Rewards, Incentives, Tokenisation: Community Networks Meet Community Currencies
| Autor | Senka Hadzic, David Johnson and Will Ruddick |
| Páginas | 83-88 |
83
Rewards, Incentives, Tokenisation: Community Networks Meet Community Currencies
5 Rewards, Incentives, Tokenisation:
Community Networks Meet Community
Currencies
Senka Hadzic44, David Johnson45 and Will Ruddick46
5.1 Abstract
Financial sustainability of community networks remains a challenge,
especially in low-income communities. We explore the potential of
community inclusion currencies to provide monetary rewards to
users who help expand community networks, by installing routers
or maintaining infrastructure or by providing offline content. This
is done by adding a blockchain-based token reward in the mesh
routing protocol. This results in distributed, decentralised ownership
of network and services infrastructure and encodes the community
network philosophy in the protocols and services being used. In
addition, tokenisation makes it possible for funders and investors
to support local economies in a portfolio of multiple CNs making
use of a community inclusion currency.
5.2 Introduction
Although many community networks have been built around the world,
few have reached a point where they are sustainable from income
earned from the network itself, especially in low-income communities.
This is usually because of a lack of network scale to displace money
spent on incumbent operators in the community – which can be as much
as 20% of disposable income in some rural South African communities
(Rey Moreno, 2016), lack of locally-relevant service innovation, and
lack of technical skills to grow and maintain networks and services and
skills in business and finance. Additionally, some community networks
are simply focused on providing connectivity in a particular location,
without much interest to expand – an angle somewhat conflicting with
traditional funders’ focus on large, or at least scalable, projects (Jensen,
2018). There are also community networks initiatives that prioritise
44 Research Fellow at Research ICT Africa and CyberBRICS project.
45 Adjunct Senior Lecturer at University of Cape Town.
46 Founder of Grassroots Economics.
Para continuar a ler
PEÇA SUA AVALIAÇÃO