On the technical and social structure of community networks

A Community Network is a bottom-up network created by a community of people with the goal of building a self-owned, self-managed communication infrastructure. Community Networks are blooming, they range from small ones (tens of nodes) to gigantic ones (tens of thousands of nodes), they are made primarily of wireless links but in some cases they mix wired and wireless technologies. People running a Community Network wish to have more independence and more control on the infrastructure compared to what commercial ISPs offer. Such networks can not be understood without studying the interaction between the social and the technical aspects, since both layers are tightly intertwined. This paper will show some properties of three community networks, indicating that they have some structural peculiarities. It will also show a socio-technical analysis using data coming from the public mailing list of one of the community, in order to highlight issues that the community needs to address to guarantee its sustainable growth.