Community Infrastructure

Mesh networks in Karnataka, community audio, and tools for collectives: infrastructure that communities own and maintain.

What does it mean to build digital infrastructure that communities own and maintain?

In Bidar, Janastu’s mesh network ran as an intranet of informal archives: folklore, songs, and oral practices held by women of various communities. The reflection in Compost Digital tried to hold both the limits of the technology and what it opened up.

The COWs (Community-Owned Wifi-Mesh) principles came out of that practice: community networks are about social relationships and trust as much as connectivity. There is also a framework for keeping such a network generative rather than extractive, mapping the roles of builders, maintainers, and creators. The experience fed a piece for the Association for Progressive Communications and a Technoscience Salon panel.

Papad is a community audio archive, built for how oral communities already share knowledge, running on the same kind of mesh networks.

The checklist for selecting digital tools for Indian collectives is shaped by limited resources, mixed literacy, and how collectives actually decide. The Webinar Pi argues for building conferencing on Raspberry Pi hardware, for people the commercial platforms assume do not exist.