of subjects that within the mere production and reproduction of relations (language, feelings and knowledge) can emancipate individuals and thereby society. This has to be thought with much political pragmatism (since this is not about metaphysics!) and without losing on the horizon the sense of a new social order. The French philosopher Michel Foucault has argued that knowledge is power. There will be no possibility of disrupting the power if we dont argue on how knowledge is managed, and, it must be clear that in cognitive capitalism there exists supremacy of the capital above life. In other words, while in cognitive capitalism the goal is to maximize prots derived by knowledge by the agent that funds research, socialism of good living seeks to maximize the positive externalities (both tangible and intangible) of knowledge throughout society. For example, while for cognitive capitalism a drug should produce the greatest possible amount of dollars, for social knowledge economy, it should produce the greatest positive impact on the health of the population. Secondly, if we do not curb this power of cognitive capitalism it will perpetuate dependency ad innitum and thus the impossibility of making a real change in the country's productive matrix (with all that this implies) . Therefore, a more rapid transformation to overcome structural poverty and levels of socio-economic inequality would be unimaginable. Finally, we must realize that for both corporations and local elites the most effective strategy to maintain their power and domination is to keep the people in ignorance. At the heart of cognitive capitalism, through institutions that generate hyper privatization of intellectual property, it is sought that a privileged few who can afford it can have access to knowledge. Under the socialism of good living, the goal is that the individual becomes autonomous through free and democratic access to knowledge. Systems of (closed) market intellectual property help to keep the bondage of "ignorance", whereas the social knowledge economy seeks to liberate the individual and society by democratizing access and appropriation of generated knowledge. In other
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words, open knowledge becomes one more factor of production to be distributed throughout society. In this sense, within neoliberalism the panacea has been claimed (and still is) to build scal paradises. But on the other hand the socialism of good living the ideal territories are havens of open knowledge where people and ideas can move freely, where they can work collaboratively to solve problems that are of concern (and keep people awake at night!) to the community, and are able enjoy the art and culture without any restriction. We must be clear that the heart of the planned obsolescence of capitalism and #therefore#the dependence of our country lies in the limited capacity for knowledge generation (especially in Africa and Latin America). The new independence then is to build a system of non-capitalist knowledge generation, which is based on the needs and potential of our people and of all humanity. In this context, the construction of such a system is not only a material but imperative, but also a fundamental route toward our emancipation. That which is at stake, then, is not only freedom from ignorance but winning our second and nal independence!
COOK Report: When I asked John Restakis to explain what he intended for the following piece he replied: My piece on the social knowledge economy is really an attempt to dene what is meant by the term. I use Ramirez as a starting point for the essay and I extrapolate from what he has said, but the formulation of what social knowledge economy means is ultimately mine. I did not intend to paraphrase Ramirez.
Framing the FLOK Transition Project in Ecuador: why open knowledge is not enough by John Restakjis
In the current debate concerning the rise and consequences of cognitive capitalism, a new discourse is developing around the concept of a social knowledge economy. But what does a social knowledge economy mean and what are its implications for the ways in which a society and an economy are ordered? Cognitive capitalism refers to the process by which knowledge is privatized and then commodied as a means of generating new sources of prot for capital. The centralization and control of knowledge replaces the traditional processes of material production and commodity distribution as the driving force of capital accumulation. This process is sustained and extended through the complex and ever evolving web of patents, copyright laws, trade agreements, think tanks, and government and academic institutions that provide the legal, policy, and ideological frameworks that justify it. Above all, the privatization and commodication of knowledge is embedded in the values, organization and operation of the capitalist rm.
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A social knowledge economy is based on the opposite principle of knowledge conceived not as an instrument of commercial prot but as a social commons characterized by free and open access for the pursuit of social ends and what Rene Ramirez describes as good living. This pursuit of a social knowledge economy is at the heart of what Ramirez conceives as the key to transforming Ecuadors economy from one of dependence on the North and on multi-national corporations to one of increased autonomy and service to the common good through the transformative effect of freely accessible knowledge on the productive systems of the country. What is left unanswered is how the existing organizational and institutional structures of the economy help or hinder the power of knowledge to play the transformative role assigned to it. A key starting point for addressing this question is the premise that knowledge in a society its creation, utilization, and value is a construct that is conditioned by the social and economic forces that dene the power relations in a community. Knowledge has always been at the service of power. Cognitive capitalism, the process by which human knowledge is both privatized and commodied, is a consequence of the overwhelming domination and power of capitalist economic and social relations, and in particular, the undemocratic and privatized nature of economics, markets, and the organizational structure of rms. In previous ages knowledge was also controlled and monopolized, to the extent that it was possible, by king or church. Todays information technology, combined with global corporate power, has made such centralization and control far easier and far more extensive. If the organization and use of knowledge in a society is a reection of existing social, political and economic relations, the pursuit of a social knowledge economy must also entail a necessary re-visioning and re-aligning of social, political, and economic relations such that they, in turn, embody and reinforce the fundamental values and principles of what knowledge as a commons implies. How then, would a social knowledge economy operate in an overwhelmingly capitalist economy? Where is the social and economic space in which such an open and accessible knowledge commons could be accessed and made to work in the service of the broader community or for collective aims? Without viable and autonomous civic institutions committed to the idea of the commons and the production of social goods, open knowledge systems are subject to co-optation and ultimate commodication by capitalist rms as is currently the case with the internet itself. In short, the creation of a social knowledge economy in which knowledge is a conceived as a common resource in the service of collective benets requires the corresponding social and economic institutions that can utilize knowledge for the realization of these ends. The operation of a social knowledge economy depends on social and economic institutions that embody the same principles of commons values, mutualist aims, and free and open democratic association for the pursuit of social ends. A social knowledge economy ultimately rests on social economy values.
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And, just as cognitive capitalism depends on the manifold institutional supports supplied by government policy, legislation, free market ideology, and the collective power of rms and the institutions that serve them, so does a social knowledge economy require the corresponding civic and economic institutions that can support and safeguard the value of commons, of collective benet, of open and accessible markets, and of social control over capital as embodied in the structure of democratic enterprises, of peer-to-peer networks, of mutually supporting small and medium rms, and of civil society and the social economy. The identication of these institutions and of the public policies needed for their development and growth is the over arching aim of this research." COOK Report: I have been trying to get my mind wrapped around this (the FLOK research) for several months now. From reading Ramirezs Towards Intellectual Independence, it is clear that he wants a window on the ideas of the North. Yachay it seems is designed to be that wndow, although should the FLOK ideas be executed successfully, the window could be much wider than just Yachay,
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A Knowledge City to Enable a Social Knowledge Economy

Now one of the threads of thinking on the Ecuadoran side is desirability of creating a new university designed to function as a high-tech magnet to attract world ranked scholars into what is hoped will become a new Silicon Valley. Yachay is to be a knowledge city for Ecuador and for Latin America. Will it work? Not with Ecuadors current understanding of what the internet is all about,. Still the idea is important and intriguing. Between March 23 and 29 2013 CNET.com published a four part series on The Correa Administrations plans for Yachay.
CNET Editor's note: This is the final installment of a four-part series. Read part 1, "Plotting the next Silicon Valley -- you'll never guess where;" part 2, "New Silicon Valley in the Andes: Promise and paradox;" and part 3, "Riding shotgun with the man behind an Andean Silicon Valley Eric Mack, the author of the four part series wrote, in part four let's review the plan for Yachay, the name chosen for the Ecuadorian government's planned "City of Knowledge" already under construction at a rural location in the country's northern Andean highlands. It all starts with a
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university that Rene Ramirez, Ecuadorian minister of higher education, science, technology, and innovation, hopes will one day be on par with the likes of Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or the California Institute of Technology. "We want Yachay to be part of that international network of knowledge development, putting Ecuador in a good position globally," Ramirez told me when I visited him in Quito. Fortunately for Yachay, some of the other key players in that worldwide brain trust think it's a dream worth pursuing. That includes the California Institute of Technology, which is helping to design the plan that will be at the center of Yachay.
Ecuadorian-born CalTech professor Jose Andrade says Yachay is the best thing ever to come to his country. (Credit: CalTech)
"We're betting a lot on it, and I think the conditions are right," Jose Andrade, an associate professor in the engineering and applied sciences division at CalTech, told me over the phone. Andrade grew up in Ecuador until he left for college in the United States at age 18, and he never moved back permanently. Mack concluded the series: CalTech's Andrade suspects it will be ve years before the university begins to realize its full potential. Andrade told me it will likely take another decade or two beyond that point for the rest of the vision -- research centers, tech incubators, an industrial park, and surrounding cosmopolitan city -- to materialize. But he says it could be well worth the wait. COOK Report: On February 4, 2014 I was asked to write a policy paper of connectivity for Ecuador internally and to the rest of the world by Michel Bauwens and Jenny Torres. By then it had become very clear that Rene Ramirez was the political philosopher behind the program. Wanting to know more, I contacted Professor Andrade myself and on February 22 we spoke for almost 70 minutes. What he told me was quite consistent with the go slow and carefully approach that Mack relates. When we spoke it was almost a year after the CNET articles. He made clear that he was advising the Ecuadoran government that the country should build its
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brain power rst and the technology would follow. He mentioned that he had been helping to inventory the faculty at the countrys 13 National Institutes one of which was the IAEN one of the three sponsors of the FLOK project. My summary of our conversation (which he has reviewed) follows.
Jose Andrade on Yachay and Educational Policy

I spoke with Prof. Jose Andrade on Thursday evening February 22 my time I was scheduled for 30 minutes and we talked for almost 70. Prof. Andrade was extremely gracious. ! He asked me to explain whether I was just writing an ordinary article and I said that I would eventually be writing an article because I thought that the FLOK!project was one of the most favorable things happening in the entire world at this point in time that I was really behind its aims and goals. He said that he was aware of the project but of course not directly involved. I explained that it was a global group of experts including Ecuadorans in a cross section of peer-to-peer technologies that could be applied to building a sustainable open source economy that matched the framework of Minister Rene Ramirez's intended social knowledge economy. I told him that I had been asked by Michel Bauwens, the project direct and Jenny Torres, the leader of stream four technology to write a policy paper on how to achieve connectivity to the global Internet external to Ecuador and open and inexpensive broadband connectivity for the 90% of Ecuadorian citizens that the 2013 national plan aims to bring service to by 2017. I said that! I was recommending, with the knowledge and agreement of Michel and Jenny, building a high-end connection to something known as the Global Lambda Integrated Facility and that the act of doing this would connect the sharpest minds in Ecuador with the leading edge of the global scientic community. I explained why I thought that achieving this connectivity would be important for plans for Yachay, as a world leading university designed to appeal to top scientists from around the world, and especially for those whose research involves such things as climate change and the enormous biodiversity of the Yasunni area. Leading edge work in these and many other areas simply can no longer be done without access to ten gigabit pardoned plus optical networks. ! This is a new scientic fact of life to which his colleague in the CalTech Physics Department Harvey Newman, had shown during the decade he had spent in designing the global optical network for the Large Hadron Collider. I mentioned that I had been able to nd out almost nothing about plans for the application of technology at Yachay -- after all I asked him what his take was on these issues he said that of course there were conversations about having a supercomputer there. I asked if he was aware of much discussion if any about broadband connectivity to research and education networks
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around the world.! Mentioning for example that because of the GLIF, it would be highly useful to have that supercomputer connected to other programs backing up grid computing currently in existence on every continent save Antarctica.! It turned out that he was not aware of the GLIFsomething that did not surprise me because it's focus has almost nothing to do with mechanical engineering. But when I explained what the GLIF was and how it operated and how Brazil was connected at 10 Gb per second to the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, he immediately responded that he was impressed and thought it was something very much worthwhile looking into. I explained that in my opinion that top rated scientic researchers from around the world would not come to Yachay without access to the world's research and education networks by means of connectivity through the Glif because they might well not be able to risk what prolonged absence from this infrastructure would do their research careers. At this point he told me that in his work with Minister Ramirez and for the Ecuadorian government he had been advising that he saw a signicant need to work on the acquisition of brainpower before technology.! He had been looking at Ecuador's 13 Research Institutes in addition to examining its university structure and its promote program to attract PhD's from foreign countries to Ecuador and that he was nding a large shortfall in the number is of PhD's needed. He added that in looking at Yachay, he was recommending consideration of a campus residential environment that that threw students together 7 by 24 for four years or longer was missing at Ecuador's Universities and that he felt judging from his experience at Stanford and Cal Tech was very very important in educating students who would go on to become technology entrepreneurs.! At this point I asked him whether he was aware of any kind of technology time timetable for Yachay explaining that, if Minister Ramirez were ready to go the slow road and focus for a few years just on creating PhD's, it would be very helpful for me to know this. He responded that he was uncertain about the speed of adoption of technology but that it seemed to him that technology remained extremely popular among the decision-makers. So that if I had detected a bit of impatience, I might be right. I then explained how building an affordable broadband Internet to reach 90% of Ecuadorian society and the next three years would be very critical to the policy advice that the Flok program was putting together for Minister Ramirez and Pres. Correa. I told him that I was well aware of the three major organizations with a ber infrastructure. Privately owned Telco net and government owned CNT and Celec transelectric.! I added that as far as I could ascertain not one of these three companies was willing to sell anyone including Internet service providers in Ecuador an IRU. ! He said he was not aware of IRUs. This is certainly nothing for which I would blame him in any way because he is a research scientist and not involved in any way with network provision. When I explained what it was and how important it was for anyone who wanted to invest
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money to provide service within Ecuador because investing capital would demand that an investor know for a period of 15 to 25 years whether he would have access to ber and be able to choose the most cost-effective equipment with which to light that ber. !Without selling IRUs on local ber, Ecuador would be unlikely to get reinvestment it needed in network infrastructure. I asked if he had any idea why no one would allow that. He answered that he did not and recommended that I write as eloquently as I could and in some detail about how and why this was important. He said these are reasonable people and if you explain how this is in the national interest I think they will listen. I thanked him very much for his time and assured him that I would be in touch in the future
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Part Two: An Introduction to the FLOK Projects Substance

A Talk by Michel Bauwens at the Borders to Cross Conference in Amsterdam October 30, 2013 (On democratic innovation and civic driven
change. Highlighting 40 citizen driven initiatives from Europe and beyond.) In many countries in Latin America, the people in power, do not call themselves political parties anymore. Rather there are civic movements. There is a civic coalition in Ecuador. There is a social movement in Bolivia. And there is a kind of rejection of political parties in that part of the world because they are seen as representing narrow interest-based politics. Despite the reforms that have been ongoing in Ecuador for the past decade, it is still pretty much a neocolonial economy that exports raw materials. Right now this works well because the Chinese economy that is there to buy them. But at the same time it is structurally weak because they have to import high value added consumption and production goods from abroad. This leaves them facing a long-term problem of trying to figure out how to get out from under this dependency. The president Rafael Correa has declared some time ago that he wants Ecuador to become an open social knowledge, commons based society. And I have been lucky enough to be called in as research director for a project that will present to the legislature a series of policy suggestions as to how this my be achieved. So very briefly this is the process. We have five areas of change that we are going to study. The first is human capabilities how do people learn to share and cooperate and create commons together? As the foundation underlying this task and the four others. there is a productive matrix. For example farmers in Ecuador still use the traditional methods of farming. Very productive in terms of nutrition but very weak in terms of the economy. At high level, the question becomes whether or not we can make a neo-traditional economy emerge in Ecuador with the use of appropriate technologies when in Ecuador no one is making those technologies. For example, instead of relying on agribusiness, which is not interested in that kind of economy, could we develop an open. agricultural machining, commons where a global
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community of engineers could work together on developing these type of machines to be made locally in micro-factories? So that is the general idea. The second area focuses on understanding the kinds of commons building efforts needed to move forward. The third area is institutional innovation and the fourth category is open technological innovation, and number five is a physical commons focused on housing and transportation. This is organized by the Ministry of Knowledge and Talents of the planning office which belongs to the Ministry. I work more specifically for the Advanced Study Institute which has a contract with the Planning Ministry. So this is the process. We are researching the issues. We will hire 20 Ecuadorian and global experts who will produce 10 policy documents and then we will have an open source conference in March the President, members of the National Assembly, and civic leaders and the 20 experts will modify these documents and present the results to the National Assembly. Editors note: bureaucratic snafus delayed the project by about two months. The conference is presently scheduled to begin in Quito on may 26th.
Changing from a Feudal Hierarchical Relationship to One Based on a Participatory Commons

I want to explain here the framing of this project and it is a bit of a critique of what I have on the proceedings. My thesis is very short. Yes we have democracy and politics relatively speaking but as soon as we start to work, most of the time we are in a feudal hierarchical relationship. If you look at how value is created, you will see that we create value as a private person by renting out our labor. This is captured in the market. And frankly civil society, in my vision, is relegated to what we do when we are tired and come home.
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We see this in our language. We talk about nonprofits as if profits were first and we talk about nongovernmental as though government is first. So the vision and Ecuador is based on the fact that we see an emergent mode of production that we call commons oriented. First I will explain the logic that underlies peer production and then I will go back to the way in which it expresses itself in reality. If you look at open knowledge like Wikipedia and if you look at free software like Linux, and open source cars like Wikispeed and open source satellites like Argie sat, there is something common among all these. It is something that is quite different in terms of value creation compared to how we do it today. These systems are based on contributions. People create a common pool of knowledge, code or design. The use value comes from being deposited in a common pool and around that common pool you see an entrepreneurial coalition. You think about the Linux economy. There is an interesting report in the US called the Fair Use Economy. That estimates the value of the open knowledge economy to be one sixth of GDP.
Entrepreneurial Coalitions Create Value Atop the Commons

The entrepreneurial coalitions are companies that create value on top of the commons. Traditionally a for-profit company would actually destroy the Commons and enclose the commons. But now we have these paradoxical situations where a company like IBM actually co-creates and co-produces the Linux Commons along with the efforts of the contributory community. This is just to say that the use value is deposited in the commons and then there is a market economy that grows up around it. Now most of these projects are linked to a for benefit Association. Looking at Wikipedia for example, you have the Wikimedia Foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation enables and empowers the continuance of the collaboration. They do not command and control the production of the Wikipedia, but they make it possible. Most of these projects have foundations. Whether it's the Linux foundation or the Apache foundation, the bit coin foundation and so on. These projects then are governed by the foundations and the leap of faith that we are making is that this emerging mode of value creation comes in the shape of a commons based economy. And a commons economic and political system. This is the thesis that we defend.
what would a society look like that is already operating in the emerging mode of commons oriented peer production?
And therefore what we do is that we go from the micro economy where this is already operating to the macro economy. And we ask then what would a society look like that is already operating in the emerging mode of commons oriented peer production. Basically such a society would be centered around civil society which had already become productive. Contributors as citizens are creating common values together in many many fields.
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And we have seen this today and yesterday. In many talks we see this modality operating in an open participatory process where something is made that is universally made available to the community. Then we would have a market space. And what we try to do in Ecuador is to develop an ethical economy, a solidarity economy. Now you may ask what is the difference? Well think about the wikispeed open source car.
This is a car that was designed in three months by 80 people in a dozen countries where they actually design a new car every week as opposed to Detroit which needs five years to integrate an innovation. Detroit puts out a new car every year but, by the time innovation gets into a new car, it is five years old. The wikispeed car is designed for a micro-factory system. So basically they use a method of design called extreme manufacturing. With very rapid iterative development. It is organized in a modular fashion so that any car engineer in the world can contribute to the knowledge commons of wiki speed. Very interestingly the physical mode of production is also based on distributed means of production. It is based on the idea of micro-factories where using a combination of 3-D printing machines where you can assemble the car like a Lego and make it locally. So this is interesting thing for a country like Ecuador which lacks a number of industries.
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But here is a problem. Wikispeed does not find investors. Why? Because those with capital do not want to invest their capital in anything that is based on intellectually property free knowledge. This is true because the economy today is not based on production but rather based on financialization. Consequently we need other forms of an economy that can work with this kind of system. And then regarding the state, if you look at a for benefit Association and you see what the state does, we come to the concept of a partner state. What is a partner state? A partner state is a state form that enables and empowers autonomous social production. So what you did Frank with the Burning Man local festival was to enable and empower the autonomy of the civic field to actually produce something. So it is not privatization. It is not centralization but rather it is helping civil society to do something by itself on its own. We also use terms like the commonification of public services, of public commons partnerships instead of public-private partnerships to express this attitude. Now we do have a problem in that peer production is hyper productive. Whenever you have a situation where this kind of open eco system enters, the proprietary alternatives start to lose their dominance. Right now we have a paradox in that capital is much more eager to invest in peer production than to invest in alternatives. And the problem with that is crowd sourcing. Crowdsourcing is great. You expanded the input of knowledge and expertise from outside that which is held by your in group. So you have more innovation. But in this form of disaggregated input from the outside what you get is a minimum wage that is two dollars an hour. So the average wage of crowd sourced labor in the US is one fifth of the minimum wage. As a consequence operating under the conditions of financial capital this is a problem and this is something that we want to avoid.
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Broad Based Open Commons Need Feeding Mechanisms

