CLOMMUNITY · A Community networking Cloud in a box

Community networking (also known as bottom-up networking) is an emerging model for the Future Internet across Europe and beyond where communities of citizens can build, operate and own open IP-based networks, a key infrastructure for individual and collective digital participation. The CLOMMUNITY project aims at addressing the obstacles for communities of citizens in bootstrapping, running and expanding community-owned networks that provide community services organised as community clouds. That requires solving specific research challenges imposed by the requirement of: self-managing and scalable (decentralized) infrastructure services for the management and aggregation of a large number of widespread low-cost unreliable networking, storage and home computing resources; distributed platform services to support and facilitate the design and operation of elastic, resilient and scalable service overlays and user-oriented services built over these underlying services, providing a good quality of experience at the lowest economic and environmental cost. This will be achieved through experimentally-driven research, using the FIRE CONFINE community networking testbed, the participation of large user communities (20000+ people) and software developers from several community networks, by extending existing cloud service prototypes in a cyclic participatory process of design, development, experimentation, evaluation and optimization for each challenge. The consortium has two representative community networks with a large number of end-users and developers, who use diverse applications (e.g. content distribution, multimedia communication, community participation) and also service providers (by SMEs and non-profit groups), research institutions with experience and prototypes in the key related areas, and a recognized international organisation for the dissemination of the outcome.