SCIPIO: A blockchain-enabled governance tool for Common Networks #19
Description
Hi there!
I'm Arquimed. I am new as a developer and I come from the business world. I run my own company (not related to technology) and I would love to gain expertise on blockchain development for many personal projects I have. This is one of them :)
Overview
Community networks (CN) are networks built by citizens and organisations who pool their resources, often classifed as common pool resources (CPR), and coordinate their efforts to build network infrastructures. They are characterised as being open (everyone has the right to know how they are built), free (access to them is driven by the non-discriminatory principle), and neutral (any technical solution available may be used to extend the network, and the network can be used to transmit data of any kind by any participant, including for commercial purposes). (Baig et al. 2016) So far, the largest CN in the world is Guifi.net. with more than 60.000 operative nodes at present time. It was born in 2004 in response to the lack of investment in rural areas of Catalonia from the big ISP providers. In spite of its distributed nature by design, this infrastructure in commons does still need a centralized Foundation that takes care of Licencing, Monitoring, Conflicts Resolution, Expenditures Declaration and Economic Compensation for its multiple stakeholders and participants. It also gives Guifi.net a legal entity. Funding of investments is achieved by the operators by creating sponsorship requests in the Guifi.net website.
Figure 1: Roger Baig, Lluís Dalmau, Ramon Roca. (2016). Making Community Networks Economically Sustainable: The Guifi.net Experience. ACM SIGCOMM
Despite its huge success, CN still represent a very small percentage of total network deployment. Several factors limit their growth: 1) Public regulations do not favor the development of CN, 2) The funding process is not streamlined, 3) There is no economic incentives for non-interested third parties for investing and participating in the growth of the CN, 4) It does not scale well: compensation calculations need to be done by a single authority -the Foundation-, 5) Closed hardware makes routing configuration tedious for the non-techie.
Philosofy
On the other hand, blockchain technologies are especially helpful in enabling trustless cooperation between parties without the need of any central authority, by providing a public ledger and smart-contract execution. In order to address some of the abovementioned limiting factors for CN growth, we propose a blockchain enabled governance platform for creating, managing and promoting Common Networks worldwide. This platform will allow for 1) Streamlined investment in Capex, 2) Automatic Economic Compensation, 3) Internet Bandwidth Tokenization and 4) Semi-automatic Conflict Resolution, 5) Internet Bandwidth Market Trading. In order to align the interests of all the different market participants, a new double token system is created: the Scipio Platform Token (SPT), which will allow for preferential access to sponsorships and will accrue value over time, and the Internet Bandwidth Token (IBT), which will be issued by the operators in order to raise the funds needed for network development.
Next Steps
A dapp with minimal functionality is to be made. Help is needed in order to design dapp and for smart contract architecture in order to grant for easy upgradeability and safe coding (I am no expert dev). This project aims to be created as a tool for enhancing common network growth. My objective is to test out whether blockchain may help solve current limitations for Common Networks. If so, a fund raise would be done for Platform development through a token sale, and the distribution of these tokens is intended to include current market participants in order to incentivise the adoption of the tools (via a selective airdrop).
I believe that internet infraestructure is becoming more and more centralized on the big internet service providers, which poses an obvious threat to internet neutrality and censorship. Common networks growth is therefore required in order to ensure a truly free, neutral internet.
Contact info:
Github: @arquimed
Email: [email protected]