This is a blueprint of what we are trying to do. So imagine a society where every sector would be governed or produced by an open commons. So you have an open education commons; you have an open science Commons; you have an open agricultural machining, and then you have a seed Commons and you have an open industrial sector Commons. If you want this, you need a feeding mechanism. For example you cannot have an open education commons, if you do not have open textbooks and open courseware. Therefore if you want to implement this vision, we need legislation and regulations that actually allow this to happen within Ecuadorian society. So how we do that? Just to give you a little anecdote a textbook used in school costs $70. They change two or three lines every year and, as soon as that happens, you have to buy a new one. Now the indigenous people cannot afford it. But they still buy it because of social status when they actually come to school with the older version people look down on them and they don't want that. So even the people without money are really impoverishing themselves by buying these proprietary textbooks. So you need open textbooks. You need open courseware and the like. If you wanted open science Commons, you need open access publishing rules. If you want a civic commons, you need open government data. I think you get the idea. So we are working on what kind of feeding mechanisms do we need to develop in order to attain such a commons based society. Then we need material and immaterial infrastructures. And very briefly I can give you an example of each. We need an Internet of energy. Like Jeremy Rifkin, and based on the same idea, we want to empower people to produce much energy as they can on their own local and neighborhood levels. And for that you need a smart grid. For example in Bangladesh and there are many villages now where you can see solar panels but there is no grid. You also need a smart grid that would allow this kind of bottom up sharing and exchange of energy production. If you want to make these of an agricultural machines you need micro-factories you need maker spaces; you need hacker spaces. You need co-working spaces so this is an example of the material infrastructure. Now let me give two examples of immaterial infrastructures. Capital does not want to invest in a project like WIKISPEED which produces a vehicle that is five times as fuel in the efficient as an industrial made car. Given global conditions, this is a crime basically. Continuing to make cars that are five times as polluting by virtue of the fuel they burn when you have the possibility of producing a card that requires only one fifth of the fuel presents a real problem especially in our current society that is plagued by ecological problems. How do you get investments that are relevant to this type of situation? We talk about open [source] venture funding. This is the kind of system that could allow such an investment to take place. Open value accounting becomes relevant to where you have an
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open contributory system and you want to avoid an outcome where only a few people capture the value of the new development and market value solely for their own benefit. You run into the situation where you have many people contributing to a common goal and only a few big companies capturing value built-up there in. Think about Facebook for example. 100% of the value comes from us. An empty platform is valueless. But we don't get any exchange value from Facebook. Effectively, it captures 100% of the exchange value. Open value accounting refers to various methods that are experimented with which to actually measure reward contributions to a system rather than labor and capital. This is what we are working on. And you may ask what does it have to do with democracy? Well to explain I will come back to the original idea. There are three players and the first player is the community. But the community of contributors is not democratic. It is based on open allocation and self aggregation. So where in this is the freedom? We may argue that it is an enormous increase in freedom, if people can choose their own tasks and choose their own jobs. This is I believe an advance for civilization, if we can achieve this on a wider scale.
Solidarity Co-ops
Consider the ethical economy. If we have a system which privileges the creation of new types of actors and to give you an example of one of the forms that I like, it is solidarity co-ops. This is a new form of co-ops that move from single stakeholder management to multi-stakeholder management. The goal here is to avoid a situation where workers coop and consumer co-ops are fighting each other. For example in Italy, you have social care co-ops that are funded by the government but they are managed by their user communities including the nurses the doctors, the hospitals and so on. The way forward would appear again to be multi-stakeholder governance and in Canada we find now that 98% of new co-ops are these multi-stakeholder co-op's. In South America many governments have these kinds of associations already. If you think about Brazil, they had a law on the solidarity co-ops and a law on complementary currencies and they are already enabling them to emerge. And so the second thing is for democracy that we have more market democratic entities. Now this is already happening. There is a little coffee company that wanted to make good coffee without exploiting its workers and being able to make a living from it. So this is what they do. Open logistics. Open accounting. Open research. Crowd funded retail expansion. And they hacked the espresso machine on top of it all. So this is a really new way of doing things.
Red Plenty as an Historical Comparison

Now let me conclude with a historical comparison. There is a fantastic book called Red Plenty. And most of you may not already know that the Russians invented the Internet. And then they killed it. And the book is about a debate in the 1960s inside the Communist
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Party of the Soviet Union about how to plan more efficiently. They invented such a system and then saw that it dramatically undercut the hierarchy on which their privileges pended and consequently they very quickly said we will kill it. In the 1970s when Allende came to power he talked with Stafford Beer a leading complexity theorist and together they created something called cybersyn. The first thing that Pinochet did was not sent his bombers to the presidential palace but to bomb cybersyn. Cybersyn was a system for open democratic participatory planning. It didn't work. It didn't have time to work. So what we are doing in Ecuador if you like, is taking up the thread because imagine this: If you have an open commons and you have an ethical coalition working around it, it becomes very easy to practice open accounting and open logistics and thereby pragmatically creating a system of mutual coordination. This is not planning and this is not the market. This is creating a new system. And so what I am suggesting is that instead of looking at the Lib Lab, this is the industrial system where we either privatize or we regulate. Where the only choice is state or private. That we work in a tri-archical way. We have the state. We have the civic society with the commons and we have the market with an ethical economy. We need to change all three at the same time and doing so will create a new democracy. Consequently, we can no longer just talk about democracy and ignore the fact that our state has been captured by financial interests. We have to do something structurally about that. We cannot have a democracy that is actually isolated from the situation in which d e m o cracy operates. T h a n k you
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The FLOK Project: Origins and Process

A Late March Interview with Michel Bauwens
The project started as a collaboration between Daniel Vasquez a Spanish hacker from the 15 May Movement and Carlos Prieto who was the Rector of the IEAN at the time. Last August they invited me to come to Quito for what looked like a really great and important project to create a social knowledge economy in Ecuador. Now maybe a few words about what made this connection possible and that I believe is the fallout from the wiki Sprint that we held in Barcelona on March 20 of last year. It was a global WikiSprint that connected over 500 individuals in 23 countries and 60 cities. It sought to map by means of a wiki P2P and Commons sharing initiatives in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking regions of the world. This created a new network that resulted in what I was doing becoming better known in the Spanish world than it had been before. A very active Spanish-language mail list also resulted and this list became the connection that led me to Ecuador. Now the first 10 days of the visit in late September were really great because of the coalescence of a great team of hackers with the full support of the University. Out of those 10 days I think we put together a really consistent strategic research plan which built on something that these hackers had already done. They had a 15 page document that was focused more on technology itself and a very good effort. But my vision has always been an integrative one which means that it broadens the project into one that looks at human capacities and innovation within institutions rather than just one focused only on technology. COOK Report: what was the sense of this time about government support and awareness of what you were doing? How far did it go? Bauwens. We were aware of the speech by Pres. Correa that he gave on behalf of free software on August 11 2013 at something called the Campus Party and we were aware of writings by Ren Ramirez in support of what he called the social knowledge economy. We assumed that this was an officially supported project. Now we are a bit more aware of the politics and opposition that exists to heading in this direction.. The second phase of our visit began in late October and lasted until the early days of December. That was a time of making it into a more practical projects that involved recruiting people. This was a fairly time-consuming process involving finding them seeing if they are available checking out the process of getting them a ticket to bring them to Ecuador. I recruited four people from the P2P network. We had one position that was more difficult namely that of open technical infrastructures. We were fortunate in finding Jenny Torres a young dynamic Ecuadorian woman with a brand-new PhD from the Sorbonne. But we also thought that there would be two teams -- the small foreign team and another one involv-
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ing Ecuadorians and other Latin Americans. And unfortunately because of the administrative project difficulties that cropped up this never happened. COOK Report: During this second stage from late October through early December you began to run into various administrative barriers and problems? Bauwens: Yes administratively it turned into a real problem. It was very difficult to find lodging arrangements and Internet connections and to complete necessary economic paperwork including contract signing. All this was very difficult. For example on the first go round my working visa was refused. While this may have a strange sound, I would prefer to place what happened to us in the following context. At the beginning of the 21st century there was in Ecuador a civic revolution against the excesses of the neoliberal regime that had dominated the country in the 80s and 90s and led to a hugely impoverished nation which in turn lead to hyperinflation unstable governments massive protests as well as uprisings by indigenous peoples. Out of this came a new progressive regime that wants to engage in some redistribution of wealth and build a state not enslaved to the global financial system. To achieve this they wanted a stronger state and to renew all the institutions of the country to impose real controls on the banking system and to develop a national planning process for the sound use of the nations wealth. So you have there a country with a progressive government but you also have all the contradictions from the old system remaining. As a result, the economy is still dominated by the global economic system to which the progressive government is opposed. This leaves, in my view, the country struggling to find a forward have that is either based on pragmatism or a more radical transformation. Does one go all the way forward based on the philosophy of the national plan that is a very radical document based on the transformation of the nations social structures using unproven social practices? So, although this vision is politically attractive, it is based on ideas for future change that will generate serious opposition. And then of course the opposing view is we have our current industries that we must protect our agriculture and to continue to grow economically we must preserve the old system that will continue to attract outside investment from the global capitalist system. Consequently there is a tension between the ideals expressed and the day-to-day practice. And this is not the case just for Ecuador but also for every country facing a similar situation. Dont forget that there is an example next-door Venezuela that is more radical and more unstable. And as far as the new difficulties that had entered in the first two months of 2014 I can just say that there has been a conflict in direction of the University - that is at IAEN - and the higher-ups in the government. As a result of one point it looked like the project might not continue because it had been defunded from April 1 through June. No one had been paid and as a result, after three months the researchers had all kinds of financial and family problems. There was a kind of paralysis resulting from the back-and-forth tussle between the old and new political forces that Ive just described. Around the beginning of March, Carlos Prieto, the original director of the project left his position and that action cleared things up. There was a renewed commitment combined with a refunding from April through June. As a result, we have gotten streamlined procedures and have received our first payments. And we had very strong signals from the new leadership at the
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University that they are with us and backing us. Jorge Forreiro is the new Rector. He has been deputized from Senescyt which is one of the chief sponsors of our effort. He is a columbian and is on the left of the party. He has worked closely with Ramirez and as a result of all of this we have renewed commitment to our work. COOK Report: And the role of the Coordinating Ministry for Human Talent? Bauwens: Guilieme Long ia the Coordinating Minister and Jorge Forreiro is his deputy.who does the actually day-to-day management of the institution. COOK Report: Starting from the fall then, how did you organize your work? Bauwens: We organized our work via four streams with four axes. You have civic versus science and global versus local. We have one stream and then that is global science and we look at the literature about these types of conditions. And second is local science so we work with a team from the University of Guaquil and they do Latin American open science textbooks. And we talked to people at the University in Loca in the very south of the country where they are doing biodiversity research in alliance with local people. They do renewable energy research based on photosynthesis of local plants. They are also working on the development of solar technology in order to become more independent of the need to import Chinese made solar panels. And then we talk international civics. For example this would be like talking to the EFF which is really the globally recognized digital civil rights organization. We talked to a group of people from Greece who developed the policy for distributed energy for the Syriza party Greece. This is global Civics for us. And then in the realm of local civics we talk to the local free software association. And then we organized 24 local workshops one in every province and each involve a sample of civic society the womens organizations, the youth organizations, the urban and rural social movements and we used a technique called theater of the oppressed in order to make it real and concrete And then we solicited input from the local people on how they see the ideas that are based on a social knowledge economy. The workshops were two days each and two people from each workshop are attending the summit at the end of May. The last one of these was held about three days ago and I have not yet read the report but what I have heard in comments is that the people in the urban environments are highly enthusiastic about the project while the people in the rural areas are distrustful of the idea of sharing because of their negative experiences with biopiracy. COOK Report: How are these carried out? couldve done this. I dont see how you are five person team
Bauwens: we used an organization called infordesario.ec. It is a coalition of about 20 ICT organizations that work with NGOs on digital literacy issues. COOK Report: said this was carried out as a kind of subcontract from within your budget?
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Bauwens: Yes and each of the members of the core research team attended at least one or more of these workshops in person. Now the second thing we good was using a connection locally with a group called diabluma. http://diablada-diabluma.blogspot.com/ It is a coalition of a urban and rural movements that critically support the government And is led by a man named Felipe Ogaz. While they try to be supportive, they are much more radical in general and their demands than what the government is actually doing. For example they are very much against oil extraction from Yasunni. These people organized three meetings for us divided among the three regions of Ecuador the coastal region; the Sierra or mountains; and the Amazon. Each of the research team members went to at least one of these meetings and mine is still planned in the future in the Afro Ecuadorian community in the Sierra region. What we do there is stay two or three days with these communities to look at their program and get a more realistic feel for what is going on in the rest of the country. Because, of course, living in Quito is not really representative of what people experience outside cities. Outside of the citys life is much more difficult. It would be like living in New York City and thinking that is representative of the United States in general.
Reasearch Plan
As research director I produced a general document which is really the theory of the transformation. In other words it answers why we are doing this. The document describes four possible technology regimes. Editors Note given Michels emphasis of the overriding importance of this material I have pasted it directly into this document immediately below. Further pointers to the transition narrative are found as live URLs on Page 48 below.
The Transition as a Global Issue in the Context of the Four Technology Regimes
Value regimes are more or less associated with technology regimes, since the forces at play want to protect their interests through the control of technological and media platforms, which encourage certain behaviours and logics, but discourage others. The powers over technological protocols and value-driven design decisions are used to create technological platforms that match proprietary interests. Thus, even as peer to peer technologies and networks are becoming ubiquitous, ostensibly similar p2p technologies have very different characteristics which lead to different models of value creation and distribution, and thus different social and technological behaviours. In networks, human behaviour can be subtly or not so subtly inuenced by design decisions and invisible protocols that are designed in the interest of the owners or managers of the platforms. The following graphic is organized around two axes, which determine at least four distinct possibilities. The rst top-down axis distinguishes centralized technological control (and a orientation towards globality) from distributed technological control (and a orientation towards localization); the horizontal axis
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distinguishes a for-prot orientation (where any social good is subsumed to the goal of shareholder prot), from forbenet orientations (where eventual prots are subsumed to the social goal). The four potential scenarios are discussed here:
Netarchical Capitalism as a technological regime: peer to peer front end, hierarchical back-end
Netarchical capitalism, the rst combination (upper-left quadrant), matches centralized control of a distributed infrastructure with an orientation towards the accumulation of capital. Netarchical capital is that fraction of capital which enables and empowers cooperation and P2P dynamics, but through proprietary platforms that are under centralized ownership and control. While individuals will share through these platforms, they have no control, governance or ownership over the design and the protocol of these networks/platforms, which are proprietary. For examples, think of Facebook or Google. Typically under conditions of netarchical capitalism, while sharers will directly create or share use value, the monetized exchange value will be realized by the owners of capital. While in the short term it is in the interest of shareholders or owners, this also creates a longer term value crisis for capital, since the value creators are not rewarded, and no longer have purchasing power to acquire the goods that are necessary for the functioning of the physical economy.
Distributed Capitalism as a technological regime: the commodication of everything

The second combination, (bottom-left quadrant) called distributed capitalism, matches distributed control but with a remaining focus on capital accumulation. The development of the P2P currency Bitcoin, the Kickstarter crowd funding platform, and the privately owned sharing platforms, are representative examples of these developments. Under this model, P2P infrastructures are designed in such a way as to allow the autonomy and participation of many players, who are allowed to interact without the classic intermediaries, but the main focus rests on prot-making. In Bitcoin, all the participating computers can produce the currency, thereby disintermediating large centralized banks. However, the focal point remains on trading and exchange through a currency designed for scarcity, and thus must be obtained through competition. The conscious deationary design of the currency insures a permanent increase in
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value, and thus encourages hoarding and speculation. On the other hand, Kickstarter functions as a reverse market with prepaid investment. Under these conditions, any Commons is a byproduct or an afterthought of the system, and personal motivations are driven by exchange, trade and prot. Many P2P developments can be seen within this context, striving for a more inclusionary distributed and participative capitalism. Though they can be considered as part of, say, an anti-systemic entrepreneurialism directed against the monopolies and predatory intermediaries, they retain the focus on prot making. Distribution, here, not meant locally though, as the vision is one of a virtual economy, where small players can have a global compact, and create global aggregations of small players. However, despite the ideals expressed by the political and social movements associated with such a model (such as anarcho-capitalism and Austrian economics), in practice, these dynamics inevitably lead to consolidation and concentration of capital.
Resilience Community Platforms Designed for Re-Localization

The following model associates distributed local control of technological platforms with a focus on the community or Commons, and aims to create resilience communities that can withstand the vagaries of an unstable global marketplace. (the bottom-right quadrant). The focus here is most often on relocalization and the re-creation of local community. It is often based on an expectation for a future marked by severe shortages of energy and resources, or in any case increased scarcity of energy and resources, and takes the form of lifeboat strategies. Initiatives like the Degrowth movement or the Transition Towns, a grassroots network of communities, can be seen in that context. In extreme forms, they are simple lifeboat strategies, aimed at the survival of small communities in the context of generalized chaos. What marks such initiatives is arguably the abandonment of the ambition of scale and the focus on strong and resilience local communities. Though global cooperation and web presence may exist, the focus remains on the local. Most often, political and social mobilization at scale is seen as not realistic, and doomed to failure. In the context of our prot-making versus Commons axis though, these projects are squarely aimed at generating community value. A generic critique of this model is that it does not generate counter-power or a counter-hegemony for the model, as the globalization of capital is not matched or kept in check by a counterforce of the same scale. Hence the need for a second alternative model, which also recognizes the importance of scale and pays attention to the dynamics of global power and governance.
The Global Commons Scenario as the desired alternative

The Global Commons approach (upper-right quadrant) is against the aforementioned focus on the local, focusing on the global Commons. Advocates and builders of this scenario argue that the Commons should be created for, and fought for, on a transnational global scale.Though production is distributed and therefore facilitated at the local level, the resulting micro-factories are considered as essentially networked on a global scale, proting from the mutualized global cooperation both on the design of the product, and on the improvement of the common machinery. Any distributed enterprise is seen in the context of transnational phyles, i.e. alliances of ethical enterprises that operate in solidarity around particular knowledge Commons, on a global
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and not simply local scale. Thus, though the production is local, the social, political and economic organization is global, and able to create a counter-power at that scale. In addition, political and social mobilization, on regional, national and transnational scale, is seen as part of the struggle for the transformation of institutions at every level of scale. Participating enterprises are vehicles for the commoners to sustain global Commons as well as their own livelihoods. This latter scenario does not take social regression as a given, and believes in sustainable abundance for the whole of humanity. END of Text by Michel Bauwens from the FLOK Wiki
Preparations for the Summit

COOK Report: Let me ask you about the purpose of the very detailed chart shown on the page above with all those inter-locking circles that is at the very end of the research plan.
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Bauwens: This chart explains how based on our work the summit will be organized Look at he big circle on the lefthand side. You have there basically a list of those who who are coming to the summit. You have the research team. Then you have the project workshops - two persons for each of the 24 workshops Then we have merit based external contributors who me invite. For example people from Greece who are experts in distributed energy, and then we have selected external contributors people for example like you who have been writing for us. Then we have a few high flyers like Larry Lessig or Yochai Benkler. Then you have the circle in the middle that intersects all the other circles. We have the foundation team; the coordination team; we have the institutional agreements. This is basically the administrative reality. COOK Report: I see a total of six groups of very small circles that presumably indicate individual people and I wonder are these groups representatives from the outside parallel processes that we have just summarized? Bauwens: Yes on the right side you see discussions during the summit. Such discussions will use nationally invited participants and then the regionally invited participants. The national participants are the workshop individuals and people from Ecuadorian civil society area and the regionally invited participants are people from Bolivia, Venezuela, and El Salvador -- the regions in which Ecuador operates. And when you see participatory workshops it says 200 so I think the people from the 24 two day workshops are grouped in that category. But I think the 200 may be a mistake. I think its probably only 48 that is to say those who attended the workshops.
April and May 2014

