Out of the Loop: Problems in the development of next generation community networks

This paper looks at five U.S. cities (Austin, Cleveland, Nashville, Portland, and Washington, DC) and explores strategies being employed by community activists and local governments to create and sustain community networking projects. In some cities, community networking initiatives are relatively mature, while in others they are in early or intermediate stages. The paper looks at several factors that help explain the evolution of community networks in cities: 1) Local gove...

To bridge the digital divide between the urban and rural regions, the government of Cameroon has launched the Multipurpose Community Telecentres (MCT). But this project does not seems to sustain the local development. The aim of this study is threefold: to determine the ICT penetration in rural Cameroon and Internet adoption; to evaluate the impact of MCTs in rural region and to provide some recommendations for both the network planning and the development of suitable service...

Community Informatics (CI) is the application of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives. CI goes beyond the "Digital Divide" to making ICT access usable and useful to excluded populations and communities for local economic development, social justice, and political empowerment. CI approaches ICTs from a "community" perspective and develops strategies and techniques for managing their use by ...

Five years after the '96 Telecommunications Act, we still find precious little local facilities-based competition. In response there are calls in Congress and even from the FCC for new legislation to "free the Bells." However, the same ideology drove policy, not just five years ago, but also almost twenty years back with the first modern push for "freedom," namely divestiture. How might we frame the question of policy for local access to engender a more fruitful approach? T...

Community network (CN) initiatives have been around for roughly two decades, evangelizing a distinctly different paradigm for building, maintaining, and sharing network infrastructure but also defending the basic human right to Internet access. Over this time they have evolved into a mosaic of systems that vary widely with respect to their network technologies, their offered services, their organizational structure, and the way they position themselves in the overall telecomm...

There has been a long standing tradition amongst developed nations of influencing, both directly and indirectly, the activities of developing economies. Behind this is one of a range of aims: building/improving living standards, bettering the social status of recipient communities, etc. In some cases, this has resulted in prosperous relations, yet often this has been seen as the exploitation of a power position or a veneer for other activities (e.g. to tap into new emerging m...

We propose a mixed-methods approach to understanding the human infrastructure underlying StreetNet (SNET), a distributed, community-run intranet that serves as the primary 'Internet' in Havana, Cuba. We bridge ethnographic studies and the study of social networks and organizations to understand the way that power is embedded in the structure of Havana's SNET. By quantitatively and qualitatively unpacking the human infrastructure of SNET, this work reveals how distributed infr...

This paper brings evidence to bear on the question of the long-term effects of Internet diffusion on civic engagement in geographic communities. It draws on findings from survey data collected in four U.S. towns and cities in fall 2000 where community computer networking is established. The study shows that early adopters of the Internet are more likely to engage in civic activities and to have higher levels of community involvement than later adopters. Further, early adopter...

This paper offers an overview of the Commons for Europe (C4EU) project and the role of Bottom-up Broadband (BuB) in developing the information society. BuB is characterized by the fact that the beneficiaries of the networks actively participate in the planning, deployment and maintenance tasks. For the beneficiaries, this represent a paradigm shift from a consumer-only position to an active-participant position. We summarize a representative set of the BuB pilot proposals tha...

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance of the dwelling from the specific node of the network serving its area. Merging unique information about th...