The Politics of Open Infrastructures - 12. Opening Network Infrastructures

12. Opening Network Infrastructures: The Sociomaterial Politics of Openness in Grassroots Community Networks

Stefano Crabu

©2026 Stefano Crabu, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0528.12

1. Introduction

Sometimes someone says: ‘Excuse me, but is it not enough that the internet is already working? Why is it not enough to request that the municipality put internet in areas still not covered?’ This question is a challenge for all of us, and we want to contribute to building a parallel infrastructure, which has grown over time and represents a space of freedom. (Italian community wireless network activist interviewed by the author)

This opening quote reflects the perspective of an Italian activist involved in Ninux.org—a pioneering grassroots initiative in Italy committed to the collective construction of digital communication infrastructures as a counter-hegemonic alternative to the corporate, centralised architecture of the mainstream internet (see Crabu et al. 2015). Although articulated in technical terms, his intervention foregrounds a central concern in current social science debates on infrastructuring processes: digital infrastructures are not merely functional assemblages enabling data transmission, but deeply political artefacts entangled in the modulation of power, rights, and forms of citizenship. They constitute contested terrains where technical arrangements and politics are inextricably intertwined (Edwards 2010).

This perspective frames grassroots digital infrastructuring initiatives like Ninux.org not merely as technical projects, but as socio-technical interventions—deliberate efforts to reconfigure power relations within the dominant landscape of digital governance. By constructing alternative networks, grassroots initiatives expose how mainstream digital infrastructures are never merely technical supports for connectivity, but rather sites where governance, corporate control, and resistance intersect. Under this lens, digital communication infrastructures are increasingly conceptualised as dynamic socio-technical systems that shape access to knowledge, mediate forms of civic engagement, and generate new modalities of inclusion and exclusion (Larkin 2013; Plantin et al. 2016). As such, infrastructures are sites of contestation where values, resources, and imagined futures are materially negotiated (Parks & Starosielski 2015). The design, maintenance, and visibility of digital infrastructures—who builds them, who governs them, and who can access them—are central to broader conflicts surrounding surveillance, sovereignty, and social justice in the digital age.

Infrastructure, in this view, is a form of slow, enduring governance—shaping the very conditions under which political agency can emerge. Michael Mann’s (1986) historical account of infrastructural power underscores how communication systems have historically served as levers of administrative control and statecraft, facilitating both territorial integration and surveillance. In dialogue with this, Barry (2020) conceptualises infrastructures as dynamic and contested configurations of technical devices, standards, and institutional logics that transgress and rearticulate political and spatial boundaries. Digital infrastructures, in this sense, are not just media of connection, but instruments of (counter)governance—material embodiments of political ideologies, imaginaries of citizenship, and epistemic regimes.

One of the most pertinent contemporary sites for examining the mutual shaping of politics and infrastructures is that of Community Networks (CNs), including initiatives such as Ninux.org. Over the last two decades, CNs have gained increasing visibility in public discourse and among policy makers as grassroots network infrastructures offering alternative models to commercial or state-led internet provision (Van Oost et al. 2009; Verhaegh and Van Oost 2012; Shaffer 2020). Typically designed, built, and maintained by local collectives, these networks propose different configurations of ownership, governance, and technical architecture that seek to decentralise control and enhance autonomy. They are thus not only technical artefacts, but also socio-political projects aimed at democratising internet access and reconfiguring the politics of connectivity. Technically, many CNs adopt a mesh or distributed architecture. In mesh networks, each node (or device) can connect directly to multiple other nodes, without relying on a central router or single point of control. This enables decentralised and resilient connectivity: if one node fails, data can be rerouted through others. Mesh networks can dynamically reconfigure themselves in response to changes in the environment, providing robust performance in underserved or challenging contexts. This form of technical decentralisation is not incidental—it directly aligns with the political ethos of CNs, reinforcing values of autonomy, redundancy, and collective management (Maccari et al. 2016).