COOK Report: How would you describe and what will happen in April and May? Bauwens: it will be the consultation process About the policy papers. We will use an open source software called comment that allows people to make comments in detailed fashion. To insert paragraphs and phrases in the proposals. Its like an open source version of Google Docs. Now there will also be an open communication campaign within Ecuador: its organized by the communications team and I really dont know all the details. But there will be an official launch of the project this coming Wednesday, March 26. There will be about 200 people invited to IAEN - that is to our institution. There will be press and television and radio. We are working from a directory of journalists both local and abroad. The communications team who know what weve been doing will say to them if you want to make your own inputs look at the policy papers. And tell us whether you think they are good enough or if there are things that you want to change and what those things are. And so on.
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COOK Report: So this is an effort fan to open everything up to every Ecuadorian citizen who may be aware and interested and want to contribute his or her thoughts? Bauwens: Yes everyone is directed to the policy papers and are given a chance to participate and say what they think of the proposals so far. COOK Report: So where does it go after this. One of the reasons you have stuck it out in the midst of all the adversities that have come your way is that presumably you were not going to stop your involvement in this come the month of June? You will walk away with a comprehensive super detailed case study and the hopes that you have planted many seeds that will grow both within Ecuador and elsewhere? Bauwens: yes. There are three levels. And this is always been our backup position. We are foreigners who were invited to make proposals but we are not involved in the internal political processes of Ecuador. This is not our function. Our second position is that we are also writing this for the global P2P Commons movement. We want to show that there is a third way to achieve social change. The first might be referred to as the old position of the left wing and based on nationalization of various institutions. While the second way would be a continuation of the way things are with your liberal dominance vision of global capitalism and continued exploitation of the resources of the earth and its people. We see a third way that is a combination of shareable knowledge and sound ecological economics. The third way is based on a common school of knowledge, self-organized through contributory communities with an ethical economy around it and a partner state that does the organizing of this new system. The research plan located on the wiki all the way from section one through section 2.9 is the statement of these goals. This is my work. We talk about three regimes of capital. We talk about for technology regimes. We talk about a social knowledge economy and how to get there. We talk about cognitive capitalism versus an open comments based in knowledge society and about the socioeconomic implications of a social knowledge economy.. Let me conclude by fully stating our backup position. This is the first time that we will have obtained an integrated transition proposal on how a social knowledge economy may be achieved. It is never been done before. My hope is that this will be a reference document that people may react to as a much-needed third way to change our broken system. The second level is the policy level inside of Ecuador. This is where it gets complicated because you have to realize that we will make our proposal this April and then at the end of May we have the summit and then we are leaving. So our proposals will have to pass all of these policy and political hurdles that can act as potential roadblocks. This is a big unknown. We know that certain people in the government support this project. But how many? We really dont know. It is for the future to say how effective this will be. Maybe there will be a continuation of our project? We have already had some discussions that perhaps some of our team will
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stay on. I myself cannot do so because I have obligations to go elsewhere. become a long-term process, but right now no one knows.
Maybe we will
Further material that is summarized in his section is found in the FLOK Wiki via the following URLs:
2.2 Four Technology Regimes 2.2.1 Netarchical Capitalism as a technological regime: peer to peer front end, hierarchical backend 2.2.2 Distributed Capitalism as a technological regime: the commodication of everything 2.2.3 Resilience Community Platforms Designed for Re-Localization 2.2.4 The Global Commons Scenario as the desired alternative 2.3 Cognitive/Netarchical Capitalism vs. an Open-Commons based Knowledge Society 2.3.1 The Socio-Economic Implications of a Social Knowledge Economy 2.3.2 Discussion: IP and patents impede and slow down innovation 2.3.2.1 Intellectual property rights and their supposed role in cognitive capitalism ! 2.3.2.2 A synopsis of empirical evidence on the effect of exclusive intellectual property ! regimes on innovation and productivity 2.3.3 Discussion: the role of Indigenous Peoples and (Neo)Traditional Knowledge 2.3.3.1 Arguments for the specic role of (neo)-traditional knowledge and peoples in a ! social knowledge transition 2.3.3.2 The potential role of commons-based reciprocity licenses to protect traditional ! knowledge 2.3.4 Discussion: Gender Aspects 2.4 Introducing the new conguration between State, Civil Society and the Market 2.4.1 What can we learn from the already existing social knowledge economy 2.4.2 The new conguration 2.4.3 Why is this a post-capitalist scenario? 2.4.4 Discussion: The role of the capitalist sector 2.5 A description of the new triarchy of the Partner State, the Ethical Economy and a Commons-based Civil Society 2.5.1 The concept of the partner state and the commonication of public services 2.5.2 The Ethical Economy 2.5.2.1 Discussion: Material and Immaterial Infrastructural Requirements for the Ethical ! Economy 2.5.3 The Commons-Based Civil Society 2.6 Beyond the market, beyond planning"? 2.6.1 The key role of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses 2.6.2 Mutual coordination mechanisms in the new 'ethical' enterpreneurial coalitions: Cybersyn redux"? 2.7 The historical and present importance of mutualization in times of increasing resource scarcity 2.7.1 Discussion: The issue of eco-system sustainability 2.7.1.1 Why innovation should be located in open design communities ! 2.7.1.2 The role of 'idle-sourcing' and the sharing economy ! 2.8 A historical opportunity: The Convergence of Material/Technical P2P Infrastructures, Digital/ Immaterial Commons, and Commons-Oriented Governance and Ownership Models 2.9 Elements of Idealized and Integrative Full Transition Plan to a mature Social Knowledge Economy
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Part Three: Connectivity

for Ecuadors Scientists to Global R&E Networks and for its Citizens to each other and the Global Internet
Some Personal Editorial Observations
The process of attempting to compose the following draft policy paper has been one of the most frustrating tasks that I have ever undertaken. As far as I know I am the only one attempting this who is not actually in the country. Consequently I have been unable to relatively easily reach out to people directly involved as providers users or regulators and get answers. My assignment as laid out in a skype conversation with Jenny and Michel on February 4 was to take the dual track as outline in the above title. Knowing nothing about the local reality describe why the dual approach was needed for a social knowledge economy and described what had to be done in order to get there. I started this work on 4 February. By the 17th I was on my second complete draft and by the 22nd I found out that, because of internal project problems that the money budgeted for payment was not there. At that point I resolved that I would at least publish what I had done here in the next COOK Report. However by March 7 things were back on track and with strong encouragement from both Daniel Vasquez and Michel, I have continued the work. In part because of the internal chaos mentioned in passing above a skype session about any aspect of my work was out of the question. Instead instructions were find the 2011 national broadband plan and write a critical analysis. Never mind that it was all in spanish. Use google translate. Explain what must be done to get good access for people in the cities and do the same for the rural areas. That work included incorporating what was requested on March 11. This material was compiled as a result of the first extensive read through of my earlier work. Now one complaint was that my text was 10,000 words when about 6000 were preferable. Despite this the comments wanted both a separate background and introduction and a summary of parts covered later all of which made the work longer. When I introduced material on the Ecuador NAP by way of pointing out why bandwidth within the country was needlessly expensive I was told I need to write a sec 2014 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA ! PAGE 49
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tion on Internet peering (how networks connect to each other.) which explained why NAPs were good idea in the first place. No problem I did so. BUT what was already too long became 500 words longer. Getting needed direction has been very difficult because the people on scene in Ecuador have had their hands more than full. And an issue that did not pop up until March involved the need to follow a rigid format that I had been previously unaware of as well as a dramatic restriction in length. Virtually all communication has been by email and the most obvious way of getting direct real-time feedback from someone on the scene who really understands what is necessary has been missing. I have been sent the official invitation reproduced on the left of this page. I have been told that my presence is really desired -- something that I am flattered by and much appreciate. But at the same time I have been informed of an April 1 deadline the rigidity of which is not entirely clear. But I have made it clear myself that given other obligations I will not be able to deliver what is requested by April 1. The process of trying to accommodate requested corrections which I have done but which immediately results in length problems is frustrating. Ive been told to learn APA footnoting and use that when I have not written a footnote formally at least in four decades. It became clear that this was desired only when I have done thorough documentation by means of embedded links. There are sections required by the format that I would be happy to dispense with to get the length down. There are issues in the way I have phrased some of the policy statements. I realize that these are likely very valid but at this point Ive been unable to deal with them because of all the other details. The format issue is very much like the proverbial Procrustean bed. Make it fit no matter what. The team in Ecuador is doing phenomenal work. But given that I will apparently be expected to undergo open ended comment for the next six weeks or so and somehow answer those comments according to standards that are absolutely not clear to me makes the continuation of this process appear are like a kind of open ended black hole into which Im being sucked and because of continuing other issues of moving on to some work that actually will be paid for, I am unclear at this point in time whether I will be able to deliver a correct product. which was my last word regarding the conditions under which the attached invitation would be valid. I have been told that my airfare has been budgeted for but again even if I managed to survive the gauntlet between now and the end of May, I have some degree of concern about how the financial obligations on the Ecuadorian government will be handled. In other words will I really show up at the end of May in Quito? I dont know. This is a very frustrating process and one that it would be easier on my part to throw my hands up completely. Except that I very much hope the project will succeed and I certainly would
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very much like be to be able to make the visit to the summit and find out in person what happens.
Lessons learned
Here is the scope of work or approach that I thought we had agreed upon on February 4. I was to assume that Ecuador needed satisfactory conductivity to the world's research and education networks to enable it to participate as Brazil is doing in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility. Doing this means the availability of optical wavelengths of a minimum of 10 Gb per second connecting at least a handful Ecuador's top universities. The reason for doing this would be to give Ecuadorian researchers a window into the leading edge scientific research being done around the world. Do this and you enable Ecuadorian scholars to directly participate in such research. Achieving such connectivity serves as the best source of primary knowledge necessary for a social knowledge economy. After a period of months to a year or two, secondary knowledge in the form of lectures and publications can be obtained by means of ordinary broadband Internet connectivity. Depending on political or economic priorities, without the Glif, Ecuador could still do a lot to move in the direction of its goal of a social knowledge economy but it must understand that if it hopes to
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attract world renowned scholars to serve as faculty at a place like Yachay or the University of the Amazon, these scholars will not come, without the guarantee of direct access to the world's leading research and education networks by means of the Glif. Being cut off from access to such infrastructure would mean the end of their career. The second point is that, in order to function, the Commons that are being explained in the other policy papers must be well interconnected with symmetrical broadband at speeds of 5 Mb per second at a minimum - 10 to 20 being much better. This is very much achievable at very minimal cost if Ecuador makes the decision to enable the development and growth of the global free network movement within its borders. In effect it must begin to copy guifinet for this purpose. It can achieve this by adopting the network Commons license and taking the necessary steps to ensure that the guifinet wireless build out is able to achieve cost-effective benefits for the country by being able to interconnect with the points of presence of CNT and or CeLEC Transelectric in every Ecuadorian town and city where they exist. These issues are more basic if brevity is the primary criterion
This approach is absolutely in conformity with the ideas behind the national plans because it allows the members of Ecuadorian society the citizens group together and build their own communications infrastructure. All that is required is the willingness of the government to act as a partner state in concert with society to change some of the legal restrictions that allow the two nationally owned companies with solid fiber infrastructure to operate on behalf of the public good rather than continue to operate as phone companies while faithfully adhering to the standards of cognitive capitalism. Such standards will maintain centralized control of the network infrastructure and do so in such a way that will prevent all citizens from being able to take advantage of the cost reductions made available from the arrival of more effective technology. The actions of a partner state should be to combine with Ecuadorian civil society to understand and then set out to achieve what is possible for the good of all citizens - if the goal is understood to be civic well-being as opposed to corporate profit. To obtain the necessary understanding of the opportunities that I have just outlined there should be established as a civil society group within Ecuador an organization that would copy the functions of Brazil's Internet Steering Committee http://www.cgi.br/english/
Needed Basic Understanding via a Civil Society Based Internet Steering Committee
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An Ecuadorian Committee on Behalf of the Internet could function as a leading example of the third way. It would be a civil society group that is neither part of the government nor of private industry but instead composed of ordinary citizens who have dedicated themselves to understanding how these technologies work and what would be the most cost effective and beneficial application of them. The overall goal being building the basic infrastructure of communications within Ecuador and between Ecuador and the rest of the world on which depend the very possibility of ever building a society of good living made possible by the by the construction of a social knowledge economy. I realize now that there has been a disconnect that has prevented me from putting together useful material that meets the required length. I have the reasonable objective just described but I have also been asked to provide a critique and analysis of the government's current plans for extending the availability of broadband. The key missing element here is broadband or a broadband Internet and from what point of view? From the official policy point of view which is telephone company centric rather than internet centric. Or from the point of view of civil society as educated by an Ecuadorian Committee on Behalf of the Internet?? The original assumption that Ecuador should join the world's research and education networks by means of the Glif and that it should build out a guifinet to attain a world-class communications infrastructure is not viable without an understanding on the part of decision-makers of the difference between the telephone company and Internet centric views of the world. Without this understanding, asking for an analysis of the government's 2011 National Broadband plan makes no sense because it leads everyone into a discussion of the regulatory issues of things like authorization for services - a policy that in Ecuador is very backward and will necessarily reduce the very possibility of investment in broadband. It is also something that expands the scope of the original two pronged assignment and increases the length of the resulting paper. The government's plans are being made from a point of view that effectively will prevent the objectives of the kind of communications infrastructure just described from ever being achieved. Current National Broadband Plan policy and objectives focus on questions decided elsewhere in the world 10 to 20 years ago. One can discuss them, as I have done, but doing so muddies the overall picture and its solution. Not to mention that, yet again, it increases increases the length of the product. Having sections on access in the cities versus access in rural areas is not helpful because it ignores much more fundamental issues of the conditions under which any operator would invest capital in the first place, and it increases length. The same must be said for the section on peering and the explanation of the economics of internet exchange points.
Without Understanding Changing Issues of Regulatory Approach to Telco

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Networks When They Become Internet Ones, Arbitrary Length Requirements Render Understanding Impossible A policy paper of 6,000 words can explain these problems and make recommendations, but it cannot also explain both the history of the evolution of the problems and why they arose in the first place while still staying within 6000 words. The perception of research and education networks within Ecuador is that they are unwanted competition for the national phone company. To be polite this perception is extremely misguided. How to change it? IF an Ecuadorian Committee on Behalf of the Internet were created and allowed to conduct a serious educational campaign, it is possible that after a year or two the perceptions might change. In the meantime in order to build out new networks that are not copies of century-old telephone networks, one must understand the technology and economics behind fiber optics and the issues involved with the building of network physical infrastructure over what is called the last mile or the last kilometer to the home of the citizen-user. When one realizes the policy issues and economic issues that underlie this question, one will understand that for fiber especially that the issue is one of what is often referred to as a natural monopoly. In other words it is one where like roads and highways or water systems or electric systems it makes no sense to build parallel delivery systems to the end user. Government must step in and certainly any partner state government as opposed to a government that exists to support capitalist extraction of rents from network customers will do so. Understand this and one will grasp why, from a policy point of view, the issue of mandatory interconnection between networks; the issue of the unbundling last mile structure to permit its sharing between companies seeking to deliver services and, above all, the insistence that owners of dark fiber sell indefeasible rights of utilization on fiber strands to those who wish to put already existing infrastructure to socially valuable use. Having a system where cannot buy IRUs and where for the last mile there is no enforced unbundling to create a wholesale market for competitive delivery of services to the customer is to ensure the continuance of the dominance of the economic model that the FLOK programs are designed to replace.
Conclusion: Why a Desired Scenario Cannot be Arbitrarily Explained with Expectation of Any Useful Results
To conclude that if any progress is to be made one must understand that one cannot take a desired scenario of glif for the scientists; guifinet broadband for the citizens and explain (1) how that works elsewhere in the world, (2) how and why replicating it within Ecuador would be beneficial and be a valid means of achieving a social knowledge economy and (3) explaining the ways in which current government policies do or do not mesh with needed policies; (4) and critiquing plans for bringing Internet to the citizens as outlined in
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the 2011 national broadband plan a document that is unaware of the very existence of the possible desired scenario and (5) explaining how the Internet world works and connects in contrast to how the telephony world functions so that readers can understand the reasons for current policies and the (6) demonstrating why why current policies are not economically effective as means for achieving a social knowledge economy. (7) Topping all of this off with a primer on how Internet technologies work and why they are better than telephony technologies - doing all of this in 6000 words is not feasible especially when the length is now defined as number of pages involved in using 12 point Times New Roman type and where any map or diagram or charge added affects the arbitrary limits of pages apart form number of words and creates a situation when the addition of an illustration cannot be done even if the roughly 6000 word limit had been achieved. Never mind that all of the above must be presented while (8) an executive summary. background statement, introduction, footnotes and the bibliography are also required. All in 15 pages.
The Solution
Here is my conclusion and recommendation: one that would fit into 15 pages and that is very simple. Create the Civil Society organization to spread understanding of these issues within Ecuador and come back in two or three years time to address remaining concerns.
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Draft Policy Paper on Connectivity for the FLOK Project

Introduction
The premise of this policy paper on Connectivity is that the single most important component needed for the construction of a social knowledge economy in Ecuador is a national fabric of broadband infrastructure. Such infrastructure will function as the critical enabling component that underlies all the nations basic knowledge acquisition. (The political program of the Correa administration is based on two national plants. The first from 2009 2013 and the second from 2013 2017. ) These plans posit the building of a Society of Good Living based on a Social Knowledge Economy. Public infrastructure has long been a critical component of all nation states. During the 18th and 19th century, to support industrialization, nations found it necessary to construct systems of roads and highways as well as, in towns and cities, of any size water and sewage treatment plants. A general-purpose technology was defined as a basic level of infrastructure on which everything else depended. Roads, water and sewage systems were general purpose infrastructures of the 19th century. Electricity replaced their status as the general purpose technology of the in the early 20th century. Broadband infrastructure is generally understood to be the new general-purpose technology in the second decade of the 21st century. To attain the social knowledge economy that Ramirez advocates in his January 2014 essay Towards Intellectual Independence,, the Ecuadoran government must invest in the building of a world class telecommunication network based on fiber optic transmission where possible and wireless where not. The goal must be affordable Internet access for every Ecuadorian citizen. Such is the absolute prerequisite to the acquisition of the knowledge the nation needs to emancipate itself. The principal objective of Ecuador's national broadband plan is to "Improve the quality of life of Ecuadorians through use, introduction and appropriation of new information and communication technologies." Announced in November 2011, Ecuadors national digital strategy, has the goal of having Internet access in place for half of the countrys households by 2015, up from a current level of 29%. The 2013- 2017 National Plan has the goal of increasing Internet access in schools to 90.0%. [page 62.]
Ecuador has substantial fiber assets belonging to three different companies two of which the government owns. These companies are discussed in some detail below. Government policy could encourage these assets to be made available under conditions that would not harm them. Finally there is no organization, not even an NGO, that advocates internet understanding and use in Ecuador.. This needs to be changed.
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Background
Peering and Transit how thousands of networks become the global internet Ecuador has access to Internet. The problem is that it is much more expensive than necessary. To understand how to acquire Internet access at a price that could be as little as 10% of current prices we must understand how Internet bandwidth between nations and within a nation is delivered and priced. Networks interconnect with each other at Internet exchange points. Ecuador has had its own exchange point for more than a decade. An exchange point is housed in a secure building into which fiber optic cables and antennas for wireless transmission are brought. The exchange houses the network equipment of its service provider members. Their pieces of equipment --switches and routers primarily -- are placed in racks. The use of a few meters of fiber from the equipment rack of one provider to that of a second provider enables traffic from the network of the first provider to flow into and through the network of the second provider and vice versa.
At these exchange points networks privately negotiate conditions of interconnection. If they are of approximately equal size that is, if they send each other in equivalent amounts of traffic, they peer or interconnect without charge to each other. If they are of different sizes the smaller networks buy connectivity in the form of a certain quantity of bandwidth from the larger. This purchase of bandwidth is referred to as the purchase of transit that is the ability sending data across someone else's network and have that network deliver it anywhere in the world. Transit costs at major exchange points can be as cheap as a dollar per megabit per second. This is a very important subject with a complex history. It is the playing field on which ISPs have for the past 25 years pushed each other round as hey seek to gain economic advantage against a competitor. The document titled Internet Peering Impact on Network Architecture and Economics written by Brough Turner in March of 2014 should be read and understood by everyone involved in Ecuadors global and internal connectivity.
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These exchange points become exceptionally valuable because they can keep traffic local and get it from one part of the nation to another part without having to send it over a very expensive international link where it has to be sent back again using up very expensive international transit bandwidth in the process. New networks that want to send traffic to any distance have to operate by the purchase of transit from existing Internet service providers. The cost of that transit can vary enormously and to be anywhere from a dollar per megabit per second to $1000 per megabit per second or even more. The variation in cost depends on what the market will bear. Which in turn depends on and access to a nearby Internet exchange point and the amount of competition there. The Internet Society in November 2013 published a very valuable booklet called Connectivity In Latin American and the Caribbean, the Role of Exchange Points. ! NAP.EC was formed in 2001 in order to try to bring down high international transit costs. Formed originally by six ISPs to physical exchange points were established one in the city of Quito and the other in Guayaquil in 2007 the networks in the buildings in each city were directly connected by means of fiber and CNT the national carrier and other backbone networks joined. NAP.EC entered the mature stage of development a few years later with the joining of content providers such as Akamai and Google. While international transit costs are around $100 per megabit per second per month domestic transit is available for as little as one dollar per megabit per second per month. Access for Scientists Whether in the North or South, collaborative cooperative scientific research is being done mainly by research and education networks. These networks interconnect with each other by means of optical fiber
GLIF world map

