Infrastructuring at the Margins: Studies in Community Networking

Abstract

This work provides three case studies of people claiming power over technology through DIY infrastructure building activities within diverse settings of technological marginality, both rural and urban. These studies are conducted in the context of ongoing community network (CN) projects—networks established, owned, and/or managed by local users in a “bottom-up” or collaborative manner [35]—that I worked on during my PhD. The first study presents the material hardships of achieving local technology repair in remote rural cove communities in the Philippines in terms of seams between heterogeneous urban and rural infrastructures. To patch these seams, people dynamically construct intermittent and informal repair infrastructures based on trust. Despite structural challenges, the remote communities are able to maintain a robust ecosystem for electrical line repair, from which we generalize the model of training grounds—requirements for sustaining an ecosystem of practicing local experts and shared expertise, or a community of practice [255]. The model emphasizes the importance of in-context “actual” problems as well as access to resources such as tools and expert knowledge. In the second study, I make use of the training grounds concept to establish an operational community of practice for building and maintaining a community broadband network for marginalized residents and neighborhoods in an urban North American context. Through qualitative analysis of participant interviews from the Seattle Community Network (SCN) and NYC Mesh as well as my own participant observer journals from 2020-2023, the research surfaces grassroots infrastructuring processes by which CN participants embed their values and intentions into the network’s socio-technical infrastructure, shaping deployed artifacts. We present a model for a non-profit, education-focused CN, termed a community learning network (CLN), that builds power among participants and produces a learning commons for in-context hands-on technical learning. Finally, we identify technical dilemmas and tradeoffs related to CNs’ dependence on powerful institutional partners who contribute resources and mediate participation. The third case also demonstrates situations where power is held by owners who contribute land to unhoused communities for use as Tiny House Villages (THVs); these power relationships constrain and shape the housing, utility, and technology infrastructure that residents can build and maintain. Through participatory design workshops of networked sensing applications with residents of two self-managed THVs where network access is served by SCN, the study investigates parameters for successful IoT interventions among low-resourced urban groups experiencing housing precarity. We identify how land ownership (public or private), management, and the local regulatory environment affect the ways in which residents can use and modify infrastructure, and how historical and current zoning of the land shapes the types of social problems that the community must navigate. Residents installing sensors or other utility infrastructure encounter the limitations of DIY and ad-hoc approaches, often mandated by resource constraints; the resulting infrastructure reproduces underlying precarities related to the residents’ housing status. Meanwhile, they impose additional constraints on sensor designs for their collective protection, such as a strict ban on camera-based visual or audio surveillance and a preference for local as opposed to cloud data storage. They also identify opportunities for diverse sensors and actuators to improve village accessibility and alleviate resource sharing tensions. Major Themes: All three chapters center a DIY and hands-on approach to infrastructure. Chapters 1 and 2 highlight the importance of communities of practice and pedagogy for creating long-term structural change through participation. I emphasize pedagogy as a strategy for facilitating engagement of groups who might otherwise be marginalized within technical communities of practice. In all three cases, we find that infrastructure is composed not primarily of technical artifacts but the people whose actions produce and maintain them, and whose relationships, values, and constraints shape them. Chapters 1 and 2 describe processes by which relational infrastructure influences the form and function of technology. Chapters 2 and 3 make extensive use of participant observation methodologies, where the researcher is a participant in the activity or context being studied. I argue in Chapter 2 that such reflexive methodologies can help technology developers capture and reflect on the values and ethics, collective or personal, that shape the products they design.