The ITU-T SG13 rapporteur meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, was attended by two SmartenIT members to contribute to the development of ITU recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at “Socio-economic Assessment of Future Networks by Tussle Analysis” and developed within ITU-T’s Q16/13. The document’s development was initiated within ITU-T’s Q21/13 in 2011 by the SESERV project to raise the awareness for socio-economic factors in the Future Internet landscape and to standardize tussle analysis as a tool to deal with these factors.

SmartenIT’s contribution to the meeting finalized document changes that were requested in the Study Group 13 meeting held in November 2013 in Kampala, Uganda, and enriched the document by text from SmartenIT’s contribution to ITU-T’s RevCom meeting held in January, 2014. Since the document is already very mature the changes were mostly of editorial nature. During the meeting, terminology was again improved just as text further condensed. Due to the overall agreement of meeting participants the document will be announced for consensus in June 2014. UZH will therefore participate in this meeting to support the last steps of the document’s development and agreement.

The outlined activities happen in the framework of SmartenIT’s socio-economic research facet where it is also evaluated whether technical SmartenIT research can be channeled to ITU-T recommendations. The development of the document is highly relevant for SmartenIT, as the project puts emphasis on socio-economic aspects of network technology in order to enable the development of traffic management mechanisms that are not only of high technical quality but also withstand inevitable socio-economic interactions of stakeholders. Since Y.FNsocioeconomic is the first document within ITU-T that addresses socio-economic aspects of network technology, SmartenIT’s activity in the development of this document establishes contact with other experts in this area and allows for the exchange of ideas on this topic. This allows for highly elaborated discussions of socio-economic aspects of traffic management within the project. Furthermore, the document itself, although not released yet, does already serve as a valuable guideline for SmartenIT’s socio-economic discussions. Vice-versa, also ITU-T profits from this document as the need for consideration of socio-economic aspects is recognized within the organization but a suitable tool to address these in the standardization process is missing. This gap became visible in the discussions on SmartenIT’s contribution to ITU-T’s RevCom meeting, where SmartenIT proposed to integrate tussle analysis into ITU-T’s standardization process; a proposal that was well received but postponed due to organizational considerations.

Therefore, SmartenIT’s efforts regarding the development of Y.FNsocioeconomic will not only increase the socio-economic qualities of SmartenIT’s traffic management mechanisms and increase SmartenIT’s visibility within one of the world’s leading standardization bodies but also eventually enrich the standardization body’s work by a socio-economic perspective and increase the overall awareness for socio-economic aspects of the Internet.