and communicate with each other by means of separate colors of light or light' paths. In areas like particle physics, climate change research; life sciences, genomics and molecular design what is called
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enhanced science is being done increasingly openly. Cedia Ecuador's research and education network should be able to join what is referred to as the Global Lambda Integrated Facility via interconnection at Ecuadors nap to the increased capacity of the Pacific Caribbean undersea cable due to be turned on in June of this year. Membership in the GLIF is open to anyone who chooses to send people to any of its two meetings per year. Participation demands the possession of an optical network and the ability to connect that network to a growing series of Global Lightpath Exchanges. Over the past five or six years what has become operational is the ability to place software on a users workstation that will enable the user to dip in two the network and directly open a lightpath of a Gigabit or 10 Gb or even more as a direct circuit to the workstation or to the computing grid of another user located anywhere in the world and to do this, of course, in real time. Access for rural areas Bringing global Internet connectivity in rural areas will be difficult and expensive. It is not horribly expensive to bring a strand of fiber suspended from polls to a rural village. But getting connectivity the last kilometer to every individual home is another matter. Wireless will not work well. It depends on line of sight connectivity and foliage of any kind, let alone that of Amazon jungles will block the signal. The most cost-effective approach would be to enable an Ecuadorian version of guifi,net to build-out from a fiber connection at a CNT office in every small town. Such a network would be built in small steps from one house to the next by line of sight over a period of many months. Satellite is not an acceptable option. Again it signals would be blocked by foliage and the latency involved for the signal to travel from Earth to orbit and back would make the network connection useless for voice and anything beyond email or web browsing. However Mintel appears to have a very different view. As part of an important government program to eliminate digital illiteracy Hughes Technology in June 1012 announced the selection of Telconet to provide an HX System and broadband satellite terminals for the Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Society (Mintel) rural connectivity project in Ecuador. Access for citizens We may best define this by focusing on inhabitants of the nation's towns and cities. Right now this is being accomplished by commercial service providers such as CNT using DSL technology or by cable providers using docsis modems. In the future what is regarded as high cost can be driven down by policies that make it easier less expensive for people who wish to provide service to gain access to the network of CNT and those of the large cable modem providers. Unbundling access should not be allowed to remain bottled up at the regulator. It is remarkable that there is no multi stakeholder body that advocates for the development of the Internet in Ecuador. There is the NAP.EC which is run by an Organization known as AEPROVI "Ecuadorian Association of value-added providers and Internet It is very unfortunate that this organization did not evolve around the interests of internet traffic and the ways in which the nations large carriers could work together no make the provisioning of small scale Internet service economically feasible. In 2014 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA ! PAGE 59
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stead there were the phone companies acting as telcos and the cable tv companies acting as cablecos. No one was at the table on behalf of Internet as a source of knowledge. Brazil, Ecuadors giant neighbor has Comit Gestor da internet (CGi). It is a multistakeholder body. The Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) was created by Interministerial Ordinance 147 of May 31st, 1995, which was amended by Presidential Decree 4,829 of September 3rd, 2003, with the purpose of coordinating and integrating all Internet service initiatives in Brazil, as well as promoting technical quality, innovation and the dissemination of the services available. Advice from an Ecuadorian equivalent would be more productive in the long run than having some government committee request bids for the purchase of Hughes Satellite Systems technology for rural service. In future such an acquisition could start with a new Ecuadorian Internet steering committees input and recommendation as to the most cost effective way to use technology to solve the problem. Critique of capitalist models -The capitalist way of doing things With the financialization of northern hemisphere economies that began in the 1970s and rapidly accelerated in the 80s, what once was a public benefit infrastructural foundation for universal access to telecommunications at affordable prices has been totally overturned. The situation is a textbook case of what Minister Ramirez wants to lead the country away from. It is predatory -- meaning it is based on a duopoly either a telephone or a cable TV company. In 2012, due to the phone company's refusal to invest in the upgrading their networks to fiber, the last mile bandwidth battle has been won by the cable company which, with its docsis 3 protocol, can easily deliver 50 Mb per second up and 50 Mb per second down. In the absence of anything as fast from the telcos, broadband has effectively become a cableco mnopoly. In the United States none of the phone companies invested in advanced DSL and motivated entirely by return on income to shareholders when a horizon that extended out not further than the next 90 day reporting period. ADSL for all practical purposes capable of 25 Mb per second doesn't exist in the United States. The European Union with stronger regulatory apparatus has it better and while research and education networks in Europe do wonderful things ordinary citizens are forbidden to use them. Mobile service is used as a cash cow with exorbitantly priced contracts that bind customers to the company from which they choose service for periods of two or three years and with cell phones tightly locked to their customers contracted network, any kind of competition and reasonable prices are missing. The financialization of the economy and capture of the regulators have permitted the destruction of a vibrant industry of almost 10,000 separate Internet service providers in the United States to a situation where it has been: choose from a phone company or a cable TV company. Both with prices twice as high as in Europe and Japan. With no competition service is extremely poor and, for cable television, prices go ever hirer while mergers continue without cease. Comcast and Time Warner being the latest example. Because the content and delivery industry are vertically integrated, former rules enforcing common carriage with published tariffs or prices have been thrown out. The huge corporations are left free by means of so-called triple play packages where, if you would prefer just Internet and telephone but no television, the price that you would
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have to pay for Internet and telephone is almost as high as you are charged for all three. To make matters worse political lobbyists for the telephone and cable companies have been quite successful at passing laws that prevent towns and cities from competing with private sector usurpation of this most basic infrastructure by building their own fiber networks to deliver services to local citizens. The absurdity of the current situation in the United States is that local citizens and their local governments are prohibited from building their own telecommunications infrastructure because it is assumed that that is what the private sector will do. Under the neo-feudal rule of the 1% citizens must not be allowed to compete with global capital. Of course there's only one problem global capital builds only infrastructure from which you can by, whatever predatory means available, extract the maximum cost. Never mind the fact that to apply for a job today you are expected to do so over the Internet. If you cannot afford your home connection, go to the nearest local library and wait for an hour or two for the availability of a terminal. Alternative Models Case study 1: Brazil, Netherlands For connectivity to scientific research in the rich North, Ecuador has the example of the globe's research and education networks. They are not all of equal quality. The United States had one good one called National LambdaRail but it was put out of business by one called Internet2 where the resident expertise was in satisfying Washington DC's requirement for grant money and subsidizing the cost of university conductivity to the commercial net. In Europe Dante and Geant have had similar problems, while in the Netherlands Surfnet beginning in 1986 became the best in the world. In this very small and old European nation about the same physical size and population as Ecuador, pragmatic farseeing public servants put together over a period of more than 20 years a network designed to build a national knowledge infrastructure. The Netherlands found itself with the good fortune not of oil but with natural gas from fields that touched the Netherlands shore in the extreme northeastern part of the country. While up until about 2002 the nation was attempting to use the natural gas income to build physical infrastructure airports canals highways, a young woman who was a farseeing member of the Dutch legislature suggested that the country poor many millions of euros per year into Surfnet, its world leading optical network--- the goal being the building of a knowledge infrastructure. In collaboration with Canada. it adopted the Optical Border Gateway protocol which between roughly 1998 and 2008 it developed into the capability of circuit switching an optical wavelength ranging from a Gigabit to 10 Gb to 100 Gb per second directly from the laboratory of one researcher to the laboratory of another By means of the Global Lambda Integrated facility established in 2001 by Kees Neggers it's now retired founder it has created a global optical network attaching every continent including Latin America (Brazil). By means of grid computing the GLIF enables scientists in many fields of expertise to collaborate in the real-time manipulation of data sets using grids established for the purpose of such varying goals as research into cancer and climate change. BioSciences, biodiversity and pharmaceuticals are major ranges of exploration of what two or three years ago was known as e-science and now is referred to as enhanced science. The Netherlands has a new Center for Enhanced Science now in its third year. Its purpose is to provide software engineers knowledgeable in the areas of science being researched who can work directly
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with the scientists and creating algorithms to run directly on supercomputer architectures. Currently in South America only Brazil is a full participant in the GLIF and in what the north is describing as enhanced science or e-sience for short. Barriers to Ecuadorian participation at both levels (GLIF and e-science) are not insurmountable. E-Science is necessary because scientists must access and manage large amounts of data; because all researchers must become data-scientists, because of the increased complexity of research projects and finally because of the need to work effectively in larger teams with colleagues from multiple-disciplines and multiple-locations. Without an infrastructure that provides these, the administration's plans for Yachay as a world-class center for innovation will remain unrealized because leading scientists will not join a university that lacks the infrastructure necessary to support world class escience. The best over all view of what e-science is about is contained in the following presentation by Tony Hey VP Corporate research Microsoft: eScience, Semantic Computing and the Cloud Towards a Smart Cyber infrastructure for eScience Dr. Hey also recounts the extremely important progress being made towards open access in the publication of science research. In a series of detailed blog posts on France, Brazil and Latin America, China, Australia, and Germany, and in a separate and equally valuable series called A Journey to Open Access he describes the origins of and reasons for his own involvement. Included are chapters on the situation n the United Kingdom and the United States. The shear volume of literature detailed in these reposts emphasizes the importance of Ecuadoran internet connectivity to the globes scientific research. case study 2:"Gui.net guifi.net, begun in the farmlands about 80 km north of Barcelona a dozen years ago, has become the largest wireless network in the world. It is user built and most interesting from the point of view of the FLOK project, it is built on the premise that its infrastructure is a commons. It is legally structured so that the radios involved and their antennas belong to the communities in which they are placed by means of something called the Wireless Commons License. Originally it is built on a mesh network principal where, to connect to the network, all you have to do is connect to the nodes of your nearest neighbor provided you can place an antenna so that your radio can see his radio by line of sight. guifiNet however no longer likes being called a mesh network because it is using citizen laid optical fiber wherever possible. Fiber that is very cheaply imported from China and where small towns are very eager to make right-of-way available to connect to their citizens by fiber to the next town five or 10 km away In 2004 gfuifi.net filed paperwork with RIPE the European and Middle Eastern Internet routing Registry. This enabled it to be recognized as a telecommunications carrier and gained it legal rights of coexistence alongside Telefonica the same global capital company that owns one of Ecuador's commercial mobile systems and has an ownership stake in one of the undersea cables connecting Ecuador. It also gained guifi.net the ability to use the border Gateway protocol through the assignment of an Autonomous Systems Number and the ability two handout Internet protocol IPv4 and v6 blocks needed to route traffic through the network mesh.
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What guifi.net has built is a basic wireless TCP/IP infrastructure that is supplied and expanded by each radio added to the overall network and which then can be used to carry higher layer application traffic such as email and web services. It has enabled the growth of between 75 and 100 small companies called guifinet professionals that, for a monthly fee of a few dollars, will provide Internet related services to users who are too non-technical to provide their own. In addition to this situation the libraries of many small towns in Catalonia for a few hundred dollars per year buy commercial Internet connections to which citizens of the town can connect at no additional charge by means of establishing a simple network proxy. Guifi.net connects through international gateways in Barcelona. It is scrupulously neutral in its approach. It essentially runs infrastructure only and as long as its users are not breaking any laws, does not care what they do with their use of the network. Although the network commons license very carefully elaborates that a user may not use his or her access to the network in such a way as to harm the ability of other users to share in the common infrastructure. Another freenet project, similar to guifinet, is being built in Kansas City Missouri in an urban and very poor area serving people who can in no way begin to afford the $70 a month that Google wants for its gigabit fiber in the same city.
The Ecuadorian political and economic framework

Existing infrastructure Ecuador has three companies -- two owned by the government and one privately owned-- of national scope that are engaged in the provision of telecommunications services. This section describes these companies and their network assets. As the result of the existence of these companies, there are three large 10,000 kilometer plus fiber networks connecting all of the nations towns and cities. As all these networks are connected to the Ecuador NAP in Quito and Guayaquil they are well connected to each other and to international bandwidth. What is left is a last kilometer problem of connection to a home or business. Policy that implements unbundling and preferably structural separation into wholesale and retail services; as well as policy that mandates the sale of IRUs would make a major difference.
CELEC EP
Celec EP (Corporacin Elctrica del Ecuador - Celec EP) Ecuador's state power generation holding company Celec, which was created in February 2010, bringing together generators Hidropaute, Electroguayas, Termoesmeraldas, Termopichincha and Hidroagoyn along with transmission company Transelectric. Its telecommunications services are described here. This page describes services in effect for 25 years that are necessary essentially to monitor electric transmission. It explains that it has recently seen the need to deploy fiber as part of its telecommunications network. It adds that Taking advantage of the new legal framework and the introduction of competition, CELEC EP - entered the market TRANSELECTRIC Carrier Services of Ecuador. On the next page is a map of the fiber network
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Service Map of Fiber Network The March 2013 design paper for its new optical transport network is found here INTERNET Services: Accordomng to its website page: CELEC EP - TRANSELECTRIC offers its customers services "BROADBAND" which derives navigation High speed Internet, allowing access to technologies such as voice, video and data that require the transfer of large amounts of information. Among the many advantages are the ability to access a wide range of resources and products to meet the demand for reasonably access customer information. According to its tarrifs page E-1 Internet prices $113 a month.
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Portfolio of services offered.
Telco.Net
The second company is a private company called Telco net that has been in existence since the 1980s and serves primarily enterprise customers that is to say major Ecuadoran corporations and the offices of all multinational corporations doing business in the country. Since the company is private information about its activities; its customers; and its prices is scarce. It is said to have a 26% interest in the expansion of the Caribbean Pacific undersea cable. Given its clientele its ownership is very likely held by Wall Street The map of Telco.net is found below. Telconet is an all Cisco shop which means it is dependent on the proprietary technologies that Minister Ramirez would like to break free from. Here is what it says about itself in this respect. The Next Generation Network (NGN) of TELCONET is a communications platform that enables you to access " services from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps multiple lambdas. In every city where TELCONET operates it has Cisco certied " platform. In data transport services, TELCONET offers Cisco MPLS L2/L3 technology for urban and interurban links guaranteeing service quality and modernity to the network, additionally synchronous data channels Clear"Channel SDH formats (E1, DS3, STM1, STM16, STM64) and DWM formats (1 Gbps, 10 Gbps).
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Telconet has a subsidiary called Andinean Cable. Through this is it is said to have a 26% stake n the upgrade of PCCS the Pacific Caribbean Cable system to be complete in June of this year by Alcatels Submarine Networks The PCCS consists of Cable & Wireless Communications, Setar, Telconet, Telefonica Global Solutions and United Telecommunication Services (UTS) The cable lands in Manta Ecuador. In August 2013 Mintel announced Florida-Ecuador consortium PCCS cable, in the 3rd quarter of 2014 will improve by 160 times the internet capacity throughout Ecuador. According to Telconets web site The PCCS will be the main output of Ecuador to Internet content and with it, TELCONET will increase reliability of"communications and help reduce the risk of breakdown in communications. Within the possibilities of service offered by TELCONET's PCCS are the following:
[Sales] under IRU model. And Rental capabilities into various format 10G,,1G, STM16, and STM64.
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Note that this IRU model appears to be a new development. It appears that due very likely to the increased bandwidth capacity of the PCCS upgrade Telconet Management is now willing to sell international IRUs. One would hope that they expand to selling ones on their domestic routes as well.
CNT
CNT is Ecuador's national carrier. It is first and foremost basically a Telephone Company which like most fund companies is much better at giving voice and mobile service than Internet as a tour of its website compared to that of telco that quickly shows. The following two paragraphs are offer a concise summary of its history. It has plenty of fiber but is unwilling to sell IRUs. The very sophisticated data network enterprise related information on Telco.nets website is missing at CNT. CNT was formed on October 30, 2008, as the National Telecommunications Corporation, CNT SA by the merger of Andinatel SA and Pacifictel SA. Then on January 14, 2010, the CNT SA , became a public company, under the name of, CNT EP NATIONAL TELECOM CORPORATION . Finally, on July 30, 2010, the formation was completed with the acquisition of mobile phone company ALEGRO . Since the government owns CNT and Celec Transelectric, one would assume that it could exert influence in their behavior and especially in the prices they charge. Source of CNET map page 21 of Estrella paper on Sedia.
CNT advertises fast boy internet for 18 dollars a month very expensive for a county with an annual per capita income of less than $6000. The page calls the connection broadband and says downloads are unlimited but does not say anything about actual speeds delivered. The company has a nationwide presence with a fiber optic backbone of 10,000 km as depicted above. The fiber cable is installed underground throughout their ducts in ring configurations to provide network reliability. The backbone is provisioned with DWDM technology, with a total maximum capacity of 192 (10Gbps) lambdas. The company manages an IP/MPLS network with traffic engineering (TE). The access network is based on both wired and wireless connections as high as 10Gbps. The company
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manages wired technologies using DSL families. The residential circuits are asymmetric and have a minimum bandwidth of 600/250 kbps with an over-subscription rate of 8:1, and Fiber to the Home with Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) technology with 100/1000 Mbps speeds. Source: Estrellas paper page 20. My efforts to find this information on CNTs current site were unsuccessful.
Transparency
Given the challenge of the internet, it is not surprising that CNT s reaction is one of protecting their "turf". This means that there will be a natural reluctance to unbundle infrastructure and support. Not surprisingly the tendency has been one that tends to maintain the status quo with CNT in complete charge of its network infrastructure. When SEDIA went out for backbone service, the nation's laws required a public bid. However they did not require that the price and terms of the bids be made public. That was a fatal flaw. Level (3), Telefonica and CLEC Trans- electric could have bid and did not. We need to understand why.
CEDIA The Ecuadoran University Network necessary for global connectivity to Collaborative Science
CEDIA Network Map In 2012, with CNT as the only other bidder Telco.net, won a ten year contract to provide service. From Telconets web site we read: The Advanced Academic Network of Ecuador (CEDIA Network) operates over TELCONET NGN, linking major universities, polytechnic Institutes science and technology or 2014 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA ! PAGE 68
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ganizations in the country with fiber optic platforms whose capabilities are exclusive to this network with 1 Gbps capacity. It has been difficult to find detailed and up to date information about CEDIA. A very detailed paper was completed by Deigo Estrella while in a masters degree program at the University of Maryland in August of 2011. As of 2011 CEDIA has had no direct government funding. [Editors Note: To download click view/open at the very bottom of this page.] In early 2014 the situation is unchanged.] Also as of early 2014 it connects 30 of the nations 57 universities. Cedia is also responsible for purchasing access to the commercial internet for all its members, a task that currently requires 8 Gbs per second connectivity. It doies not want to function as an ISP because of the admnistrative burdens that would entail. According to its Executive Director Juan Pablo Carvallo, CEDIA is building a one gigabit per second fiber ring to connect all its members. With its peers in RedCLARA, it is working in a project to connect Ecuador with a 60 Gb capacity link to Lisbon in Portugal, through an trans-Atlantic cable being deployed by TELEBRAS and some of its partners. The 185 million dollar TELEBRAS project is expected to begin in the first half of this year and be completed with 18 months. The RedCLARA project is being complemented with a new segment of the RedCLARA South American ring, connecting Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, with an expected capacity of 40 lambdas of 100Gb. each. The project will be partially financed by the UE, [EAN University: Academic interconnected High Speed Networks] in addition to the contributions of the partner national networks. Also according to Dr Carvallo Currently we are seeking for the capital required to complete the Ecuadorian contribution to the project, and we have already talked to SENESCYT, YACHAY and the Ecuadorian Telecom Ministry, which have expressed the interest in the project. The CEDIA budget for 2014 is about $4,500,000.00. 70% of this budget is used to pay for infrastructure to local operators and RedCLARA. The remaining is used to finance research projects, researchers and technicians training, and enhance our infrastructure (supercomputer, cloud, etc.). Earlier in email he also said: The main problem in Ecuador has been the difficulty to identify suppliers of dark fiber willing to support the project. CNT, the national telecom company has simply stated that they are not interested, which has forced us to rely on private national telecom companies, mainly Telconet. he later pointed outt that the contact with CNT regarding the Ecuadorian segment was made by Red CLARA directly. We are aware of this outcome because RedCLARA provided this information [that CNT was mot interested] after the feasibility study was conducted. !"##"$%&'"())*+',")-"./01!"2'3456'2"52"%4%5+%(+'"7'3' Ecuador has 13 National Institutes that do things like cartography for the country and as is the case IAEN train public servants. IEAN is a member of CEDIA from where it gets its internet connectivity. The institutes are listed here. Juan Pablo added in clarification: IEAN is a member but we are negotiating its access to Internet through CEDIA beginning in April 2014. Currently INOCAR is the only institute member of CEDIA receiving Internet from us.
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Note that on the map below shows CEDIAs current Internet2 connection than runs on a spur from Santiago Chile, goes through Peru and ends up in Ecuador at a rater of 622 mgbs or the equivalent of fout STM 1s. Note also that to participate in the GLIF via a link from Brazil it will need a minimum link of one giga bit per second.
The source of the above map is found here. Editors Note: As far as I can tell, anyone involved with Mintel or SuperTel has a telco centric non 2014 COOK NETWORK CONSULTANTS 431 GREENWAY AVE. EWING, NJ 08618-2711 USA ! PAGE 70
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Internet outlook view of the world and absolutely no understanding whatsoever of the significance of the research and education network world. They seem to be moving against setting up an adequate foundation for CEDIA regarding it as very much unwanted competition to CNT. I found one document, a PDF regulation in Spanish that I was told encompassed a regulation that any publicly funded educational institution wanting Internet connectivity could use public money to purchase at least half of that connectivity only from a public company which in this case would be CNT the national carrier. Never mind that the price paid would be several times higher. The document is found here and the relevant article is Article 1 on page 15. Until someone in power makes it clear that the nations Public Interest demands radical adjustment of CNT's prices, there is little reason to think that enough people in Ecuador will have affordable access to the knowledge from the wealthy North that Minister Ramirez very rightly understands the importance of. Forget about the 25 universities that were members of CEDIA in 2011. There is an even more serious gap in understanding that must be bridged. If Yachay and Inkiam the Unversity of the Amazon, and Uniartes: the University of the Arts and UNAE: National Education University, are Minister Ramirez major projects for world class education, Then these institutions should have world class broadband attachments. The infrastructure from which connections can be built there is but affordable prices are not. Solve the problem for CEDIA without subsuming CEDIA into a public oirganization that gives the government complete control over it and you will solve it for them. You will do so because you will have created nfrastructure to which they all can be cost effectively attached.
Current Situation Regarding Broadband Access

