On February 25 and 27, 2013, members of the UZH delegation (coordinator of SmartenIT) attended the ITU-T SG13 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to contribute to the development of ITU recommendation Y.FNsocioeconomic, which is aimed at the “Socio-economic Aware Design of Future Network Technology”. The development of this document stems from efforts of the SESERV project, that initiated the development of the document within ITU in 2011. The study period, that the development of the document was started in, recently ended, wherefore a new Question to develop the document in, became necessary. Thus, the first proposal of SmartenIT attendants was to continue the development of the document within an ITU-T’s Q16/13, that addresses “Environmental and socio-economic sustainability in future networks and early realization of FN” and is therefore considered a perfect match for the further development of the document. Secondly, editorial and structural changes were proposed. Third, the addition of a section that explains to ITU members how to best integrate the socio-economic analysis (by the means of tussle analysis) proposed within Y.FNsocioeconomic in the standardization of Future Networks was suggested. All three proposals were well received by the meeting participants. However, the valuable feedback given during the meeting led to agree on significant extensions and adaptions of the document, as discussed subsequently.

ITU recommendation Y.3001 identified objectives and design goals for future networks, two of which were "social and economic awareness" (objective) and "economic incentives" (design goal). Y.FNsocioeconomic was started to develop a methodology to better achieve these two criteria. As pointed out by meeting participants, the objective of “social and economic awareness” implies the design goal “service universalization” (besides "economic incentives"), which was hitherto not addressed by Y.FNsocioeconomic. Since the document attracted meeting participants, these volunteered to provide content for such an additional section until the next Study Group meeting. To further improve consistency with Y.3001, the scope of the document will be adapted and the title was changed to “Social and Economic Awareness of Future Networks” (cf. Y.3001 Section 7.4).

The next editorial iteration for Y.FNsocioecomic will happen during SG13 Rapporteur meeting in June 17-28, 2013, and during SG13 meeting in November 4-15, 2013. The UZH delegation will provide contributions to these iterations that are to be developed in the framework of SmartenIT´s socio-economic research facet and evaluates potential to channel technical SmartenIT research to ITU-T recommendations as well.