Community-Lab introduction

#+title: Community-Lab: A Community Networking Testbed for the Future Internet

* Introduction
** Community networks
- Origins: In spite of the importance of the Internet, companies and
  governments left behind people and regions of little economic interest for
  them.  Thus some groups started coordinating the deployment of their own
  networks for self-provision.
- Characteristics: Open participation, open and transparent management,
  distributed ownership, works and grows according to users' interests.
- Prospective: Strategic importance for the expansion of broadband access
  throughout Europe (as stated in the European Digital Agenda).
- A challenge: How to support the growth and sustainability of community
  networks by providing the means to conduct experimentally driven research.

** The CONFINE project (Community Networks Testbed for the Future Internet)
- Takes on the previous challenge.
- Project supported by the European Community Framework Programme 7 within the
  Future Internet Research and Experimentation Initiative (FIRE).
- Partners (list with logos): (community networks) guifi.net, Funkfeuer,
  Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network; (research centres) Universitat
  Politècnica de Catalunya, Fraunhofer Institute for Communication,
  Information Processing and Ergonomics, Interdisciplinary Institute for

#+title: Community-Lab: A Community Networking Testbed for the Future Internet

* Introduction
** Community networks
- Infrastructure deployed by organized groups of people for self-provision of
  broadband networking that works and grows according to their own interests.


- Characteristics: Open participation, open and transparent management,
  distributed ownership.
- CNs are of strategic importance for the universal availability of broadband
  networking (according to the European Digital Agenda).
- A challenge: How to support the growth and sustainability of community
  networks by providing the means to conduct experimentally driven research.

** The CONFINE project: Community Networks Testbed for the Future Internet
- Takes on the previous challenge.
- Project supported by the European Community Framework Programme 7 within the
  Future Internet Research and Experimentation Initiative (FIRE).
- Partners (list with logos): (community networks) guifi.net, Funkfeuer,
  Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network; (research centres) Universitat
  Politècnica de Catalunya, Fraunhofer Institute for Communication,
  Information Processing and Ergonomics, Interdisciplinary Institute for