Current broadband Internet access is provided by commercial ISPs. It seems that the regulator exerts an approach that appears to create more categories of service providers than would be desirable for achieving the most economically efficient service to the most users, ISPs -- 198 entities have registered as ISPs. As of March 2013, in reality the number of serious suppliers to the market appears to be quite small. The top six providers have 93% of the market and the top 3 82%. Fixed broadband internet market is divided into CNT (54%), followed by TVCable (16%) and Claro (12%). Etapa a municipal network in Ecuadors third largest city Cuenica was in fourth position, with a 5% share, while Megadatos and Punto Net occupied the fifth and sixth place with respectively 3% each. Cyber cafes and telecenters are a separate legal category from ISP 2235 cybercafes offering VoIP as well as Internet were also registered as of March 2013. (Budde.com p. 15) (In December 2013 according to Supertel, telecompaper claimed 3.4 million smartphone users) mobile phone users were receiving mobile internet service. As opposed to our first category of high bandwidth requiring scientists, it seems reasonable to include in this second category citizens to be served all those living within Ecuadorian cities and towns that have CNT points of presence. However in theory towns with Teleco.net or Celec Transelectric pops,
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(according to the maps of the pops of the three networks shown above, more than 100 towns and cities) presumably match these qualifications.
Policies to Assist the National Broadband Plan and Strategies for Expanding Internet Use
Policy Goals of the Broadband Plan and the Three Basic Strategies
The 2013 to 2017 national plan merely specifies a goal of 90% of Ecuadorian schools connected to the Internet by 2017. <page 62> The 2011 national broadband plan posits a similar objective to be achieved by means of the three strategies but does very little to fill in any details. STRATEGY ONE -- The following strategies come from the above cited document. The first overall strategy of the national broadband plan namely to ensure competition by "establish[ing] mandatory sharing the physical infrastructure of telecommunications networks." This can and should start with mandatory interconnection for all network providers. But it should also be extended to the unbundling of network infrastructure at a wholesale level for use by separate Internet service providers. And most significant of all, it could include what is known as structural separation. Namely the formation of a company in control of last kilometer whose sole purpose is to sell wholesale access to that infrastructure to companies which wish to compete in the provision of services for the so-called last kilometer. The most certain way of achieving this is for legislators to require publicly owned company's in this case CNT and Celec Transelectric to sell indefeasible rights of utilization on strands of dark fiber within their networks to those who wish to purchase them. STRATEGY TWO --The second strategy of the broadband plan to "Promote the granting of authorization convergent certificates and encourage price reductions in Broadband service" will depend on reductions achieved in the cost of delivering service. In this case the regulator is Supertel. http://www.supertel.gob.ec/ Convergent certificate should mean you may provide internet service, where this is defined as any data service, using any legal software that runs on a TCP/IP stack. Also that should mean how you do it or what you do with it is up to you. [NOTE that so far I cannot find the direct cite in the Spanish language on the web site.] However this also means that under the current way of doing things is that the would-be service provider must get permission for fixed internet to homes and business. But that someone who wants to expand the economy by offering a new business service of internet to smart phones must go through another authorization process for providing internet via mobile service. Or someone else will face the need for another authorization for service to cyber cafes, yet another for telecenters. And so on. Here is a serious problem. Think up a new service to provide using TCP/IP and run the risk of legal trouble if it is determined to be unauthorized. Apparently Supertel has separate authorization for every
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kind of imaginable internet service. Not surprisingly this creates regulatory uncertainty for anyone who wants to offer service. Lets say that I get what I believe is the necessary certificate but what if a competitor complains to Supertel that I am doing something that my authorization certificate does not permit? Can I be put out of business? Do I need separate certificates to offer wireline service wireless service and voice over IP mobile and a second one for fixed? But Voice over IP service is rapidly evolving and is beginning to depend on the USE of the SIP protocol. If I want to use SIP in my VoIP service do I have to get a separate certificate authorizing me to do that? If one wants according to the third of the three strategies listed to encourage the new deployment of broadband infrastructure in underserved areas, there is no better course of action to take than IRUs.
Substance or a Numbers Game?

As the following paragraphs will show, he regulatory regime is complex and not transparent. Ecuador's Superintendence of Telecommunications (Supertel) said that last year, 27 operators obtained permission to provide internet services in the country. The new providers started operations in the provinces of Azuay, Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, El Oro, Esmeraldas, Guayas, Imbabura, Loja, Manab, Pichincha, Sucumbos and Zamora Chinchipe. Supertel also conducted audits of 37 new ISPs that obtained their permits between the second half of 2012 and the first half of 2013. This appeared as a short article on the Telecom paper website on February 22, 2014. It begs the following kinds of questions: To whom were the licenses issued? What individuals or what companies? What coverage was promised? Where are these companies going to get their bandwidth? According to budde.com in late 2013 the regulator shut down Univisa in Cuenca and Azogues for delivering services in areas where it was not licensed Therefore even if you could buy an IRU on dark fiber, unless you used the IRU for private purposes, the current process of Service authorization creates a situation where the government regulator can look at what you are doing with the network and if you are doing something it does not like, it could tell you to stop or worse shut you down. POLICY Recommendation: The idea for convergent certificates of authorization is excellent. Instead of certification for each kind of service offered, let's just have one certification for internet service. These changes were proposed in the summer of 2011. It is now spring of 2014. Have they been made? Unless these changes been put into operation, it can make other good policies like selling IRUs of dubious value.
STRATEGY THREE -- Encourage the new deployment of broadband infrastructure in underserved

areas by enabling the selling of IRUs
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Doing this enables the organization that wishes to provide service to gain control over the physical media necessary for such provision at a known cost for a period of usually between 15 and 20 years. By this action the motivation to very carefully plan how to light the fiber on which ones service depends is put directly into the hands of the people involved in providing the new service. If one wants according to the third of the three strategies listed to encourage the new deployment of broadband infrastructure in underserved areas, there is no better course of action to take. We must understand that without doing this, the current owners of fiber have no incentive to cut prices or extend access. The telco mindset says to them never give access to fiber which, once you have it, is an almost infinite resource to those outside your company. The prices charged by those operating as telephone companies are always about an order of magnitude and sometimes more than the cost of delivery. Until this mindset is overturned, the market for Internet services in the areas of: "public education, healthcare and e-government" will remain needlessly small. In areas of mobile service Ecuador has embraced foreign entry into its markets. As a result mobile penetration exceeds 120% of the population. However foreign-owned companies currently enjoy the majority of market share. They appear to have insufficient motivation to provide good service as they have been continually cited by the Ecuadorian regulator for failing to deliver service to required standards. Insistence on cost effective opening of the existing fiber infrastructure via IRUs should enable new market entrants to provide much better service in the mobile area. One would hope that the regulator would be given the ability to demand hearings on pricing and inter connection policy. What relationship does price have to actual costs?
Reasonably priced and accessible Internet service in Ecuador will not be available anytime soon because of the following problems.
Licensing for an Internet service provider is an insecure cumbersome process where virtually every field of activity requires a separate license. Roughly 200 ISP licenses exist in the country with the six largest having 93% of the market. I have been able to find no information about the remaining 192. Why anyone would apply for a license to serve a truly miniscule number of people it's baffling. Note further that such licenses do not encompass Internet cafs of which there are approximately 2000. Regulations requiring CNT to unbundle access to its network exist but are apparently stopped somewhere inside the bureaucratic workings of Supertel. Without very public well-enforced rules for interconnection and tarrifed prices it is impossible to see how meaningful competition to CNT will develop. However the most important obstacle to everything is that in an advanced forward-looking country like Ecuador there is this far as I have been able to determine no owner of dark or unlit fiber who is willing to sell any customer something known as an it should have been able to run the carrier ethernet on a dark fiber pair over a specific geographic footprint for a period of time that normally ranges between 15 to 20 to 25 years.
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Such business practices are standard throughout the countries of the North and as far as I can determine in most countries of Latin America.. Yet not one of the three fiber rich telecommunication companies two of which are owned by the government in Ecuador is willing to sell an IRU. IRUs are not dirt cheap. Nor are their prices transparent. I would guess that an IRU on a fiber pair on the national footprint of one of these three companies for a period of 20 years might cost between one and $2 million. In addition to this cost there would be an annual charge that would cover physical maintenance of the fiber pair the housing of the equipment used to light it and the electricity required to keep it lit and run the equipment. Again while this is only a guess that annual fee might be in the neighborhood of $50,000 a year for an IRU covering the entire national footprint of one of these three companies. It is vitally important to realize what this permits. Namely it makes it possible for the purchaser choose the equipment that he or she will use to light the fiber equipment which is becoming more powerful and cheaper every year. And the nations of predatory capitalism like the United States possessors of dark fiber are reluctant to sell IRUs because they realize that access to a dark fiber pair can be used to provide almost infinite bandwidth. For example an IRU on the 20,000 mile footprint of Level (3) in the year 2010 was sold to Internet to for $20 million for 20 years. This allowed Internet2 to light it with 88 separate wavelengths or channels of 100 Gb per second a piece, serving almost the entire geographic area of the nation some 300 million people. But we must pause and look at the signal this sends to anyone in Ecuador with the capital to invest in becoming an Internet service provider. It means that such a person has no way of making a reasonable long-term plan for the provision of service over a given geographical area because determining the cost of bandwidth, the very gasoline or fuel needed for such a business over a long-term period of time, is impossible. The cost will be determined by the owner of the fiber in most cases CNT which is a competitor of any new company wishing to offer service. Such a policy seems NOT to be in the national interest of the Ecuadorian people.
Ecuadoran Policy Recommendations A single overriding basic principlel -Enable the cost effective and therefore sustainable building of the network infrastructure on which the actual ability to create and then maintain Ecuadors social knowledge society will depend. Do this by driving down the cost of bandwidth both in Ecuador and from Ecuador to the rest of the world. Also emphasize the need to steer away from proprietary network architectures and hardware design. The goal should be for entrepreneurial Ecuadorians to have access to dark fiber and light that fiber with hardware designed to deliver open architectures. This will ensure operational flexibility and lower costs. For the good of all of Ecuador ask CNT to reduce prices and by doing so increase the size of the market. Ask the regulator to recommend policies for purchase of new operating equipment that will take advantage of open source software like linux, and open network design principles that encourage interoperability. Discourage making decisions at lower layers of the stack that restrict business entry at
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higher Application layers. By means of the creation of a civil society based organization for the advancement and coordination of the internet in Ecuador establish a body that can give accurate, up to date and neutral information on the development of policy. Advice for the government should be free of economic motivation. The good of the nation not the profit of the providing organization should determine policy. Use exchange points to enable Internet service providers to reduce costs by Peering with networks of similar size or by buying transit from larger networks. Traffic for domestic delivery should never have to leave the country. Do not place barriers that will prevent Ecuadorian universities from purchasing low-cost bandwidth in ways that are done in other Latin American countries and indeed in the rest of the world. Transit bandwidth costs for traffic that stays within Ecuador are about a dollar per megabit per second at NAP.ec Permit the sale of indefeasible rights of utilization (IRUs) by understanding that this will allow other Ecuadorian businesses to invest in offering Internet bandwidth and drive down prices charged by CNT. Making a wise investment in Ecuadors long-term economic future by opening up a wholesale market by means of insisting that CNT unbundle access to its copper as well as to its fiber. And that CeLec Trans-electric do the same with its services. Promote conditions that facilitate interconnection of every one with ISP authorization. Publish the conditions required for someone wishing to offer Internet service to do so by interconnecting at a point of presence of CNT, Celec Trans-electric and Telco.net. Do this as well for any Internet service provider who wishes to build out its own physical network starting from the location of NAP.ec in Quito and Guayaquil.
Transparency is paramount. Although bids for public services must be done in public, when they
are unsealed the amounts offered for the sale of such services are subject to nondisclosure. The use of nondisclosure for making the results of bids public should be banned. The process of making bids in public is good. It offers transparency. However, making the results of the bidding process subject to nondisclosure negates the original effort at transparency since it creates a situation where the requested provider of service can offer outrageous prices and or restrictions in the absence of public knowledge.
Policy for Bringing guifinet to Ecuador

Here it is a matter of identifying those with technical knowledge and interest in the building of wireless networks based on a Commons infrastructure. Working with those in Catalonia Italy Greece, Germany and Argentina and the United States holding a series of seminars in a handful of Ecuador's largest cities it should be possible to spread the understanding needed as well as the personal connections to began this serious build-out's before the end of 2015. Once it catches on, the process becomes
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self-sustaining. What is needed is it legal support of the idea of a Commons infrastructure of network transmission and the ability to ensure reasonable terms of interconnection with commercial networks. One of the important aspects of this approach is that it brings telecommunications network based on all the free and open source principles espoused by the entire FLOK project. A point of uncertainty is how rapidly the economic and philosophical understanding necessary to support the spread of this approach to a telecommunications system built by citizens for their own use would take off. From a technology point of view it should enable the provisioning of five or 10 or 20 Mb per second of bandwidth to end-users where the exact amount needed would not need to depend on a top-down uniformity of some architects prior design. End users could size the radios they need and add more bandwidth by adding more radios. This would be a very cost effective way of investing in a country where teledensity although it has dramatically improved under the Correa administration is still lower than the Latin American average of 18%. Understand what quifinet is and how it could be built in Ecuador. What has been built is a TCP/IP based fabric that can carry any TCP/IP using applications that its users wish to employ. It is this fabric that is held as a commons. It gains its legal standing and governance through a five person foundation. The foundation is very carefully operated in such a way that it cannot be captured by any user action. And in this sense it is not run as a popular democracy. (My November December 2013 COOK Report goes into great detail as to how and why these decisions were made.) The TCP/IP network fabric operated on principles of strict neutrality. As long as it does not interfere with another person's ability to use the network for their own purposes or directly contravene local law, anyone may use the fabric to run any kind of application and espouse any ideas that they wish. If a group of users wishes to use the network to run a mail list, it may do so and at the governing level of guifinet, the board takes care not to become involved. Bibliography Footnotes
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Gui.net and i2cat Meet Again

Novembers Good Intentions Result in No Action in January
Editors Note:
this is a follow-up to the January February 2014 COOK Report on i2Cat and guifi.net. It is a brief interview done with Roger Baig on Skype the third week in January. He has edited the text the follows for accuracy and returned it to me. I was really pleased in the fall of last year by Artur Seras close attention and responsiveness to my questions. But in the third week of March as I get ready to publish, the good intentions of the fall seem to have vanished. I sent this to Artur in February asking for a response. I have received none. To summarize the situation: The Spanish incumbents would seem to have set up a tax-exempt foundations to make contributions to the worthy educational cause of i2Cat something that is perfectly legitimate. But something that should not discriminate if i2C is genuinely interested in sharing its infrastructure with guifi.net. Unfortunately we have here yet another example of what happens when an entity with a public purpose becomes dependent on private corporate largess. Accept access to the fiber network offered just so long as you do not share it for any purpose outside our corporate interests and meanwhile we take our foundation based tax deductions. It turns out that i2Cat vehemently disagrees with this exchange. Their understanding of reality is presented on pages 82-96. Roger: In our meeting in mid-January we talked with one of the technical people who coordinates the use of i2cats network and he said he was worried about peering with guifinet because he said he thought it would be unfair competition. I am definitely sure that our proposal is compatible with their requirements. What is troublesome is that their definition of dedication to research purposes sets up an artificial distinction that would exclude us because our Network Commons License is completely open to any kind of use including commerce as long as it does not prevent some other person's use of the commonly held infrastructure. COOK Report: But who are these other operators? Roger: Theyare very small ISPs that go all the way back to the beginnings of the I2cat Infrastructure and who were effectively grandfathered into the operation. In our discussion there was a complaint from the i2cat side that the guifi.net board had more freedom than the I2Cat Board. I think part of the complaint comes from the fact that Orange is a board member. The standard way of doing things for these big telecommunication companies has been to establish foundations where they donate resources to the functioning of the research capabilities of a group like i2cat.
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COOK Report: By doing this then they can get a tax break by saying something like we've donated !1 million worth of bandwidth to this research group? Roger: Well where it gets interesting is that, if they wish to allow a university-based entity like I2cat to use their existing fiber rings in the Barcelona area, they could do it by charging commercial rates that i2cCat would not have the money to pay or they could set up a foundation on behalf of the I2Cat research partnership, give i2Cat access to the fiber and take a nice deduction on the tax that they would normally owe the government. The foundation is set up as a private public partnership that can do business according to the European Union rules. This is the way around the issue: public-private entities cannot donate these telco kinds of resources because it is a liberalised marked. Thus it must be the private sector that does this. What they do through these pub-priv entities is to promote/create the need for telco infrastructure (e.g. this distribution of remote musical concerts which require 10Gb/s 10ms connections) and then the private telcos must provide this infrastructure. I2Cat promotes/creates these research projects and Orange provides the infrastructure. Under this situation they cannot operate the network. Such operation is the responsibility of i2cat which finds itself placed in a position where it is reluctant to do anything that would upset Orange its benefactor. COOK Report: so I have the impression then that someone will have to go to Orange and say look we want to peer with guifi net. Do you have any problem with that? Roger: Gordon please remember hat It is not just about peering in the technical sense (i.e. exchange routes over a BGP session) but about collaborating._ Now I cannot speculate of course on what they might say, but our position is that we have agreed that we share similar purposes and that now is the time to start taking specific small steps to interconnect with each other and share traffic within each other's networks. If you look at the agreements that underlie the i2Cat Foundation, I believe that you would find that the purpose is to develop new uses for the network on behalf of ordinary citizens without the need to discriminate according to the infrastructure involved. COOK Report: will one of the things that Artur told me in a Skype in the third week of January is that he thinks it is necessary to complain to the Barcelona City Council that they must really start to open up their network to guifinet. What is going on here? Are they worried about making Orange angry? Roger: two things. The first is that the City Council's network is mostly provided by Telefonica and not by Orange. And second if i2 cat says to Telefonica, we are going to peer (collaborate) with guifi.net, because we believe that sharing our infrastructures would further the purposes for which the Foundation has been established, there is absolutely nothing that Telefonica could do to overturn such a decision.
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They say that they can just do experimental traffic whatever this means. And guifinet is not an experimental network and therefore they claim that they cannot interconnect with us because doing so would lead to unfair competition. But the question needs to be asked competition with whom? I think we have established that we are both benefiting essentially the same groups of users. That is to say the ordinary citizen who should be free to have unfettered access to a broadband network to pursue innovation. The way that they have built their network is different from the way that we have done ours. But by virtue of their grant of bandwidth to the tax deductible foundation, they benefit and it would seem that any such restriction on traffic would contravene the ostensible purposes behind the foundation. COOK Report: this leads me to raise a couple of questions to confirm what I have been somewhat slow to understand. What you have done is establish an extensive layer two mesh and that your basic operational principle is that anyone without any preconditions as long as they respect completely the network Commons license to be able to connect to and benefit from and contribute to that layer two mesh. Correct? Roger: for the most part but I would disagree with your use of the word mesh since it leads to misunderstandings. The technology choice should be regarded as secondary to our goal of providing universal connectivity. The rules are clear regardless of the technology used and, as long as you respect the rules of the network Commons license, you may connect to our network and do what ever you want. COOK Report: I wonder what you would think of this argument? If the I2cat folk understand and accept the principles of the Network Commons License, then you should be able to use this shared fabric for virtually any lawful purpose as long as you are use does not prevent the use by others. In one sense doesn't it all boil down to the question of whether Telefonica and Orange in their relations with I2cat would ever accept the principles of the Network Commons License ? Is frustrating isn't it? Roger Indeed it is. COOK Report: Let me ask a question about Guifi net Professionals. Is this just anyone who joins that mail list or anyone who offers services involved in connecting people to the shared fabric? Roger: yes in a general sense. What we say is that the fabric is there. If you have the technical knowledge of how to use it and connect to it and you want to try to make a commercial business out of helping other people to do so then you are perfectly welcome to join the effort. We do not know exactly how many professionals there are. I would guess that they are probably number somewhere between 75 and 100 such people. COOK Report: My impression is that the fabric is there and if you understand how it works and how the technical knowledge to connect other people to it and you wish to start up a business doing this, then welcome to the party. That people will observe what you are doing and if you start doing things that break the network Commons license they will have means to discipline you.
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Roger yes this is true there are such means. But I would also suggest that you do not rely so much on the word mesh in your descriptions. The network uses fiber and copper as well as wireless and in the wireless area its protocols are not exclusively mesh. Right now a very large amount of our new growth is on fiber. We are always trying to find new places and new ways to employ fiber. Up in the area of Gurb where Ramon's people are installing new fiber every day. When you get fiber and your neighbor wants to connect to your new fiber, it's usually very easy to do so. And this is how it is growing now. In towns nearby the towns are connecting. It takes time but things are moving forward. Four years ago in Gurb we started with seven fiber connections then grew to 20 and we will soon reach 200. COOK Report: outstanding how can I get more detail? Roger Well we are not very good at documenting all the new infrastructure but I can send you were reports that we did for the European Union Commons project. As far as I2 cat and Telefonica and Orange go with their. foundations I am sure that there is nothing written in their rules which would really prevent them from cooperating with us. if they really want to do it, they can go right ahead. COOK Report: they should be able to go to Orange and Telefonica and explain that we think it would be better for all the people of Catalonia that we are trying to serve if we exchange traffic with guifi.net and there should be nothing that would prevent this? Roger if they want to do it, they definitely can do so. COOK Report: And a final question is there any sign of a new Pablo Boronat Perez emerging anywhere else in Spain? that is to say someone who really wants to expand guifi.nets infrastructure. Roger: yes there are encouraging signs from a group of people around Madrid but it's a bit early to know exactly how things will turn out.
Fiber From the Farm

COOK Report Roger also sent two pdf on guifinets ongoing fiber deloyment. One on the Commons4EU found here and the other on fiber from the farm. Bother are similar.
Here is the introduction to the first report.