This shift becomes particularly salient in a context marked by the increasing centralisation, commodification, and infrastructural opacity of the global internet (Van Dijck et al. 2018; Zuboff 2019). Under the governance of a small oligopoly of platform monopolies, contemporary digital infrastructures are organised around extractive data economies, algorithmic opacity, and asymmetrical control over standards and access (Sadowski 2019). In this regard, the infrastructural turn in platform studies highlights how power is exercised not only through content moderation or interface design, but through the technical and logistical arrangements that structure participation, constrain autonomy, and mediate visibility across networks (Parks 2015).

Against this backdrop, CNs position themselves not merely as oppositional trajectories, but as prefigurative infrastructures—initiatives that enact alternative socio-technical configurations grounded in horizontal governance, free/libre/ open-source software, and cooperative models of maintenance and care. These initiatives challenge the dominant digital infrastructural regime by foregrounding user agency, collective ownership, and epistemic transparency. In doing so, CNs contribute to reimagining digital connectivity as a shared civic resource rather than a privatised service, articulating modes of digital citizenship that resist enclosure while enabling experimentation with new forms of democratic networked life.

This chapter examines how the politics of openness is enacted through grassroots infrastructuring practices, focusing on the case of CNs. Drawing on science and technology studies ( STS)—particularly infrastructure studies (Bowker and Star 1999; Star and Ruhlede.... Here, the politics of openness is not only an analytical lens but also a lived practice, made tangible through governance arrangements, technical decisions, and sociomaterial negotiations.

Indeed, what this formulation implies for practical engagements with infrastructures remains far from straightforward: What does it mean to prioritise openness while simultaneously shaping stable, functional systems? How do actors navigate the tensions between the aspiration to openness and the often rigid material and organisational demands of infrastructural design? These tensions highlight that openness is not an a priori condition to be embedded into infrastructures, but a contingent and contested outcome of socio-technical negotiations. The term ‘politics’ in this context serves to foreground the performative and situated nature of openness—particularly, its emergence through the iterative entanglement of governance practices, technical decisions, political imaginaries, and infrastructural constraints.

Following Winner’s (1980) insight that ‘artifacts have politics,’ I argue that technologies such as routing protocols, antennas, and open-source platforms do not merely support openness but shape its meaning and boundaries. Infrastructures, from this angle, are not passive enablers of political values but active sites where those values are materially negotiated and made durable or, at times, rendered fragile. Openness is thus enacted through technical constraints, not in spite of them but via hybrid collectives of human actors and heterogeneous materials engaged in practices of configuration, maintenance, and governance. Rather than seeking fixed definitions of openness, this chapter proposes to investigate its multiple instantiations as a doable problem—a practical, ongoing effort that requires continuous negotiation and adaptation. It is within this processual framing that the politics of openness can be meaningfully explored. What openness becomes in practice depends not only on normative aspirations but also on the infrastructural settings through which it is pursued. Hence, the guiding question of this inquiry is not whether CNs are ‘open’ or not, but how openness is done, by whom, with what tools, and with what consequences.

This approach enables a relational understanding of openness as both a political and socio-technical phenomenon—always situated and in-the-making. Empirically, this chapter draws on a multi-sited qualitative study of Ninux.org conducted between 2014 and 2015. The fieldwork included eleven semi-structured interviews with long-term members of four local nodes (Rome, Pisa, Bologna, Florence), participant observation at national meetings, and analysis of collaborative infrastructures... as a ‘gymnasium of experimentation,’ where technical skills and political subjectivities are co-constructed through ongoing infrastructuring work. In this context, Ninux.org is used as an instrumental case study, not because of its uniqueness per se, but because it helps illuminate broader processes at stake in the enactment of openness within grassroots infrastructures. The case illuminates how openness is materially and discursively shaped in practice, and how technologies act as mediators that configure, enable, or constrain the performative..., the chapter also contributes a geographically situated analysis from Southern Europe, adding to the global conversation on grassroots infrastructures, openness, and digital sovereignty. While much of the literature has focused on cases from the Global North or on high-profile initiatives in urban innovation hubs, this chapter foregrounds a different infrastructural geography—one shaped by uneven state investment, volunteer labour, and alternative imaginaries of connectivity. This situatedness reveals how openness is not only a tech...

