Community Infrastructure

From mesh networks in rural Karnataka to community audio archives- building technology that communities own and maintain.

This thread follows a question that has shaped much of my practice since 2019: what does it mean to build digital infrastructure that communities actually own?

It begins in Bidar, where Janastu’s mesh network experiments showed what “connectivity” could look like when it is not mediated by commercial ISPs. The project set up a local mesh network as an intranet of informal archives- folklore, songs, oral practices held by women of various communities- that would collectively function as a knowledge network. The reflections published in Compost Digital tried to hold both the limitations of technology and its potential to catalyse spaces of cultural collaboration.

From that experiment came a speculative framework for long-term sustainable community-owned wifi mesh networks, mapping the roles of builders, maintainers, creators, and the actions needed to keep the network generative rather than extractive. Papad emerged on this infrastructure- a tool for community audio archives, designed for the way oral communities actually share knowledge, deployed over the same decentralised networks.

The COWs (Community-Owned Wifi-Mesh) principles distilled what was being learned through practice: that community networks are about social relationships and trust as much as technical connectivity. Writing for the Association for Progressive Communications and presenting at Technoscience Salons brought these experiences into broader conversations about alternative internet infrastructures- what they demand, what they offer, and what ruins of dominant network models they grow from.

The practical work also generated tools: a checklist for selecting digital tools for Indian collectives, shaped by the realities of limited resources, diverse literacy levels, and the social dynamics of collective decision-making. And the Webinar Pi- an argument for building conferencing tools on Raspberry Pi hardware to foster digital literacy in communities where commercial platforms assume connectivity and devices that do not exist.

The through-line across these pieces is not technology but relationships: between communities and their tools, between infrastructure and the social fabric it either strengthens or tears.