Despite the skepticism of some people about the capacity of community networks (CNs) to incorporate the optical fiber (OF) technology in guifi.net there are many on-going initiatives to do so. The fact that some of these projects are already in the stage of being fully operational, bringing of Gbs/s broadband Internet access to places (such as rural areas) where the traditional telcos are currently offering connections of few Mbs/s at
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most, proves that it is totally feasible to deploy and operate OF infrastructure according to the CNs principals following a bottom-up approach. Hence, the aforementioned skepticism is totally unfounded. The present document reports the presence of OF in guifi.net, paying special attention to the three projects that have been selected as OF pilots [1] in the Commons4Europe project and how they have progressed over the first year. The Gurb project has been selected as a pilot because it was the first OF project started and it is the most advanced one. The Vic pilot has been selected because it is a case of OF in an urban area. Finally Rub has been selected as a case where the project at the moment is blocked. Several new terms have appeared for this new way of deploying OF, such as Fiber From The Farm (FFTF/FFTx) 2 Or Bottom-up Broadband (BuB)3, etc. all of them referring to the high degree of the implication of the end user in all the phases of the network deployment and operation.It is worth to mention that the BuB term was introduced in the Digital Agenda for Europe as the result of the guifi.net participation in the Stakeholder Day 2010 4
Some Very Useful URLs from the BUB List on March 31 2014
[1] http://nets.upf.edu/ [2] http://bubforeurope.net/?q=pilots/report-how-start-community-wireless-network
Report on How to Start a Community Wireless Network

The experience will take place at Barcelona inside the exponentially growing gui.net. I will start a new zone. Others continue growing. Analysis on that. Progress on"Fiber interconnection at Barcelona. New challenges will appear: How is the collaboration with bub promoters and his bers? What technical problems appear? How we solve it? What are the effects and reactions of the community because of this interconnections? Also, other works related to bub task force: promotion, dissemination, bottom-up installation, etc. github status:"in-progress [3} http://social.gui.net/sites/default/les/BuB4EU-Governance_v2.pdf In this November 2014 Commons for EU presentation Ramon provides must detail on guinet governance although he call it here BUB governance. Recommend iit be read in conjunction with Chapter The Operation and Governance of Guinet pp 89-110 of our November December 2013 report - downloadable via this url http://www.cookreport.com/pdfs/nov-Dec_2013_CRpp.pdf Readers may see how the Living Labs part of I2Cat presented itself last fall by clicking here
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I2Cat and Guinet Meet Again: According to I2Cat

Editors introduction: Last autumn, as I worked with Artur Serra in order to understand better how living labs fit into the global network of public private regimes and to understand the organization and structure of i2Cat, I found myself hopeful that i2Cat and guifinet would find a way to cooperate with each other. A first meeting was scheduled on November 15th and resulted in an invitation to guifinet to join the i2Cat Foundation. A second meeting between guifi net and I2Cat occurred on January 15th 2014. On the 22nd Roger Baig and I did an interview regarding the meeting and some of the other questions that I had about the progress of guifinet since my visit last year. On January 27 I mentioned to Artur Serra that I had done the interview and would be sending him a copy, as soon as I received the review text from Roger which I did on February 2. On February 27 when I had received no reply from Artur, I sent him a reminder saying that I hoped he would respond. Time passed and on March 21 still having received no response, I sent Artur another reminder. On March 26 in response to a public compliment to Ramon Roca from Artur I sent him yet another reminder pointing out that I would publish not later than April 1. Finally two days later on March 28 I received an email from Sergi Figuerola saying that he had seen and read the January 22 interview for the first time only two hours previously and requesting me not to publish until he had the time to send me back a description of what he described as the very serious misunderstandings contained in the January 22 interview. I responded immediately pointing out the above attempts to communicate and saying that, given my repeated attempts to communicate, I would not arbitrarily delay publication. They have requested that I present their point of view which I will now do. I was rather surprised when I saw that rather than a letter to the editor response summarizing their reasons for disagreeing with what Roger Baig told me, they assumed a right to insert them selves into the middle of the interview and took the liberty of a paragraph-by -paragraph rebuttal, the first time in 23 years of the COOK Report that ever happened. I must add however that I find their last-minute response very awkward. Here is my interpretation of these events. They have invited guifinet to join the I2Cat Foundation. I am not certain that guifinet has accepted the invitation. Let's assume that they have. As
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far as I can tell on this last weekend before my publication on Monday March 31 the only thing that joining the foundation would do for guifinet would be to give it a seat at I2Cat Table where it would be the only "outside" member to the approximately 15 year old arrangement between the corporate members and the nonprofits from the government and education sectors in Catalonia that have long operated what I believe would be understood in the US as a public-private partnership. Once public agencies enter into such an agreement, as Sergi himself points out in the text that follows, any network sharing or Peering agreement between I2 Cat and guifinet would cause problems. Sergi wrote: If i2CAT peers with guinet to provide service connectivity to whoever wants internet (under a commons approach), then, and since it is not the role of i2cat, we may have problems with other operators we have on board, just because it is not in our mission/vision. The entire discussion, that now looks to be coming to an unsuccessful conclusion, began last fall when I did the write up of my interaction with I2Cat and raised the question that, if Arturs living labs were truly designed to extend broadband network infrastructure to the ordinary citizen, then why do couldn't there be a reciprocal process by means of which the two networks would use their infrastructure into to share each other's traffic so that rather than restrict Artur's Living Labs to the small footprint of the greater Barcelona area, the cause of bringing the innovation possibilities of broadband ordinary citizens could be extended throughout all of guifinets footprint which covers all of Catalonia and most of Castelon. It seemed that last November Artur considered this a good idea. But now, at the very last moment - on March 26 Artur apparently asked Sergi Figuerola to review the interview text and the result of that request follows. Once again the heavy foot comes down along with the explanation is that I2Cat for research purposes ONLY. Now, I certainly understand the very common use by industry of university based research psrtnerships where they give the unverity advanced infrstructure that only the university is allowed to use in return for colaborative work on what will become a commercial project. The collection of compnies and government organizatins that is on I2Cats board is not at all unusuaL What WAS unusual - somethong that I had never seen before was Artur Serras Living Lab concept where the industrial research consortioum appeared to step down from its lofty perch and offer the ordinary citizen the ability to use its facilities to do innovation. Artur andi ent back and forth on this subject for weeks last fall. As he said the Guifi.net is a community of people, that creates its own infrastructure. And, in that sense it is more a living lab than a telecom operator. But times change and the opinion of Artur has changed as well. Arturs Living Labs was certainly attractive being focused on he actually human being as oposed to a technology product. But now that push comes to shove i2Cat makes it very that the same restridctions that have kept ordinary citiens out of using the infrastructure of other industrial research cnsortiums
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apply here. If he citizen has a role to play, it is as a product on which the telecoms and hardware makers may test their wares. And in this i2Cat and Living Labs are no different than any other closed university research consortium. Yes I do catch i2Cats interest in using gufinet infrastructure to test some protocols and related technical ideas but I also note their decree that, without a clearly announced termination date for any such project, nothing will happen. Artur has asserted that Living Labs is some how diferent but in the end it seems that citizen innovation testing is permissible only if it takes place on I2Cat infrastructure. In my opinion Serge is very disdainful of guifinet but readers are invited to decide for themselves. The whole founding premise of each of the two networks is very different. Guifinet is organized and legally instamntiated as a commons. Its infastructure is owned as a SHARED RESOURCE by the peole who built it. I2Cat is privately owned for the private benfit of itrs corporate builders. The very idea that it would peer or exchange network traffic under any sort of presumed equality was obviously unacceptable and needed to be quashed.
The interview
Roger: In our meeting in mid-January we talked with one of the technical people who coordinates the use of i2cats network and he said he was worried about peering with guifinet because he said he thought it would be unfair competition. I am definitely sure that our proposal is compatible with their requirements. What is troublesome is that their definition of dedication to research purposes sets up an artificial distinction that would exclude us because our Network Commons License is completely open to any kind of use including commerce as long as it does not prevent some other person's use of the commonly held infrastructure. Sergi: Let's clarify the term peering. i2cat cannot peer with guifinet or any other operator. Peering activities are done in Internet Exchange facilities. I2cat is not in CatNix, our regional IX because we are not an ISP. The research centers are not telecom operators. The network facilities we operate are like lab infrastructures not comparable to a service ISP. Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated in the last months presenting a proposal to a European research in which Guifi.net participates, i2cat is totally open to collaborate with guifinet on any project, pilot or initiative to validate a solution, service or technology. For a more long term collaboration, i2cat is ready to invite Guifi.net to become parte of the i2cat Foundation, like other operators and to collaborate in research
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and innovation topics like how to deploy SDN or wireless technology, applications or services. COOK Report: But who are these other operators? Roger: There are very small ISPs that go all the way back to the beginnings of the I2cat Infrastructure and who were effectively grandfathered into the operation. In our discussion there was a complaint from the i2cat side that the guifi.net board had more freedom than the I2Cat Board. I think part of the complaint comes from the fact that Orange is a board member. The standard way of doing things for these big telecommunication companies has been to establish foundations where they donate resources to the functioning of the research capabilities of a group like i2cat. Editors note: Sergi wrote the first reply and then sent it to Artur asking him to provide comments/updates/feedback Artur did just that engaging in quite a lot of edits to Sergis text. Artur: Let us correct some of these facts. There were not any small ISPs at the beginning of i2cat. Only big operators like Telefonica, Orange (at that time, called Al-pi) and Vodafone (at that time Airtel) participated in the i2cat project started in 1999. When the first part of the project finished in 2003, the regional government proposed to us building a non-for-profit foundation. In that moment, Telefonica told us that it was not interested in joint the Foundation. They wanted to be the only operator in i2cat. We said no. i2cat should be open to any telecom operator and we didn't accept the control of Telefonica neither any condition by any other operator. At that time, Guifi.net didn't exist yet. We do not know the level of freedom for giufinet board, but, i2CATs direction has total freedom to set the strategic lines of the foundation that has been agreed year after year by the Board, composed by a combination of universities, public authorities and IT companies and telecom operators. Editor: Sergi had written: I do not know the level of freedom for giunet board, but, i2CATs board reports every 2 months to its patronate delegates, which in the end, are the responsables of i2cat. Saying that The standard way of doing things for these big telecommunication companies has been to establish foundations where they donate resources to the functioning of the research capabilities of a group like i2cat. you are suggesting that i2cat depends on a big telco like Orange, what is totally out of scope. It means a complete misunderstanding about the role of big telcos in Spain. I2cat is a university driven initiative that convinced the regional government to established
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the foundation. The telcos play a totally secondary role in the i2cat foundation. The President of the Foundation is the Secretary of Telecommunications of the Regional Government and the VicePresident is the provost of the UPC. http://www.i2cat.net/en/presentation). I2cat is a public company, with more nytimes.comparticipants from public bodies that from the telecom operators: public administration (health department, media departments, telecom department), universities (URL and UPF), and private companies (operators, manufacturers, service providers, content providers,.).i2cat is neutral and tries to help mainly the government in having a research agenda in the Internet domain. Your vision about the relation between i2cat and the telecom operators is simply a fantasy. Editor: Sergi had written: i2CAT DOES NOT belong to any operator at all. I2CAT is neutral and follows the government vision, while also supports companies from the board. Donations to i2cat from the private sector [my?] represent 0,1% of its budget. This is just to provide some kind of support. Editors Comment How can one be both neutral and support companies from the board ? The board has 18 members. Taking a narrow denition 9 of 18 are either carriers or makers of hardware and aother six are ICT related orgbizations. Thus more than two thirds of the board are either manufacturers of hardware supplied to carriers or organizations that exist to advocate ICT use and decide how money supporting it will be spent. Thus while ithe I2Cat Foundation certainly does not belong to any SINGLE operator, 22.5% of it certainly belongs to the 4 carriers and another 22.5% to Cisco, Alcatel, Fujitsu, and Juniper - companies that are major suppliers of the equipment on which the carrier needs to operate - and leaving interoute the cloud company some where in between. As far as government vision goes it would be helpful to have a reference to whatever that is. As far as I can tell it presumably is the board member Barcelona City Councils connected city program building on the expertise donated to it by Cisco about which I wrote in the January Februry 2014 COOK Report as overseen by the board member Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Government Director General of Telecommunications . . .) Now another board member is Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informaci. This board member functions within the ofce of the Catalonian Government Director General of Telecommunications. According to google it is responsible for the Completion of technical planning and the establishment of guidelines for the management and operation of services and systems for telecommunications and computer [systems]. Also on the board is ACC1 referred to as the (Catalonian Trade and Investment Agency). According to Good Practices - ACC1 one of its goals is to boost the technology transfer activity of the universities and public research centres in order to increase the competitiveness![of Catalonia] It also works with Catalan Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) in making funding recommendations.
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Board members:
Carriers ! !
" " " " " " " " " " " " Orange Vodafone Abertis telecom Mediapro (the private owner of the operator who was chosen to manage "xarxaoberta.cat", " the bre optic network of the local government) and the network into which municiple govern" ments dumped millions of Euros between about 2004-2008 and which private telco interests " took over when it was determined the the local government violated EU competition rules.
Providers of ICT and Telecom Hardware and services

" " " " " " " " " " Fujitsi Cisco Alcatel Juniper Interoute Iberia Europes largest Cloud services computing provider
Government agencies with money to spend and/or award on or for telecom and ICT " " Generalitat de Catalunya ! Ajuntament de Barcelona (Barcelona City Council) ! Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informaci" ! Servei Catal de la Salut (Catalan Health Service) ! Corporaci Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (The Catalan Broadcasting Corporation) ! ACC1 promotes business opportunities and advises on what universities should get research grants Universities to provide laboratory and research services to the above ! Universitat Politcnica de Catalunya ! Universitat Ramon Llull ! Universitat Pompeu Fabra So there you have it. Nine ICT organizations. Six government organizations that are either purchasers of ICT or decide how government money will be spent on ICT and three universities that have services for sale to ICT and government through the organization known as I2Cat, Civil Society is missing. The citizen of Arturs living Labs has been turned into a ptoduct and most assuredly is not represented in anyway in the decision making process.
Sergi: I do not know the level of freedom for giunet board, but, i2CATs board reports every 2 months to its patronate delegates, which in the end, are the responsables of i2cat. And i2CAT DOES NOT belong to any operator at all.
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Editors Comment: How can this be asserted when the operators are on i2CATs board have presence at the board and foundations belong to their boards? Just as in the United states there are layers and layers of telco provided public interest organizations and the carrier are quick to hand out favors for those in a position to reciprocate, I am told that Telifonica provides the ber for the Barcelona City Council network via a grant from its foundation, which is just one of the instruments used by the telco lobbies to inuence the government. I also asked Is this a public private partnership? !If i2cat is neutral not for prot foundation how does this differ from guinet? !I understood that whole purpose of peering was to allow Artur to!extend!Living Labs throughout territory of Catalonia?? One must conclude that the difference between I2Cat and gui.net is that in the statutes of gui.net, nobody at the board can have a monetary or or any other kind of interest in any commercial telecommunications entity. Whereas the entire Board of i2Cat is centered on the creation of projects to which its university members develop and deliver solutions for its commercial sponsors. If Sergi would like to know the level of freedom for the guinet board I invite him to read pages 89-94 of my November December 2013 COOK Report downloadable from the front page of my web site. It is explained there in detail.
COOK Report: By doing this then they can get a tax break by saying something like we've donated !1 million worth of bandwidth to this research group? Sergi: I would say this question is wrong, since it does not apply to i2cat. Actually, no private operator gives/donates bandwidth to i2CAT. We get two types of bandwidth connectivity services: a) one is provided by the LOCAL NREN L3-to connect to the internet services. We pay for this service as any other university or research center do. And b) the other is, what we call, the experimental service, which allows to connect our research projects to the GEANT3 backbone and so to other EU partners participating on EU research projects. i2CAT is connected to the Geant3 infrastructure through its associated NREN, but with a L1/L2 services. In order to get this service, we pay for it to the regional NREN, as any other university or research center do, in Catalonia, Spain and maybe Europe. Thus, i2cat does not get any free/donation bandwidth from nobody. Editors Comment: The "NREN", in Catallonia "Anella Cientica" is a
telecommunications infrastructure acting as an operator built to connect universities and