The structure of the chapter reflects this analytical orientation. It begins by tracing a genealogy of community networks as a socio-technical movement, following their evolution from early experiments in countercultural computing to more recent developments in mesh networking. The subsequent analysis unfolds across closely interconnected dimensions through which the politics of openness is enacted in practice. First, the chapter explores the governance models and participatory arrangements through which CNs operate. It then turns to the material and maintenance practices that sustain infrastruc... are not merely alternatives to commercial internet provision—they are experimental and contested arenas where openness is continuously performed. Their political significance lies not only in the values they promote, but in the situated, materially grounded, and collectively sustained practices through which they make those values operative.

2. The Long Journey Toward Opening Network Infrastructures: The Genealogy of Community Networks

The increasing centralisation of digital infrastructures, coupled with neoliberal regulatory frameworks that foster commodification and surveillance, has catalysed renewed interest in distributed, community-rooted alternatives. In this context, CNs are not only infrastructural responses but also political interventions that contest dominant regimes of connectivity and control. This section traces the historical and socio-technical genealogy of CNs, situating them within the broader landscape of infrastructural studies, and foregrounding their embeddedness in the politics of openness, autonomy, and self-governance.

CNs are grassroots initiatives aimed at collectively building and managing communication infrastructures, often structured around the principles of the digital commons (Bollier 2008; Velicu and García-López 2018). While they provide internet connectivity, their deeper function is to reimagine infrastructure as a domain of collective action and civic empowerment. CNs exemplify a kind of ‘material participation’ (see Le Dantec and DiSalvo 2013; Marres 2012), where technical design and deployment become vehicles for democratic engagement. These networks are not simply alternatives to corporate ISPs; they instantiate counter-hegemonic models of infrastructural governance based on transparency, horizontality, and mutual aid. Organised through hybrid collectives of technologists, activists, hobbyists, and occasionally municipal authorities, CNs materialise at the intersection of technical experimentation and political imagination (Shaffer 2020).

These collectives, however, do more than operate infrastructure; they actively reconfigure the epistemic and material conditions of digital networked environments by engaging in struggles over ownership, visibility, and the governance of technical systems that shape everyday life.

The roots of CNs extend back to early pre-commercial internet cultures, emerging from countercultural movements that framed computing as a tool for collective empowerment. Early initiatives, such as Berkeley’s 1973 Memory Project, were deeply embedded in the ethos of the homebrew computing and DIY movements, envisioning decentralised technology as a means of fostering community autonomy and resilience (Levy 1984). These projects aligned with broader critiques of centralised media systems and drew inspiration from radical media traditions—including pirate radio and the underground press—that prioritised self-managed communication (Downing 2001). Armin Medosch’s (2008) work on Freie Netze underscores how early European wireless experiments fused libertarian political traditions, creating socio-technical infrastructures that prefigured later CNs.

The 1980s–1990s saw CNs proliferate across North America and Europe, coinciding with telecommunications liberalisation and the rise of personal computing. Free-Nets and Bulletin Board Systems epitomised this wave, leveraging nascent connectivity tools to cultivate localised publics (Turner 2006). Projects like the Seattle Community Network and Cleveland Free-Net not only filled infrastructural voids but also exemplified what Sandvig (2004) describes as collectivities, constituted through shared engagement with infrastructure. These efforts reflected a socio-technical imaginary of the internet as a participatory, civic resource rather than a privatised commodity. Yet, such formations were neither widespread nor uniformly emancipatory. As Köhn (2025) demonstrates in the Cuban context, CNs often emerged in response to conditions of scarcity or state repression, highlighting how infrastructural practices are contingently shaped by local political economies and social struggles. This tension underscores a central paradox in CNs: while they aspire to democratise access, their trajectories remain entangled with broader structures of power (Star 1999).

The early 2000s marked a shift in CNs’ scope and scale, bolstered by the availability of affordable Wi-Fi technology and open-source firmware. Initiatives such as Freifunk in Germany (Vaseva 2016), Guifi.net in Spain (Vega et al. 2012), and Zenzeleni Networks in South Africa (Hussen et al. 2016) revealed diverse governance configurations, from radically horizontal collectives to more structured community associations.

