Our challenge is try to open to the Community Networking movement the possibility of being active protagonism in the definition of the future digital cities. Increasingly, Internet is becoming a basic infrastructure not only for scholarship or electronic commerce but for developing basic public functions at local, regional, national and international level. 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. 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. 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. Keep in mind that we are not defining only a computer distributed system but a complex social estructure.