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research centers. It subcontracts to the telcos present in the i2cat board, and so at the end still provides a revenue to those telcos. So yes i2cat pays "Anella Cientica" which in turn pays the telcos. And it remains very true that no bandwidth is without cost. Readers will also note that precisely what is meant by peering is never clearly dened. Roger denes it as collaboration while Sergi says he will collaborate but NEVER peer.
However, what we have achieved is dark fiber from the city council (since they are a public administration and do not pay tax, they do not get any tax break at all). i2cat convinced them that we could use the same fiber separating the experimental traffic from their service traffic. Then we are lighting this fiber with a set of ROADM that were designed and built by means of a research project co-sponsored under an open research call from the Catalan government. So, we are lighting the fiber that we are using within the metropolitan area of Barcelona, and we use this bandwidth to deploy and test the pilots of the research projects we develop. And when needed we connect this infrastructure to GN3 for testing and or demonstration the research project results. Conclusion 1: no peering at all anywhere. Said that, i2cat is interested in the collaboration with Guifi.net is order to ask them for their infrastructure in order to test new services, technologies or applications in their infrastructure, but i2CAT will never become a peering point for traffic interchange, this is a business for IX, nor providing any type of service to the end user, unless the end user is a researcher or a research/innovation projects that need to reach user to make a pilot or a demonstration of a project result. Conclusion 2: i2cat does not offer peering services, does not offer services to end users and it is not focused on any ROI from service or peering, but a research center that aims at developing innovative services and new technologies for the operators, manufacturers or other organization that are interesting on making a step forward on the technology they use, and so, we can develop proofs of concept.
Roger: Well where it gets interesting is that, if they wish to allow a university-based entity like I2cat to use their existing fiber rings in the Barcelona area, they could do it by charging commercial rates that i2cat would not have the money to pay or they could set up a foundation on behalf of the I2 cat research partnership, give I2CAT access to the fiber and take a nice deduction on the tax that they would normally owe the government. The foundation is set up as a private public partnership that can do business according to the European Union rules.
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This is the way around the issue: public-private entities cannot donate these telco kinds of resources because it is a liberalised market. Thus it must be the private sector that does this. What they do through these pub-priv entities is to promote/create the need for telco infrastructure (e.g. this distribution of remote musical concerts which require 10Gb/s 10ms connections) and then the private telcos must provide this infrastructure. I2Cat promotes/creates these research projects and Orange provides the infrastructure. Under this situation they cannot operate the network. Such operation is the responsibility of i2cat which finds itself placed in a position where it is reluctant to do anything that would upset Orange its benefactor.
SERGI: whenever i2cat has performed a remote musical concert (i.e. with Korea) that required 6Gbps minimum traffic with low latency, due to the content is sent at UHD uncompressed (as said may times, experimentation), we have always used an extension of our experimental facility deployed in BCN over dark fiber (i.e. last time we did it, we extended a dark fiber to the Mercat de les Flors, which connected to our dark fiber infrastructure) which we connected to our closest point in our experimental network and then to the NREN network, which by means of GN3 brought the signal to Korea. So, no telco service involved at all (and if used any time, is because i2cat does not have full capability in BCN, and it has been used for one or two days, but never a 10Gbps service). Actually, we have never used any 10Gbps service from any telco operating in Spain for free or as donation. We have a 10GBPS to the NREN academic network that connects us to GN3 for experimentation purposes.
COOK Report: so I have the impression then that someone will have to go to Orange and say look we want to peer with guifi net. Do you have any problem with that? Roger: Gordon please remember that It is not just about peering in the technical sense (i.e. exchange routes over a BGP session) but about collaborating._ Now I cannot speculate of course on what they might say, but our position is that we have agreed that we share similar purposes and that now is the time to start taking specific small steps to interconnect with each other and share traffic within each other's networks. If you look at the agreements that underlie the i2Cat Foundation, I believe that you would find that the purpose is to develop new uses for the network on behalf of ordinary citizens without the need to discriminate according to the infrastructure involved. Sergi and Artur: Guifi.net is already peering with Orange in the CatNix. The problem is not peering. The problem is research and innovation. Is Guifi.net interested in any kind of research or innovation collaboration with i2cat? If the
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answer is yes. We can do it right now. i2cat is a research center with a research facility. It is not a telecom operator like Guifi.net. i2cat is the same kind of institution like the UPC. In fact, i2cat was started by UPC groups in 1999. Guifi.net should consider to collaborate with i2cat in the same manner that Guifi.net is collaborating right now with UPC groups in European projects like CONFINE. I2cat should consider to work with Guifi.net like we collaborate with other telecom operators private or public ones. In that sense Guifi.net is a third kind of telecom operator, not public, not private but a cooperative one built by the citizens themselves. COOK Report: Well one of the things that Artur told me in a Skype call in the third week of January is that he thinks it is necessary to complain to the Barcelona City Council that they must really start to open up their network to guifinet. What is going on here? Are they worried about making Orange angry? Roger: Two things. The first is that the City Council's network is mostly provided by Telefonica and not by Orange. And second if I2Cat says to Telefonica, we are going to peer (collaborate) with guifi.net, because we believe that sharing our infrastructures would further the purposes for which the Foundation has been established, there is absolutely nothing that Telefonica could do to overturn such a decision. SERGI and Artur: We repeat again, i2cat will not peer. If Guifi.net wants to offer their infrastructure to i2cat for experimentation they will be welcome like the other operators. If we agree with Guifi.net for example to test a new SDN controller of the guifinet infrastructure to improve the QoS, then we will easily set up a connection, make pilots, get conclusions and close down the experiment, until a new one comes. Editors comment: How can I2Cat claim to be neutral and have operators on its
board while declining to participate in a network as a commons? Sergi and Artur use
the term like the other operators. Artur was seeing guifinet not as an operator but as a social movement. Something happened to change his mind? Following guifinet definitions of peering (below) it is clear that if commons means share traffic between operators or users, i2cat does not provide traffic services, because we do not consume either wholesale interchange services. We see guifinet as a new kind of operator, under the commons perspective. Guifi.net has been very innovative (we like it) and makes a difference to what other models, like the public one or the private ones, do. Guifi.net has helped to understand that the citizens can also create or co-create a new digital infrastructure by themselves. Now i2cat can
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help in solving innovative problems that Guifi.net could find in its evolution. And Guifi.net can offer its infrastructure for testing or doing experiments that i2cat could need. We are just trying to find these common needs. That's all. We are very keen to work together to identify if a new technology is needed to better operate this type of operation model.
Guifi.nets Value Proposition inserted here as a Result of i2Cats Objections

COOK Report: guifinet just builds and grows and provides service to its members. It does not spend much time explaining itself. However since Ramon has added this to what Roger told us in the January 22 interview, it seems well worth including. Ramon responded with this in the first go round in tis dispute on March 27. Sergi quoted it back on the 28th and Artur took it out on the 29th when he finished his comments at 4am Barcelona time. We cite Ramon here in with his permission. Ramon Roca: The robustness of guinet is based on self-sustainability and by participating
in [our] peerings and obtaining transit from them, you'll get three main benets: 1. 2. 3. Free access to any other network which is participating in the network based on the Commons Signicant cost reduction on the access to wholesale interchange to the rest of the Internet By that, promoting both a Commons based network [reaching all the way] to the end users available in fair conditions to all operators and content providers, and promote a fair wholesale interchange and the concept of "Internet for all"
Benet 3 is a bit intangible, although for someone (for sure, not everybody) the most important, but 1 and 2, are absolutely tangible and typically do have immediate impact on any ROI since reduces the cost for telecommunications for anyone who participates in gui, and by the way, provides us sustainability and the main reason we keep growing. So there are benets for sure. I mean, is not "for nothing". Everyone is free to take into consideration those benets or not, but they are [real]. I hope you understand that although I'm trying to keep out on opinion related discussions, I wanted to clarify this particular point and is important for our institution not be seen as a kind of "charity" or "donation-only" [operation]. [End of Ramon quote.]
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Editor - back now to the original interview.

Roger: And guifinet is not an experimental network and therefore they claim that they cannot interconnect with us because doing so would lead to unfair competition. Sergi: no, it is not a problem of competition. It is a problem of the kind of traffic. Experimental traffic is the traffic put in the network to test a protocol or try to stress it in order to identify where the content is. It may just be row data or a 1Mb link that we only use to see if the management system we have developed can work on a distributed way. So we use experimental traffic over an experimental network. And if any operator wants to test this on their network, we are open to make a demonstration over their infrastructure for a defined period of time. The same way we would do with guifinet. Roger: But the question needs to be asked competition with whom? I think we have established that we are both benefiting essentially the same groups of users. That is to say the ordinary citizen who should be free to have unfettered access to a broadband network to pursue innovation. The way that they have built their network is different from the way that we have done ours. But by virtue of their grant of bandwidth to the tax deductible foundation, they benefit and it would seem that any such restriction on traffic would contravene the ostensible purposes behind the foundation. COOK Report: this leads me to raise a couple of questions to confirm what I have been somewhat slow to understand. What you have done is establish an extensive layer two mesh and that your basic operational principle is that anyone without any preconditions as long as they respect completely the network Commons license to be able to connect to and benefit from and contribute to that layer two mesh. Correct? Roger: for the most part but I would disagree with your use of the word mesh since it leads to misunderstandings. The technology choice should be regarded as secondary to our goal of providing universal connectivity. The rules are clear regardless of the technology used and, as long as you respect the rules of the network Commons license, you may connect to our network and do what ever you want. COOK Report: I wonder what you would think of this argument? If the I2cat folk understand and accept the principles of the Network Commons License, then you should be able to use this shared fabric for virtually any lawful purpose as long as you are use does not prevent the use by others. In one sense doesn't it all boil down to the question of whether Telefonica and Orange in their relations with I2cat would ever accept the principles of the Network Commons License ? Is frustrating isn't it?
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Roger: Indeed it is. Sergi: sorry, it seems that you have for some reason some persistent misunderstanding about what i2cat can do. Our network is the same kind of facility that any research lab may have, but instead being in a room/office lab, it is deployed on the city. COOK Report: Let me ask a question about Guifi net Professionals. Is this just anyone who joins that mail list or anyone who offers services involved in connecting people to the shared fabric? Roger: Yes in a general sense. What we say is that the fabric is there. If you have the technical knowledge of how to use it and connect to it and you want to try to make a commercial business out of helping other people to do so then you are perfectly welcome to join the effort. We do not know exactly how many professionals there are. I would guess that they are probably number somewhere between 75 and 100 such people. COOK Report: My impression is that the fabric is there and if you understand how it works and how the technical knowledge to connect other people to it and you wish to start up a business doing this, then welcome to the party. That people will observe what you are doing and if you start doing things that break the network Commons license they will have means to discipline you. Roger yes this is true there are such means. But I would also suggest that you do not rely so much on the word mesh in your descriptions. The network uses fiber and copper as well as wireless and in the wireless area its protocols are not exclusively mesh. Right now a very large amount of our new growth is on fiber. We are always trying to find new places and new ways to employ fiber. Up in the area of Gurb where Ramon's people are installing new fiber every day. When you get fiber and your neighbor wants to connect to your new fiber, it's usually very easy to do so. And this is how it is growing now. In towns nearby the towns are connecting. It takes time but things are moving forward. Four years ago in Gurb we started with seven fiber connections then grew to 20 and we will soon reach 200. COOK Report: outstanding how can I get more detail? Roger Well we are not very good at documenting all the new infrastructure but I can send you were reports that we did for the European Union Commons project. As far as i2cat and Telefonica and Orange go with their foundations I am sure that there is
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nothing written in their rules which would really prevent them from cooperating with us. if they really want to do it, they can go right ahead. Artur. i2cat, Telefonica and Orange are not comparable kind of organizations. Guifi.net, Telefonica and Orange are. They can offer to i2cat part of their facilities to make tests. I2cat on the contrary cannot peer with these operators, regardless if they are private or citizen-based operators. I2cat could be similar to a research lab of Guifi.net or Orange. COOK Report: they should be able to go to Orange and Telefonica and explain that we think it would be better for all the people of Catalonia that we are trying to serve if we exchange traffic with guifi.net and there should be nothing that would prevent this? Roger if they want to do it, they definitely can do so. Artur. i2cat mission is not to serve the people of Catalonia like a telecom operator. We are not a service. We are a lab. The way i2cat serves the people of Catalonia is trying to provide some light about what Internet can be and how it can evolve. Exchanging traffic is not our role. Our goal is to collaborate with any organization, being public, private or cooperative like Guifi.net, that want to advance the state of the art of the research and innovation of Internet. And we are sure that we will find a way to collaborate with Guifi.net in this field. Thanks you all. COOK Report: And a final question is there any sign of a new Pablo Boronat Perez emerging anywhere else in Spain? that is to say someone who really wants to expand guifi.nets infrastructure. Roger: yes there are encouraging signs from a group of people around Madrid but it's a bit early to know exactly how things will turn out. January 22, 2014 corrected Feb 2
Closing Comment
Editors Note: It is quite a shame. Artur Serras language last November was quite mellow. He seemed absolute open to trying new things. To see what I am thinking and why please read the following. I never expect to be able to prove it but while I am willing to accept the sentiments he expressed here as totally sincere, what he has to say above in the last days of March of 2014, seems designed to reassure his ICT board members that they will not be disintermediated by any kind of cooperation with this very strange guifinet thing that is neither public nor private, and may actually be some sort of social movement
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COOK Report: But the telcos dont like this - They feel that their fundamental interests are being challenged. [Within I2Cat] where do you draw the line between what they can influence and what they cannot? Serra: Before this, the line has been drawn at the point of experimental on one side and commercial on the other. What is needed now is a new wave of innovation in the networking models themselves. The national research and education networks (NRENs) and commercial networks still work with the same models that we had twenty years ago. We need to explore new models of networking that are aligned in the direction to peer-to-peer infrastructures. Guifi net is trying to do so. As I said before, in my opinion, Guifi.net more a social experiment than a technological one this is why they are getting money from the European Commission because they are offering a kind of new model. A model of do-it-yourself telecommunications infrastructure as an hypothesis for the Internet of the future. Internet's new infrastructures should not repeat the bad example of the telco monopolies of the past but rather they must allow the emergence of new networking architectures and peer-to-peer models. Guifi.net is a community of people, that creates its own infrastructure. And, in that sense it is more a living lab than a telecom operator. In fact, it was recognizes by the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) as a living lab before it was recognized by the Spanish Telecom authorities. It belongs also to the Catlab, the Catalan network of living labs. Finally, there is an evolution of research in the Internet that favors the possibility that each of us could build our own piece of the network based on software. At this moment, i2cat is working in different projects in the field of NAS, network as a service. We have built a Open Naas, a a toolkit for IP Networks as a Service. In that sense, there is the possibility that Guifi.net effort and the i2cat technology could converge. COOK Report: With these new forms of organization every time you try to think in terms of the old boundaries, you have difficulty. Take for example my 2010 Building a National Knowledge Infrastructure about SURFnet. I have there a considerable discussion of a new area called pre-commercial that serves really as the boundary line between experimental and commercial. It is within this area that we are discussing where the boundary line should be as to who can do what and under what conditions I think? Serra: The discussion in Europe is that, if you want to invent a new kind of Internet, you need this experimental gray area. With the commercial Internet you cannot do it. You cannot break commercial Internet because it is a service for which people are paying. If you cannot do much with the Geant networks, and you need to build a new infrastructure. The question becomes how big should it be and how many people can participate?
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COOK Report: Of course I cannot speak for Kees Neggers but I have the idea that, if he were sitting here, he would consider the Geant approach in Europe similar to what in the US we would call the Internet2 approach. The SURFnet approach I think is much closer to what we are talking about here? Serra: Yes but this is really a strategic option just for the Netherlands. However, if you think that the society is becoming a lab for innovation, that new generations are more and more engage in innovation and entrepreneurial activities of all kind, you can imagine that a new Internet is possible, more experimental and open to everyone. Because now with projects like Wikipedia and fab labs, there is an explosion of innovators in every city in the world. This is what we are building in Barcelona now the Barcelona Laboratory -- the City as a living lab. When you have this arrangement, you can open your infrastructure to everyone in the city and you can say to corporate sponsors here is the community and the platform that can yield widely innovative benefits. Guifi.net does not differentiate between an experimental platform and a commercial platform. We do. The Guifi.net model is quite unusual because they are neither a private company nor a public company. In that sense they are working in a new territory where may be the distinction between experimental traffic and commercial traffic has less relevance. Looking back, perhaps the mistake of i2cat in relation with Guifi.net has been our not understanding this third way, considering this community more a social innovation than a technological one. If we take this point of view, Guifi.net doesnt consider itself forced to behave as a telecom operator separating the commercial traffic and the experimental traffic. As a social organization, it seems this is not in their DNA.
Late Breaking News

Editors Comment: given Arturs comments above -- late March 2014 -- it is hard to imagine how he ever could have expressed such a different view last fall. Meanwhile on March 31
I2Cat sent a network engineer to meet with Roger Baig who! adopted a! pragmatic attitude:
let's find a pilot and let's work on it. We have arranged to share a googledocs document to keep refining the proposal and to investigate further means of collaboration.
Editors personal point of view: it seems to me that Artur and Sergi !slammed the door very tightly with the foregoing complaints. !We can look forward to them having their cake and eating it too. !An outsider asks are you talking to guifinet about collaboration for the use of!your respective networks for the citizen in the living labs movement? Oh yes. !Absolutely! and they then point to the March 31 2014 meeting and the google doc. Their behavior speaks for itself. If you have any doubt, just reread the preceding 15 pages.
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Kansas City Freedom Network Update

ON ALL SOULS FORUM | JANUARY 22, 2014 | 12:00 PM
Liberate the Internet! by Isaac Wilder