These projects challenge any idealised or singular model of community networks. For instance, while Freifunk champions a decentralised vision grounded in hacker ethics and anti- surveillance principles, Zenzeleni reflects a form of infrastructural pragmatism, where connectivity solutions are shaped by the immediate needs of under-served rural communities. Moreover, CNs in the Global South often reveal how infrastructuring efforts are motivated less by aspirations of political autonomy and more by the urgency of securing basic access. Taken together, these cases illustrate the diverse logics and practical considerations that drive CN development, highlighting the multiplicity of motivations, values, and operational models at play. Thus, CNs increasingly intersect with contemporary digital platform politics. As commercial platforms consolidate infrastructural power by controlling protocols, access points, and data flows, CNs offer situated alternatives through which governance, participation, and control are continuously negotiated. From this perspective, CNs function both as technological experiments and as socio-political prototypes, challenging the platformisation of everyday life.

Hence, CNs emerge through situated struggles over connectivity, shaped by local histories, material constraints, and political cultures. Turning now to a specific case study, Ninux.org, I show how the politics of openness is not a static ideal but a dynamic and contested field, continually reconfigured through practices of infrastructuring, negotiation, and care, as well as through the governance mechanisms that sustain CNs over time.

3. Governing Community Networks, Opening Infrastructures

Unlike large, centralised networks owned and operated by powerful third parties—such as the state or major profit-driven Internet Service Providers (ISPs)— CNs are typically established by and for local or regional communities (see Belli 2018). Their primary focus is not profit generation but addressing the collective needs of their participants and communities. Indeed, participants in these initiatives recognise that contemporary social, cultural, and economic life is increasingly co-shaped by information and communication technologies, particularly through the production, circulation, and control of data and knowledge. In their view, connectivity should enable the circulation of information and knowledge as commons.

These networks also explore innovative models of distributed governance, grounded in cooperation and sharing among a community of peers (ranging from a few dozen to tens of thousands), echoing the principles of commons-based peer production (Shaffer 2020). By empowering users with technical expertise, CNs not only ensure the sustainability of their projects but also foster a more engaged and digitally literate community, capabl... reflects on their involvement with the community not as a result of prior technical expertise, but as a learning process fostered through collective participation and support:

No, I’m not an engineer, but here in [Ninux.org] it is not the situation where you’re alone, trying to do things. When you approach a community that teaches you all sorts of things, it is easy to learn. So, my interest in mesh networks depends on a series of events that triggered my curiosity. I became interested, I went [to the meetings] and I liked it. I did not understand anything at first, as when I went there it was like listening to someone speaking another language. And slowly, by insisting, I started to learn that kind of language. (Interview 3, participant in Rome)

As the interview excerpt makes clear, CNs do not merely provide an alternative mode of internet access; they also enact a different vision of how digital infrastructure can be governed and how users can participate in that governance.

Many CNs rely on highly decentralised mesh networking architectures (Akyildiz and Wang 2005) that enable peer-to-peer interconnection among devices—including routers, computers, smartphones, and other terminals—through direct... explained:

You cannot define our services really as ‘services,’ in the sense that normally a ‘service’ implies that there is a supplier for these services. In this case, being completely self-managed, the services have emerged when people, who had a need to do something, put up a solution and offered it to others. So, early things that came out were services to communicate, then chat and do other stuff like file sharing; someone also started to implement a search engine that searches within the files of all hard drives that are around. (Interview 1, participant in Rome)

A defining characteristic of CNs is their commitment to user autonomy, digital literacy, and the protection of fundamental rights to communication and privacy. Unlike commercial ISPs that may restrict web navigation or censor specific websites and content, many CNs are designed to uphold principles of ‘net neutrality.’ Local mesh networks are often framed by their developers and users as alternatives to the global internet, offering spaces of autonomy that resist pervasive surveillance—a consequence of privacy-invasive practices embedded in traditional online service providers. In this regard, scholars note that local mesh networks are often embraced as infrastructures of resistance against the surveillance capitalism endemic to mainstream digital platforms (Sinnreich et al. 2011). Accordingly, such infrastructures advocate for a more egalitarian and collaborative political framework, characterised by governance structures that emphasise symmetry, mutual collaboration, and active participation (Kostakis and Bauwens 2014).

