"Community" is a key organizing principle shaping online socio-economic networks. Because the practices of creating and sustaining community networks require knowledge of online community development, the practitioners of that art represent a significant body of experience in understanding the impacts of using the Internet to change the patterns of daily life. If the goal of governments and business is really to "unite" with "civil society" then community networks, and the agencies that serve to understand and advance their role in community development, are a critical and absent element in brokering that union.

The people who are learning how to use community networking to defend the electronic commons and to support radical practice in social change at the grassroots level know as much about the consequences of living with the impact of transition to networked economies and learning societies as anyone. But what they know has yet to be contributed effectively to either national or supranational strategic planning.

When corporations and governments focus on electronic commerce as the driving force in adapting to social transformation, they turn a blind eye to the need to understand how community is realized online. A community's health is coming to depend on controlling the means to capture the experience of realizing community online and turning it into practice. Unless there's a conscious community networking process in place at the local level, the community lacks the means of capturing what's going on and applying it to its own interests. Community networks give enormous power to individuals who engage in realizing the benefits of community based action through electronic means. That experience of engagement provides for balance in the relationship between technological change and social change.

The idea of a "global economy" is, of course, an ideological abstraction. In getting to "Yes" in the negotiation of a new social contract, such a strongly held belief on one side makes it difficult for those who subject it to critical examination to find the zone of mutual interest. This is especially true if the alliances of governments and businesses continue to treat citizens (or as they say to blur the rising tide of voices into a mass, "civil society") as consumers of "services." It is becoming increasingly clear that, even considered as consumers, the communities of interest that inhabit and shape markets are steadily enhancing their power to negotiate. One rule - the negotiation process is going to continue increasing in complexity. Denying self-organization to homogeneous determined communities is going to get harder and harder.

The "union" of governments, businesses and civil societies should not be an attempt to perpetuate the forms of the old global society - to seek at best a society of nations united. The imagined model of how supranational agencies should work is often the notion of nation state writ large. Call "world government" the "meta-state"? But the problem is that networked infrastructure really does reintermediate the sovereign power of nation states. And the protocols that govern the formation of nations and relations among them aren't IP (Internet Protocol). Community networks already inhabit the new global society. Their unity is in diversity, not through the order of states. Why should they participate in supporting agendas that seek to perpetuate what they are not?

It is people who connect in networks, digitally enabled or not. The bottom line for civil society must be that access to IP is not about access to "architecture." IP expresses a philosophy of relationship that structures the institutions of the culture of the Net. The key objective in development must remain "informing" the autonomy of local choice, not applying technology to access "information" as a commodity.

In fact, IP based networks (i.e. understood as social networks) do inform local choices quite differently. But there is a huge potential for global networks with a purely technology focus, and acting in the name of security, property and control, to eventually pervert the impact of IP on the distribution and re-distribution of socio-cultural and political power. In a corrupt world, advancing large amounts of money to address the digital divide for the wrong reasons has as tremendous potential for sustaining inequality rather than reducing it.

Those who work in community networks believe in the value of full and open participation in the choices about the structure of institutional arrangements that address social, economic and political needs. When any can connect to any, and all voices can be heard, why not seek to maximize the benefits of completely new and different possibilities to be found in the re-intermediation of political and economic power that is under way?

The GCN Partnership's mandate is to increase interdependencies in the diverse and distributed community of those who act on the local level to understand and develop community online. The most appropriate experiences of community development online are local, uncentered and widely distributed by their very nature. The instinct to centralize something in finding a route for applying that experience to socio-economic development in general is diametrically opposed to its essence. How can we enhance the strength that emerges from local autonomy in self-organization without turning it into its opposite?

The practice of community development, whether online or off is simple. People want to talk. Let them. Therefore the purpose of a Global Community Networks Partnership isn't to organize community networks into a supranational agency or to focus their goals. It's to foster networks that share their experience of online community development and to increase their capacity to defend cyberspace as a commons.