http://www.kk.org/program-episodes/liberate-the-internet-with-isaac-wilder/
Editor: This is an absoluyely awe inspring presentation by Isaac. Isaac: Here we are, hurtling through space. I am on this podium, and you are there, and so we nd ourselves. Each of us has made our way here somehow, but that part is already nished. What happens next is up to us. I say us, because in order for this yapping to mean much, you have to make it mean. Otherwise I'm just a monkey on a pedestal, making noise. I have high hopes that we can make meaning from this moment. It is with a profound respect that you if I may speak to you now, and if you will listen. I should disclaim that I am not here as myself, but rather as a part of the thing in which we are together - humanity, nature, god, whatever name you prefer. If you can access that part of your self, try to get it listening, too. " I've been asked to speak to this congregation about the future of communications, telecommunications in particular and specically telephony. Let me apologize in advance should my remarks be considered too broad in scope. I believe in my soul that this moment is a rare opportunity to voice the truth as I see it. Let me apologize also should you nd my language strident. I have devoted my life to building a freer, fairer network, and I sometimes struggle to contain my passion. We are in the midst of a quiet, perpetual, sometimes desperate struggle, and I pray that some of you here today will lend your talents to this effort. " I've been asked to address the future of communications, but I cannot do so without addressing the future of our society. To understand the shifting landscape of policies and technologies that are transforming human interaction, we have to look beyond those things, towards the economic, social, and spiritual implications of our decisions. It is only with a fuller understanding of the potential impacts that we can really intuit or reason about how to proceed. This morning, I'd like to do a few key things. First, to examine the role that telecommunications plays in contemporary society; second, to understand how we got here and where the current trajectory might take us, and nally; to advocate for a course of action that might alter that trajectory, serving humanity and ushering in a new paradigm of human connectedness.
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" It goes perhaps without saying that we live in a epoch where information moves the world. Labor, having long since been alienated from the laborer and converted to abstract forms of currency, is quickly being transformed into bits - the ultimate form of abstraction. !!Vast sums of so-called 'wealth' are created and destroyed by moving minute electrical charges to and from hard drives, spinning not quite silently in faceless, billowing structures. Fortunes come and go in a icker of light. Every aspect of human commerce has been nancialized turned into a sport for those with certain combinations of zeroes and ones next to their name in the database. Enamored with the promise of a system that allows for the endless hording of things, our systems of exchange have lost any and all touch with the reality on this nite, fragile planet. " A generation with no memory of life before the network is already born. I myself am part of it. In many ways, at this point, we all are. Conditioned for an extreme, pathological myopia, we have mostly lost our ability to see that which is not directly in front of our eyes. We have been psychologically intubated with innitely scrolling news feeds, algorithmically tailored to promote a vague sense of loneliness and consumerist tendencies. With the virtual sum of human knowledge at our ngertips, we have mostly clamored for more likes, more lol cats, more entertainment. While we could easily ensure that no child ever again goes hungry for knowledge, we have done little to seize the opportunity. " The problem and the promise are the same at their root: the Internet, as experienced by almost all of the nearly three billion people lucky enough to use it, feels like magic. It is not magic, obviously, but, as Arthur C. Clark once said, any sufciently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. While computer networks can enable direct, nearly instantaneous, peer-to-peer communications anywhere on earth, they can also be used to capture, store, and analyze those communications surreptitiously. So long as networking know-how remains the sole domain of multinational corporations and governments, it is nearly impossible for us to tell what really goes on when we click 'send'. !We have seen all too much evidence of this over the past few years. " Beyond the revelations brought to light by Snowden and others, even ordinary use of the Internet is not what it appears. While on the surface, on the screen, we are browsing, tweeting, messaging inside the network we are monitored, proled, and processed. We ourselves have become the product, where the business is targeted advertising and consumer analytics. The basic human inclination to share and discover, lament and rejoice, is being capitalized upon by a few individuals for their own private gain. Even as we are faced with ecological catastrophe, profound inequality, and a heightened sense of insecurity, still we are being convinced to buy more, spend more, and waste more via new and unnerving forms of social engineering.
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" And yet, there is so much good in the Internet. Even as the grip of pervasive and perpetual surveillance tightens, more and more we slip through the cracks. Civil discourse proliferates, encyclopedias and dictionaries are written, social movements quickly grow, we better ourselves and ourish, ourish though our every action is monitored and monetized. " The fundamental economics of communication have changed: the marginal cost of reproducing information content approaches closer and closer to zero. That is to say that once some information has been produced, making another copy of it has become incredibly cheap. This fundamental shift has given rise to what the political philosopher and law professor Yochai Benkler termed 'commons-based peer production' : a system where the inputs and outputs of the process are shared, freely or conditionally, in an institutional form that leaves them equally available for all to use as they choose at their individual discretion. The two most powerful examples of this phenomenon, in my opinion, are Wikipedia, and GNU/Linux: the most popular encyclopedia by far, and the operating system that runs on 95% of supercomputers and more than half of all web servers. These tools are the building blocks of a new commons, a new world, in which we as a society share our tools in the effort to solve big problems. " Those of us alive today have the opportunity to ensure that all people have affordable access to communications free from surveillance and censorship. More than an opportunity, we have a duty, for we cannot hope to build a more just and sustainable society if we cannot communicate freely. In order to bring about this outcome, however, we must work to understand how we came to our present situation and the direction in which we are headed. I hope you won't mind if I quickly sketch out how we've come to our understanding of information. " In one sense, information is but a conceptual abstraction, but in another sense, it is the very essence of our existence. The quantum theorist and philosopher Freeman Dyson put it best when he said: The explosive growth of information in our human society is a part of the slower growth of ordered structures in the evolution of life as a whole. !Everywhere around us, wherever we look, we see evidence of increasing order and increasing information. The technology arising from Shannons discoveries is only a local acceleration of the natural growth of information. There is no single gure more important in the evolution of telecommunications than Claude Shannon, whose 1948 work entitled 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' is the bedrock of contemporary information theory. It was Shannon who rst separated information from meaning and recognized the binary digit, or bit, as a fundamental unit. " Information technology existed long before information theory language, the alphabet, and the printing press were all major discoveries; but it was not until Shannon grounded our
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understanding of information in a coherent mathematical framework that we could truly embark on the precision engineering of communications systems. " And so we have, during the 1960's, researchers including Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies developed the concept of packet switching: slicing information into socalled 'datagrams', passing those datagrams over a network, and reassembling the original content on the other end. " This research led directly to the creation of the ARPANET in 1969 a network that grew inside of research and education institutions for twenty years, until transforming into the Internet in the early 1990's. By '94, the network had transitioned from a centrally managed resource for research applications to a decentralized collection of independent networks, connected through their use of common protocols, and governed by the consensus of network operators. " Over the next twenty years, more and more independent networks were engineered to join this coalition, extending the Internet's reach to every nation on Earth. Now, today, there are some 42,000 autonomous networks that, taken as a whole, constitute the Internet. These networks presently connect almost three billion people. And that's great. " However, in achieving this expansion so rapidly, some important trade-offs were made. The buildout, rather than taking place under the aegis of government, was mostly left to commercial interests. The result of this is that we have to pay steep premiums to access what has essentially become our global nervous system. More than that, when the incentive to maximize prot met with technical limitations, some important shortcuts were taken. " While the original design envisioned a network where every node was directly reachable and capable of hosting information, today's Internet largely consists of servers and clients. We depend on companies such as Facebook and Google to store our information property so that it will be secure and available. And they do, in vast complexes full of whirring fans and blinking lights. In exchange for this service, however, they extract a premium: our data. That data, in turn is sold to aggregators and advertisers, stolen by both governments and criminals, ultimately traded like kernels of corn on the open market. " In the end, it's kind of a raw deal. We pay monetary rent to the network operators for allowing us to pay data rent to the server operators. What agricultural goods were to medieval Europe, information goods are to society today. It's their Internet, and we are essentially serfs it's just that rather than land and protection, we are dependent on our lords for connectivity and hosting. Now, it's possible to imagine in world in which that deal makes sense. it's just not the one we live in. The margins, for both network operators and server operators, are outrageously
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high. Billions of people cannot afford access to the network, and those that can are spied upon egregiously. So what can we do? How can we make the Internet Our Internet? " Let's imagine, now, what it would take to build networks by and for the people. Let's imagine a world where connectivity is ubiquitous, affordable, and free from censorship and surveillance. Rather, let's look at how it is being built, right now, all around the world, by a nascent social movement that is dedicated, organized, and highly skilled. Let's talk about free networks. " Free networks are networks that are owned and operated by the people that use them, essentially they are Internet co-ops. For the most part, today's free networks are built using wi, because it is cheap, commonplace, and easy to deploy. I put antenna at my house, you put an antenna at your house, a few of our neighbors do the same thing, and we all pitch in for an uplink. We connect our network to the Internet just like all those other networks that have joined in the past 20 years, except that in our network, we own, operate, and govern together. This particular speech is not so much about the how, it's more about the why and the what. I'd be more than happy to discuss the how with anyone who's interested, either today, or at some point in the near future. " The key thing to understand is that the 'free' in free networks doesn't mean gratis, it means libre. It means that you are free to share, expand, and improve the network. We dene free networks through three key freedoms: " First, the freedom to participate in the network, and allow others to do the same. This means that if your neighbor wants to put up a radio and join the network, you can't say no unless you have a really good reason. " Second, the freedom to communicate using the network for any purpose, without interception or interference. This means that you can't look at other people's packets, you can't block other people's packets, and you can't intentionally interfere with the network's operation. You can't do illegal stuff, either, but that's because it's illegal, not because of the network. " Finally, the freedom to modify and improve the network, including the ability to access, author and distribute information about how the network functions. This means a network built with free software, using open protocols, and transparently operated, so that anyone, anywhere, can improve the system. " In a free network, you can engage in communications that are truly, materially peer-topeer. You can host your own data, serve your own content, sharing it only with whom you
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choose, and on your own terms. It may sound far-fetched, but it is anything but, in fact, it is simple; it only takes the will. " Free networks are sprouting and growing all around the world. In Catalonia, gui.net is 25,000 nodes strong, the size of New Jersey. From Buenos Aires to Berlin, the peaks of the Himalyas to the plains of the Sergengetti, in Oakland and Austin, and right here in Kansas City, we are building something. " We are doing so because we know that we have to face those big problems that confront our society, and that we cannot do it if we cannot speak freely. We are doing so because we believe that all people, everywhere, deserve to participate in civil discourse, and that no one should ever be deprived of the opportunity to educate themselves. " As our networks grow larger, they grow stronger too. When a wireless link gets saturated, we replace it with copper; when that gets saturated, we replace it with ber optics. We are rebuilding the Internet from the inside out, but this time, we are making it our own. We are building it so that it serves all of us, instead of the oligarchs. " We know that our struggle has just begun, and that many obstacles lie in our path. There are technological obstacles, to be sure. There are political and economic obstacles that vary from place to place. And then there are spiritual obstacles. These will surely be the hardest to overcome, for in order for our enterprise to succeed, people must believe that we can succeed; they must believe that we are not at the mercy of our feudal lords, and that with ingenuity, determination, and patience we really can change the world. " While it may seem that more pressing issues should demand our concern, I ask you to step back, to take a wider, longer view. Our social contract is frayed and torn; corporations run amok, while our government serves the interests of a privileged few. Our nancial system is a shell game, justice is a distant dream, and the ecosphere that sustains and nourishes our civilization is in serious peril. We could do so much better, but it's essential that we tilt the balance of power. That cannot happen in a world where private individuals are under surveillance, and public servants operate in secret, where we are products, instead of producers. " I was asked here today to address the future of communications, and it is this: we must ip the world on its head, so that black becomes white, and zero becomes one. We must build from bottom up, and the inside out, working in cooperation, rather than competition. Free networks are an opportunity to do just that: to build a free and open nervous system for humanity, and with it a political bloc that is ready to restore the commons, after so many centuries of privatization and enclosure
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" There is very much work to be done, and very little of it requires an advanced knowledge of networking. I hope that each of you will consider becoming a part of our cause, sharing in the hope and meaning that it brings us all. " I look forward to answering any questions you may have, and invite you stick around for conversation. In addition, I would like to invite you to my home at 4117 Virginia Avenue on the First of February at twelve noon, for an open meeting and technology demonstration. " May god bless you and keep you all.
Editors Note FNF and Connecting for Good have been rening their working relationship and have built intriguing proposals for substantial expansion of their network coverage on the basis of cystalizing support from within the community that will enable new builds. On March 21 from Isaac: I want to update everyone as to what's been going on with KCFN -- where we stand, and where we seem to be headed. The rst thing to say -- and I won't go into too much detail -- is that the last week saw some organizational/structural changes at Connecting for Good (our partner org, and KCFN operator). To my mind, this reorganization is a hugely positive thing. Inefciencies in our collaborative process were really starting to take a toll in terms of mental energy. Felt like we were losing enthusiasm and losing steam. Shaking things up will include putting Clint in a better position to drive the network building process and work side by side. Can't tell you how exciting that is. At the same time, we've been moving forward in our (group) conversation with Dianne Cleaver and the Urban Neighborhood Initiative. Dianne has helped secure 10k$ in funding from Arvest Bank, and is working on another 20k$ from the Community Capital Fund. We're still nailing down all the details, but the current proposal on the table is basically as follows: The funding is not directly intended to expand/build network infrastructure -it is intended to create a living laboratory and education program where we can train operators. We're thinking about calling those operators/the program NITROs:
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Neighbors Investing in Technological Renaissance and Opportunity This would work in concert with Father Justin and Reconcilation Service's TNT (Trained Neighbors Teaching) digital life skills program. Actual funding breakdown would be something along the lines of: 5k$ for improvements to tower at 3101 Troost (including Airber to Joe's) 5k$ for FreedomRelays (we would still want folks to pay something when/where possible, but could also subsidize in places -- mostly, we need the gear so that students can build/play/learn) 5k$ for FreedomNodes (same as above) 5k$ to Connecting for Good for training/education (this would be in the form of some classroom instruction, and copious onsite/practical network building) 5k$ to FNF for training/education (same as above, basically) 5k$ for program costs (such as renting a lab space, transportation, incidentals, admin overhead) Again, this is all still up in the air/in the works. 10k$ is secured, 20k$ is contingent on a successful grant application. Would be curious to hear what folks think of this breakdown/ideas -- questions and comments welcome, of course. COOK Report: Looking forward to a 10 to `14 day visit to Kansas City in mid to late June where I anticipate staying with Isaac and doing a deep dive into the Kansas City dynamics. Participating in a Mutual Musicians jazz festival planned by Anita Dixon and so on. Also a possible visit to Open Source Ecologies.
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Book Review
Learning to Photograph - Volume 1 Camera, Equipment, and Basic Photographic Techniques By"Cora Banek, Georg Banek Publisher:"Rocky Nook Released:"August 2013 Pages:"256 Rocky Nook also takes novel and refreshing approaches to the field in ways that more ordinary publishers never do. The most outstanding example of this is a wonderful two-volume package published in the second half of last year called Learning to Photograph. The authors are Cora Banek and George Banek. What this does in two $40 volumes of 250 pages each is to provide starting with camera, equipment, and basic photographic techniques a detailed even encyclopedic guide that gives the reader a very good introduction to the choices that will be faced in selecting and beginning to use photographic equipment. First up - the lens, the camera body and the accessories. Using an approach that I have never seen before, it explains the choices involved in making the monetary investment in equipment. It does this in a way that allow us the reader to understand the abilities that will be gained by selecting more expensive and sophisticated equipment as opposed to more ordinary point and shoot cameras. In other words you will learn the thought processes that you will have to go through in order to use a given piece of equipment successfully and by successfully I mean getting the actual benefits of an improved photograph that would have not been possible with more ordinary equipment. It does all this in a rather encyclopedic way that exposes the reader to a well ordered universe of thinking about photography as an art form rather than separate specialized approaches to composition techniques; or printing techniques; or archiving practices. These two volumes are very likely not for everyone because they invite their reader to enter a journey of amazing detail and possibilities. The detail and complex choices to be made may put the more casual reader off. But if one feels at a gut level that digital photography is something more intriguing than just point-and-shoot this is a magnificent two-volume set that is unlike anything I have ever seen. Lets walk-through the extraordinary organization of volume 1 that starts with a chapter 1 entitled a bit of theory. It then proceeds to do an the extraordinary job of laying out basic broad points it wishes to make by means of some of the best illustrations I have ever seen. It then goes on to a very valuable chapter 2: An overview of photography technology explaining photography as the process of separating a very specific amount of light from a continuous light source and storing that. From this definition it takes the reader through optics; through the way in which cameras focus; in the way in which the two aspects of exposure metering and exposure control shape the process. The next section entitled the influence of the photographer begins to teach you how to consider your choice of equipment and the way in which you experience what it calls five key factors: brightness, light sensitivity, the lens, the aperture setting, and the time of exposure. Chapter 3 leads the reader into a more detailed view of optics and lenses. In doing so it illustrates things that will occur only to the more thoughtful and experienced photographer such as light, color, and color temperature and the way in which the color of natural light changes throughout the day. From there, it goes on to a extraordinary brief section on the physics of lenses with diagrams of how they are structured; how their focal length works showing the reader how to interpret technical specifications into an understanding of the results that the technology will give. and then the instructions on how to use that equipment to obtain a series of desired results. Section 3.3 offers advice on the quality of lenses. It gives a useful guide to the criteria use judging quality and where to get trustworthy information. It also offers detailed subsections on mechanical quality metal compounds for example last longer than plastic bottle are heavier intake more battery power in the field in accomplishing things like auto focus.
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It does a fairly lengthy deep dive on optical quality explaining the issues of resolution; distortion centering; vignetting; chromatic aberration; scattered light; spherical aberration; and astigmatism. Focusing is carefully explained with a short introduction to manual focusing and a multiple page section on the various aspects of autofocusing. Section 3.5 is an overview of the types of lenses including prime or fixed focal length lenses these are well loved by "real" professionals while zoom lenses for a traveling photographer give unparalleled versatility of possibilities for image selection. Zooms are now manufactured routinely to a level of precision and accuracy unobtainable only about a decade ago. It offers useful advice on wide angle versus normal lenses offering a focal length of about 46 to 50 mm that reproduces normal human vision -- in other words neither wide-angle nor telephoto. It carries on with what form me personally is a welcome encyclopedic tendency to explain tele convertors; mirror lenses; macro lenses; shift lenses; tilted lenses and finally something called lens baby. Chapter 4 on exposure metering again uses a somewhat encyclopedic approach to educate the reader on the physical and technical issues of what's happening including the measurement of brightness by means of what is known as light or subject metering. It coaches the reader on external light meters something that with nonprofessionals is rarely seen. It acknowledges this point by explaining what it calls in turn will exposure metering how a high quality digital camera body measures light and determines proper exposure. But it goes on to subtleties of informing the reader about neutral gray; substitute metering; stray light and so on. And then with very useful illustrations it points out the basic automatic metering options that are found on virtually all digital cameras from spot metering center weighted metering two matrix metering all the various ways that the user can adjust the camera to be sensitive to different levels of light that appear in the subject of the photograph be it another person or a landscape. Chapter 5 is called exposure control. Again the detail covered is quite extraordinary. On a personal level I find the detail quite useful. Regardless of whether one will use this amount of information, I find it appealing to have the issues explained and thereby gain a better understanding of the enormous range of possibilities that the technology affords two photographers of all levels. I remember very well my frustration with the Sigma 14 which offered no automatic exposure control and required that the user remember to change an ISO setting of 800 for dim interior light to 100 or 200 in bright sunlight. The chromatic distortion that resulted in my otherwise well lit and well exposed exteriors of a Confucian Temple in Beijing is something I won't soon forget.. I had purchased the Sigma as my first digital SLR because of the suberb results of the foveon sensor. In 2007 I could ever really profited from this book because, much to my chagrin I did not even realize that Canon Olympus and Nikon all had well designed software for exposure control that made sure if the user left it on automatic the camera would not use an ISO of 1600 or 800 in bright sunlight. Again the reader is offered well written explanations of exposure value; exposure scale; coordinating aperture with shutter speed, and ISO sensitivity and then taken through the details of light sensitivity, range of contrast with graphic illustrations explaining the differing dynamic range of digital sensors and the actual greater dynamic range of film. Again while most users in the field will not often think of targeted contrast control or range of contrast for the use of other media, I enjoy understanding that these are possibilities that actually exist. 5.2-3 is a section on aperture depth of field and shutter speeds. The issues of designing your image from the point of view of aperture or camera opening and its resultant possibilities for depth of field versus shutter speed which can be used to stop motion and if one wants achieve blur free images. The possibilities that well done Digital software gives the photographer in choosing shutter priority over aperture priority over all the other automatic modes again is very well explained. Chapter 6 Additional Camera Functions offers an introduction to the basics of digital photography from the pixel, to RGB colors, to color depth resolution camera resolution which in effect explains the design of the all-important Sensor or CCD that captures the light. Section 6.2 the image sensor; how the sensor works; the basics of sensor construction; Sensor design; Sensor types; CMOS sensors; CCD sensors; EXR CMOS sensors; X3 sensors in this case the foveon. Sensor size EV value, medium format or full frame; or sensors with a small crop factor or a large
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crop factor. And then the range of sensor errors: noise. Blooming, smearing, moire, hot pixels, dust. The possibilities go on and on. Section 6.6 the viewfinder. How viewfinders work in SLR cameras; viewfinder indicators; electronic viewfinder; viewfinder on compact cameras; life at view. Everything is there including a section on the menu operation focusing on White balance and the camera processor in other words when do you use raw or JPEG or TIF. There is even a secyion video covering frame rate compression and file formats. Chapter 7 on camera accessories. Everything you need to know about batteries and memory cards; battery grip; a remote trigger; flash units: built-in versus external flash; studio flash units and light shaping tools; tripod monopod; lens hood; filters; equipment bag and cleaning tools. Chapter 8 choosing the right camera looks at camera types an overview of cell phone cameras advantages and disadvantages. There is even mention of light field cameras correctly described as a new and entirely different form of photography that involves its own file format known as light field picture or LPF as of the writing of this book his file type is readable only with special software these very new cameras are not only capable of measuring the brightness of light but can also save the direction in which the light comes." The camera in other words stores brightness and color data in addition to light vectors, which is why rays is used to describe these images rather than pixels. Most outstanding feature of light field images is that you can retroactively change both the depth of field and the perspective within a defined range. Since this technology is still in its infancy these cameras are mostly found in the toy and lifestyle market class." Page 173 The possibilities are endless the author explains compact cameras and upmarket compact cameras: - advantages and disadvantages; primary uses; and purchase criteria. Then we get an explanation of bridge cameras micro 4/3 cameras system cameras with APS-C sends. A section on SLR cameras beginning and intermediate models and SLR cameras semi Pro and Pro models is useful probably for the coverage of the largest number of potential buyers. But be informed there is lso something called an SLT camera and of course medium and large format cameras. After this exhaustive walk-through section 8.2 the sensible way to buy a camera should come as no surprise. Chapter 9 photo technology in practice wisely advises that photography "isn't about how many gadgets and features you have at your disposal it's about what you do with them. Too much functionality may become a burden, but having access to the right technology at the right time make certain images possible that wouldn't be otherwise. This chapter includes an overview of several different subjects and shooting situations and the tools or settings applicable to." The chapter list an exhaustive range of potential kinds of photography ranging from nature and landscape; flowering and petals; wildlife; architectural-- photos in the rain in the snow photography for extreme climates; night photography; indoor photography with the available light; panorama images and so on. there is even a short concluding se section called common technical mistakes. Chapter 10 asks the reader what kind of photographer are you or will you be? Is your photography about content; about form; about technology; or more about the possibility of editing your photographs. which is most important? Chapter 11 is a short essay on the potential of each of us to develop as a photographer and master the art of what we are doing and what we wish to achieve and chapter 12 some useful advice on mastering your camera. Learning to Photograph - Volume 2 Visual Concepts and Composition By"Cora Banek, Georg Banek Publisher:"Rocky Nook Released:"August 2013 Pages:"256 Volume 2 continues the encyclopedic tour. It is subtitled visual concepts and composition. How to think about what you are doing from designing an image that goes into areas such as a gestalt psychological point of view. What is called the process of perception; steps of perception; perception in the strictest sense; subconscious
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evaluation; schematic understanding; getting into the picture; examining the image; mental processing; how photos were designed; images for the purpose of motivation. The subjects; aspiration versus reality; image design as an example of a goal of what you will find in this book and what you wont. Chapter 2 offers an extraordinary tour of composition. Section 2.4 arranging visual elements offers something I had never seen before called the basics of Gestalt theory. Next covered are the quantity of visual elements; main and secondary elements; to Golden ratio; grid methods; symmetry and asymmetry arranging the main element; arranging two elements; arranging three elements; arranging multiple elements; busy scene and visual levels. Chapter 3 -- Shapes and lines. Chapter 4-- Stand point and the point of view coverings such as the position of the camera; selecting a vantage point; proportions; arranging and overlapping; exposure hiked in perspective; normally viewed; downward view; upward view Designing your photo -- what is possible in photo design given the use of different lenses. Chapter 5 Light -- The nature of light; how much light; harsh light and direct light; soft diffuse light; qualities of natural light. The direction of light; front lighting; backlighting side lighting; possible hiding; bottom lighting; indirect light; light sources; color; shadow; light management. Chapter 6 -- Color and black-and-white. Chapter 7 -- Sharpness and blur. Chapter -- 8 The overall effect." This chapter looks at the simultaneous interplay of all design tools. They don't always combine in the same way and it's not possible to explain how a photo functions with any sort of mathematical proof; this can be done critically only on a case-by-case basis because it requires qualitative judgment. Chapter 9. Image analysis and evaluation. The book ends with a brief tour of online resources.
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Ecuador: Revisioning An Entire Nation State

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THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL!

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