Today, ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13) finally consented Recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic during its closing plenary. The document reached consent of SG13’s Working Party 3 (WP3) already yesterday during WP3’s closing plenary. Last week the document was refined through changes by the Question 16/13 chairman and a SmartenIT member, who attended SG13’s July meeting (7^th-18^th of July) in Geneva, Switzerland, several times to ensure the consenting of the document. With the reached consent the document can now undergo ITU-T’s approval process during which ITU-T members may request last changes to the document. The document is expected to have passed this process in two months from now upon which it will finally be released.

Y.FNsocioeconomic is aimed at the “Socio-economic Assessment of Future Networks by Tussle Analysis” and was 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.

The outlined activities are conducted in the framework of SmartenIT’s socio-economic research facet. Because SmartenIT 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, the development of Y.FNsocioeconomic is highly relevant for SmartenIT. 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 and 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.

The need for consideration of socio-economic aspects is recognized by ITU-T but a suitable tool to address these in the standardization process is missing. This gap became visible in the discussions on UZH’s contribution to ITU-T’s RevCom meeting, which proposed to integrate tussle analysis into ITU-T’s standardization process. This proposal was delayed, because tussle analysis is specified in Y.FNsocioeconomic, which was still under development. However, as of today Y.FNsocioeconomic can be expected to be released in the near future, also UZH’s efforts within RevCom are planned to be resumed.