Place: Stockholm, Sweeden
Date: June 12, 2017
The first workshop on DIY networking was hosted at Mobisys 2015, following a successful 2014 Dagstuhl seminar on "DIY networking: an interdisciplinary approach", http://www.dagstuhl.de/14042. These events managed to bring together a highly diverse group of researchers and practitioners to reflect on technological and social issues related to the use of local wireless networks, and led to novel interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations, such as the EU Horizon2020 project MAZI, http://mazizone.eu.
In parallel, an extended research community started building around the multi-faceted challenges faced today by large scale community networks such as Guifi.net and Freifunk.net. Another successful Dagstuhl seminar on "Towards an Affordable Internet Access for Everyone: The Quest for Enabling Universal Service Commitment", http://www.dagstuhl.de/14471, eventually led to the EU Horizon2020 project netCommons: http://netcommons.eu.
At the same time the Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA, an IRTF initiative that aims to create increased visibility and interest on the challenges and opportunities in enabling global Internet access),http://irtf.org/gaia/, produced the RFC 7962 on "Alternative Network Deployments: Taxonomy, Characterization, Technologies, and Architectures" and fostered the cooperation of many researchers and partitioners around the concept of global and bottom-up Internet access.
Finally, the RIFE project, http://rife-project.eu, explores novel networking tecchnologies to extend the reach and qualify of Internet connectivity. Working jointly with a satellite service provider and a community network as well as using TV white space and localized networking, the project develops a number of flexible building blocks for DIY networks that can satisfy diverse user needs, can span a range range of deployments, and can be tailored to commercial as well as non-commercial settings.
Those efforts contributed to the engagement of scholars from many different disciplines: political economy, law, design research, human-computer interaction, urban and community informatics, media studies, policy, urban studies, and more. However, there are still important communication gaps between those that build the technology (computer scientists, engineers, and hackers) and those that understand better the complex urban environment where this technology will be deployed (social and political scientists, urban planners, and designers).
This year we would like to extend the scope of the workshop toward two directions:
- Include large-scale community networks and the "Internet access for all" narrative as a complementary role of DIY networks
- Revisit key engineering questions, such as routing protocols, energy consumption, automation, resiliency in light of the possible practical uses of DIY networking technologies.
More specifically, we would like to attract both:
- Technical contributions that render DIY networking technology easier to understand and used by less technically savvy people addressing issues of resilience, energy consumption, and autonomy.
- Theoretical contributions that can facilitate the understanding of the various inherent trade-offs in the design of DIY networks and the translation of engineering decisions to constraints and requirements for applications developers and vice versa.
For more details see the call for papers and submission guidelines
Organizers:
Panayotis Antoniadis (NetHood, CH)
Leonardo Maccari (University of Trento, IT)
Jörg Ott (Technical University of Munich, DE)
Arjuna Sathiaseelan (University of Cambridge, UK)
Supporters: