Rajnesh Singh, Regional Director of the Asia-Pacific Regional Bureau at the Internet Society recommended that India, Nepal and Bangladesh should experiment or conduct a pilot project with community radio networks and make them community network providers for the first mile connectivity.
Following are recommendations that came collaboratively after the discussion:
- Sustainability needs to be contextual—it needs to be localised keeping local issues and cultural issues at hand.
- While some models can be replicated elsewhere, others need to be contextual.
- The community practise needs to be emphasised so that community networks and community radios can evolve and grow.
- Understanding and measuring of the socio-economic impact of community networks required to form guidelines for bench marking.
- Basic datasets need to be collected to monitor to measure the impact on community.
- To focus on community networks in South Asia and engage more indigenous communities in seemingly developed nations and the Asia Pacific region.
- To form a consortium on community network practitioners at South Asia level.
- To conduct a data oriented study of some of the oldest community networks to test their economic and technical viability to learn for future models.
- Need for a Rights-based perspective—to study how freedom of expression has been impacted where community networks have been set up and the need for privacy protection.