This model prioritises a politics of openness grounded in shared decision-making and collective ownership, contrasting sharply with the more centralised, corporate-controlled structures that dominate much of the current internet landscape. Against this backdrop, CNs reveal a set of recurring governance features through which a politics of openness is performed in practice (see Albert 2013; Baig et al. 2015; Belli 2018; Shaffer 2020):

• Open communication: A cornerstone is transparency. Many CNs have embraced this principle by implementing open financial reporting. This includes publicly disclosing all expenses, equipment costs, membership fees, and other income sources, and often maintaining a public registry of operational relay nodes.
• User engagement: CNs often engage their communities to shape the network’s design and management. This is achieved through non-hierarchical organisational structures and collaborative decision-making processes that prioritise discussion and agreement. While most communication occurs via email lists or instant messaging platforms, many CNs also organise regular in-person meetings. These meetings, held weekly or monthly, provide an opportunity for all interested participants and core volunteers to connect socially and address crucial operational matters. This approach fosters a sense of community ownership and ensures that the network’s development aligns with the needs and values of its community. For instance, in the case of CNs providing internet access in areas overlooked by traditional commercial ISPs, it is common to accommodate members’ diverse financial situations, developing specific subscription schemes for unemployed individuals and students, with some even adopting a ‘pay-what-you-can’ model. Furthermore, many CNs extend their services by configuring their networks to provide free internet access to various community spaces such as cultural centres, public parks, squats, schools, municipal buildings, and healthcare facilities.
• Expertise development and digital empowerment: A significant challenge faced by community networks is the varying levels of technical expertise among users, which can potentially reproduce the asymmetric dynamics between clients and ISPs characteristic of the dominant internet infrastructure. Recognising this, CNs place a strong emphasis on enhancing users’ digital and technical literacy. They focus on teaching and disseminating technical expertise and network management skills to their members, viewing this as crucial not only for the network’s longevity but also as a pivotal way of enacting a politics of openness. This approach aligns with their broader goal of creating inclusive, citizen-centric networks.

Overall, the analysis of governance arrangements in the context of CNs highlights some of the conditions through which a politics of openness is enacted. In this framework, the members themselves are intended to be the ‘architects’ of their network’s design and implementation. This process is oriented toward minimising the influence of corporate interests and relocating decision-making power in the hands of users. Consequently, it fosters an environment where creativity and collaboration thrive: the simple act of neighbours sharing bandwidth or engaging in technical activities for network maintenance has far-reaching implications. It has the potential to strengthen community bonds, promote self-sufficiency, and create spaces for democratic engagement within increasingly digitalised societies. Hence, CNs can be understood as more than technical infrastructures: they operate as ‘sociomaterial platforms’ (Burke and Wolf 2021) within which communities can purposefully engage with, articulate, and address the issues that the infrastructure is designed to confront (e.g., democratisation of digital communication).

Here, the notion of sociomateriality recalls the need to recognise that the political and technical aspects of infrastructuring processes can hardly be dichotomised, and that—accordingly—a politics of openness in network infrastructures is mutually defined at the nexus of human participation and the technologies mobilised in infrastructuring. In other words, CNs can be framed as a sociomaterial platform enabling a politics of openness, where communities engage to overcome the centralisation of internet infrastructure ownership, the subordination of citizens’ privacy to data control, and the general predominance of commercial and profit-driven web services, while centring their governance on a digital inclusion and community ownership framework.

While these characteristics, often central to the CNs’ political framework, possess transformative potential, they also demonstrate inherent ambivalences. Indeed, even the most ambitious challenges to dominant governance structures are, at best, partial and contain within their conceptions and structures the very elements they aim to alter. In this process, prevailing governance arrangements and social structures are inevitably influential. Community networks, whether due to external factors or internal design, inherently contain ideological tensions from their inception. This is unsurprising, given that they develop within a socio-technical space of established power dynamics and binding regulatory frameworks. Such tensions do not warrant dismissal, but neither should they be overlooked. Rather, they call for a reflection on how openness takes shape materially within CNs. As the following section illustrates, technologies are not neutral supports but constitutive mediators that actively configure how openness is enacted and sustained in practice.

