TY - JOUR
T1 - "the Network Is an Excuse"
T2 - Hardware Maintenance Supporting Community
AU - Garrison, Philip
AU - Jang, Esther Han Beol
AU - Lithgow, Michael A.
AU - Pace, Nicolás Andrés
N1 - Funding Information:
We are very grateful to AlterMundi and all of our participants whose contributions made this study possible, including Gioacchino Mazzurco, Virginia Sosa, Florencia Pezé, Marcos Gutierrez, Natalia Baravalle, Daniel Baravalle, Martin Gaitan, and Leandro Navarro. Thanks to Ramón Roca for his input during our fieldwork. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers (both sets), Lucy Pei, Naveena Karusala, Amanda Baughan, Christine Geeng, David Ribes, and Sandy Kaplan for feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. This paper draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/10/18
Y1 - 2021/10/18
N2 - The global community networking movement promotes locally-managed network infrastructure as a strategy for affordable Internet connectivity. This case study investigates a group of collectively managed WiFi Internet networks in Argentina and the technologists who design the networking hardware and software. Members of these community networks collaborate on maintenance and repair and practice new forms of collective work. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we show that the networking technologies play a role in the social relations of their maintenance and that they are intentionally configured to do so. For technology designers and deployers, we suggest a path beyond designing for easy repair: since every breakdown is an opportunity to learn, we should design for accessible repair experiences that enable effective collaborative learning.
AB - The global community networking movement promotes locally-managed network infrastructure as a strategy for affordable Internet connectivity. This case study investigates a group of collectively managed WiFi Internet networks in Argentina and the technologists who design the networking hardware and software. Members of these community networks collaborate on maintenance and repair and practice new forms of collective work. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, we show that the networking technologies play a role in the social relations of their maintenance and that they are intentionally configured to do so. For technology designers and deployers, we suggest a path beyond designing for easy repair: since every breakdown is an opportunity to learn, we should design for accessible repair experiences that enable effective collaborative learning.
KW - communities of practice
KW - community networks
KW - ICTD
KW - repair
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85117900742&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3479608
DO - 10.1145/3479608
M3 - Journal Article
AN - SCOPUS:85117900742
VL - 5
JO - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
JF - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
IS - CSCW2
M1 - 464
ER -