Local Nets:
An  platform for integration of community services at the local level

1. Community networking and digital cities.

As the academic era of Internet evolved towards a transfer to the industry and an explotation for commercial purposes of all this technology, this commercial phase will evolved towards a public use of the Net. The debate on the Universal Net Service will help to the companies to understand that a market needs a community as a condition for making profits, big profits, as his industrial grandfathers understood 50 years ago in the era of automobil. Here is the evolution in France of the differents networks in a city as a universal access services

The question then is how to define models for the coming of this new digital city, still to be born. Several possibilities are on the way. Our bet if for defining the digital cities as open societies, based in open systems. In that sense, we are exploring how the methodologies that allowed the design and building of the Internet as a global network, can be apply to the design of digital cities as inter-communities, or communities based on the Internet platform.

2. We need Open Digital City research projects.

If we apply what we have learned of the design of Internet to the design of an Open Digital City, we need first of all, a research project that could allow us to define the basic computer and social architecture of such a city. This group need to analyse the differents models of community networking and "digital cities" now under way. Keep in mind that we are not defining only a computer distributed system but a complex social estructure.

The research project needs an ongoing process of consulting to the different actors that are building parts of such complex structure: university, city halls, volontier organizations, companies,...An Open Digital City Task Force started at the local level can help us to define such a complex structure. It can only work as a bottom up process. In that sense, the work in the Community Networking can help a lot to understand how a digital city can be define.

From the computer side, we can see the Open Digital City as a Local Net.
 

3. What a LocalNet can be.

• The local integration of local services.
• The local platform we call localnet is a logical integration of services in a common Internet domain. Usually, what you have now in a city is a collection of many local services developed by a heterogeneous set of actors (individuals, students, local administrations, small or big companies, NGOs,...) without any common sharing of Internet domains. LocalNet allows at the first step the local  integration of local services by offering a local common domain to all of these services
• Technically, what you can do is to create a name server, or DNS (Domain Name Server) . This service allows to you offering to every local service in the city be part of the localnet. F.e. All the services that want to be in the Barcelona localnet  they only need to obtain a  city subdomain , f.e. upc.bcn.es

A localnet will allow to integrate several systems and services already developed in Internet.
 
• A virtual public network inside Internet.
• A localNet is not an Intranet. In a private Intranet, you cannot access from the Internet to his private services. But the  localnet is at the same time Internet  at the local level. What is possible is that some of the localnet services could be private. But the localnet is a virtual public network inside the Net. A community network can be seen already as a localnet service.

3. Integration of existing local services.

• You can develop inside the Local Net several common servies like
• a local search engineun  (f.e. Altavista) that could search in all the subdomains under the city domain.
• a local directory (like Yahoo) organized by topics or areas interested to the localnet.
• the coordination of several city subdomains could allow you make searches by a set of cities or countries.

4. Developping new local services.

• Any new local service can be part of a localnet.
• The Open Digital City must be as open as the current industrial city, even more. Any company, university, NGO, individual of the local community can organized his service as part of the localnet. They only need to giving a subdomain of the local domain, and suddently it will appear in the local net. Independently, they can keep their current domain in the general Internet.
• Any citizen can have a localnet  electronic address.
• In a complementary way, we have developped the idea of an Internet Citizen Address, that in fact will be a localnet citizen address. The local authorities in combination with the local ISP can provide one the citizen address based in neighborhood, city, nation structure and the other the connectivity, as well as an alias system to have two addresses (the civic one and the professinal one) with a single account.
• A localnet proxy can be developped.
• A local proxy can facilitate the access to the local information and the ISP can offer this value added service for their clients.
• A localnet news, agenda and newsgroups common service.
• It is difficult to have access to the serveral newsgrups, new media and agenda a big city is developping. The localnet can facilitate the creation of serveral services to group these disperse local resources.
• A local certification service for all the current network services, based in the localnet.
• The control of the quality of service is not yet solved in Internet.

• The local character of the services is not a warranty of their quality. We can expect an explosion of local information services with low quality. There is a increasing research on value filtering (f.e. Alexa ) and other systems to reduce the amount of trash we received daily. Local Net will not solved this problem. What we can think is about establishin inside the LocalNet, especific local subnets, may be more selected, for especific purposes or projects.
• Edunets, communitynets,etc. can be subareas inside the Localnet that allow people to define the especific group of persons with a common set of goals and objectives for work. But at the same time, the small group produces a loss of openess and variety you can find in the global spaces.
• We need to be prepared to live a an open world and at the same time defining innovative spaces inside this new ocean. But in anycase, an Open Digital City can be a testbed of this new digital era and a new perspective for the Community Networking movement.