4. Free Software, Wireless Antennas, and Technical Expertise at Work in Community Networks’ Politics of Openness

Originally, I started attending the free software environment. The free software community, even though it was a very nerd community, much more tied to technical issues, was still interesting because within it there were reflections, such as what you can do with the software, who can use it, where, when or how. If I’m the one who builds the tool, I can do certain things. But if the tool does not exist, then this chance does not exist anymore. As someone said, who writes code, writes laws. And I learned this thing here through the free software experience. (Italian community wireless network activist interviewed by the author)

This quotation foregrounds a central aspect of CNs, namely the political commitments embedded in the collective development, modification, and use of the hardware and software components required for network operation. This work is framed by developers, maintainers, and users of CNs as a means of opposing the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few corporations or governments, and advocating for users’ rights to regain control over the digital infrastructures and tools that organise everyday experience. As such, it constitutes a performative intervention in shaping the sociomaterial conditions under which a politics of openness can be enacted.

In this regard, it is worth noting that CN members often find satisfaction in materially engaging with the technology itself. They are captivated by the hands-on aspect of wireless networking, deriving fulfilment from addressing technical challenges, devising innovative solutions, and releasing them in accordance with the principles of the Free/Libre and Open-Source Software (see Kelty 2008; von Hippel 2017). This approach challenges the dominant relationship between software production and market dynamics, thereby creating new conditions for alternatives to the neoliberal model of software development and distribution (Schoonmaker 2007). The opening quotation also suggests that CN participants adopt a critical stance toward the socio-technical entanglement of technology and society, resonating with Winner’s (1980) argument that artefacts have politics. Winner emphasised the importance of examining the inherent characteristics of technical objects, arguing that they can embody political properties. Winner proposed two ways in which technology’s political nature manifests: firstly, when a specific technical design becomes a means of resolving community issues; and secondly, when certain technologies inherently align with or enable particular politics.

In the context of CNs, this perspective is crucial for understanding how a politics of openness is sociomaterially enacted. This enactment can be grasped by attending to how specific technological choices are themselves politically charged. These technologies, mainly grounded in the counterculture of media activism (McCaughey and Ayers 2004), actively contribute to shaping the network’s politics of openness, rather than simply serving predetermined technical ends. For instance, the decision to rely on free software, which often requires complex ad hoc customisation, represents the clearest example of how tools used in open infrastructuring interweave with a broader political terrain. This interrelation encompasses issues of freedom, digital rights, and participatory democracy within ICT developments.

The politics of openness is thus enacted through the mediation of material artefacts. The relevance of materiality as a generative dimension of socio-technical processes has been extensively addressed in STS, particularly within actor-network theory (see Callon 1986; Latour 2005). To understand how materiality shapes the politics of openness, we can emphasise that technologies are more than mere organisational elements; they are integral to the politics itself, shaping a sociomaterial arrangement in which human actors and technologies are mutually reconfigured. This constitutive entanglement is central to users’ engagement in CNs: open infrastructuring emerges through the alignment of discourses, governance arrangements, and material practices of technical work. This generative relationship between participants and artefacts becomes especially visible in the installation and maintenance of wireless antennas ( WAs), where technical practices intersect with situated forms of political participation and collaboration (Crabu and Magaudda 2018). WAs serve as a material interface between CN users and the network, propagating signals that enable connections among network members. These WAs cannot be reduced to their technical properties, since their installation and maintenance have direct consequences for collaboration, forms of community membership, and the governance of the network as a sociomaterial platform for a politics of openness. Participants must assume responsibility for WAs installed on their roofs, a commitment that carries both symbolic and material significance in...

As this participant in Ninux.org has argued:

A tacit rule is that below every roof, below every node, below every antenna, there must be an active member of the community. This is because the network is being conceived as something that we do and then we put in common. You cannot imagine building up the network like: ‘Oh well, I’ll come to your house, and I install the antenna... and then everything will be ok and you will never have to worry.’ The key issue is that, by joining the Ninux network cable that comes down from the roof, you are not just replacing the commercial ISP cable, and nothing more has changed for you. Behind this network there must be people who are aware of how the network works, and therefore there’s this tacit rule that for every antenna, there must be a human head. (Interview 7, participant in Bologna)

This account underlines the significance of shared responsibility in the infrastructuring process. Antennas are not merely functional devices but represent a point of entanglement between users and the technical system—a site where participation, care, and politics converge. The participant’s emphasis on the presence of ‘a human head’ below each antenna reinforces the view of infrastructure as not just installed but lived and co-maintained through ongoing participation.

