Community Network is a term used broadly to indicate use of networking technologies by and for a local community. Free-Nets and Civic Networks indicate roughly the same range of projects and services, whereas community technology centers (CTCs) and Telecentres often indicate a facility to compensate lack of access to information and communication technologies (ICTs).
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2 Information and Services 3 Operators and Primary Goals 4 History 5 Future Prospects |
There is no widely-accepted and used definition on the term. When one looks at the entries of community network directories or the papers and web sites whose titles and names bear community network or communitry networking, it is noticeable that a variety of practices exist. This diversity can be seen in:
Based on this ongoing use of the term, a community network could be any or some combinatin of the following:
As seen from the above list, community networking is practiced by many different groups with different goals.
The groups in charge of planning and operationg the project may be:
In general, what is common among these is the use of some means of communication and involvement of some locality. It should be noted that here, locality indeed mean again many different size of places. The area a community network identifies with could be a town, city, county, metropolitan area, state, or occasionally a region including parts of whole of multiple states.
However, majority of the community networks seem to be associated with a metropolitan area or smaller places.
There are a number of factors contributing the diversity of practice under the term.
Among the earliest practices that are frequently mentioned are Big Sky Telegraph (Montana, USA), (Cleveland, USA) Public Electronic Network (PEN) in Santa Monica (California, USA), Digital Amsterdam in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Definition and Diversity
Each of these is discussed in the following. Information and Services
It should also be noted that, while community network increasingly involves a web site, it may be of secondary importance for the project (such as in case of a local ISP), or there might be no web site - in the past, some operated via ftp and other networking protocols than http. Operators and Primary Goals
The primary goals of community networks may include:
Some of these are not completely independent goals, nor contradictory, but interrelated and can reasonably pursued at the same time. Geographical Coverage
Factors behind Diversity
History
