Learning from COWs: Community Owned Wifi-Mesh
A reflection on facilitating community network spaces and developing principles for open climate networks through community practices and local engagement.
Published in Branch Magazine (Issue 4), this piece reflects on facilitating community network spaces and developing principles for open climate networks. “COWs”- Community Owned Wifi-Mesh- is both acronym and metaphor: a grounded, unglamorous, collectively maintained form of infrastructure, explored further in the framework for establishing a generative community mesh network.
The article draws on our experience building and maintaining mesh networks in rural Karnataka- including the Bidar project- to propose principles for how community practices and local engagement can inform the design of climate-responsive digital infrastructure. It asks what “open” means when the communities in question have never been centred in conversations about openness, a question also taken up in the Alternatives and Demands in Network Ruins panel.