Antennas can thus be understood as non-human agents that actively solicit engagement and support processes of subjectification within the collective. They materialise both a technical project and a political vision rooted in horizontality, responsibility, and infrastructural awareness. Although not all participants are expected to master the full technical set-up, they are required to engage with its basic functioning; thus establishing a specific interdependence between human and material components. This model of shared configuration may limit scalability, as onboarding new members requires time and effort, but it also reinforces a bottom-up model of governance and participation. In this sense, the material and symbolic presence of antennas plays a constitutive role in sustaining the politics of openness and the collective identity of activist-technicians within CNs.

5. Final Remarks

Building on Hartley et al. (2018), the ‘politics of openness’ captures the tension between openness as a normative commitment and its situated enactments within socio-technical practices. This chapter has expanded that definition by..., how openness becomes a contingent accomplishment—configured by governance models, technical artefacts, and practices of maintenance and care. In doing so, it shows that the politics of openness is less a prescriptive ideal than a processual achievement, continually negotiated within grassroots infrastructuring. By shifting the analytical focus from normative definitions to the situated practices through which openness is made actionable, the chapter has contributed to a sociomaterial understanding of infrastructural politics—challenging the dichotomy between the political and the technical and advancing a relational approach where technical choices, governance models, and collective imaginaries are mutually constitutive.

The analysis has shown that CNs enact a politics of openness not through abstract commitments but through concrete practices of infrastructuring—designing, maintaining, and governing the network in ways that decentralise authority, cultivate shared responsibility, and foreground collective learning. Practices such as installing wireless antennas, customising open-source firmware, or co-managing routing protocols are not just technical operations; they contribute to the socio-technical construction of the politics of openness, embedding values of transparency, autonomy, and mutual care into the very materiality of the network. In this sense, CNs do not merely offer technical alternatives to centralised infrastructures; they constitute prefigurative infrastructures—spaces where alternative forms of socio-technical order are prototyped, contested, and iteratively negotiated.

Within CNs, openness emerges as neither a stable property nor an unproblematic goal. Rather, it is a doable problem—an ongoing accomplishment shaped by tensions between accessibility and complexity, inclusion and expertise, horizontality and coordination. These tensions are not simply challenges to overcome; they are generative forces that shape how openness is configured and contested in everyday infrastructuring work. The chapter has thus approached openness not as an inherent good, but as an emergent and situated achievement contingent upon specific sociomaterial arrangements. Moreover, the concept of CNs as sociomaterial platforms has been developed to capture the entanglement between human actors and technological artefacts in the enactment of openness. This conceptual move foregrounds how infrastructures are not merely supports for action but mediators that shape political subjectivities, redistribute agency, and organise participation. Technologies such as wireless antennas and open-source protocols are not passive instruments, but constitutive elements in the network’s political ecology.

Through their affordances and constraints, they channel particular modes of engagement, foster collective responsibility, and delimit the possibilities for democratic experimentation. At the same time, this chapter has also pointed to the ambivalent character of CNs. While they carry significant transformative potential, they remain embedded within broader socio-technical systems marked by power asymmetries, regulatory constraints, and infrastructural inequalities. CNs do not operate in a vacuum; their politics of openness is always partial, situated, and marked by internal tensions.

These initiatives must navigate the friction between their aspirations and the realities of maintaining sustainable infrastructures within a deeply commercialised digital landscape. Overall, this inquiry has shown that the politics of openness implies a continuous negotiation between ideals and materials, between practices and imaginaries. Openness, as enacted in CNs, is not simply about making things accessible or transparent; it is about reconfiguring the very conditions under which participation, knowledge production, and infrastructural agency become possible. By centring this processual and relational view, the chapter offers a critical lens for understanding how grassroots infrastructures do more than connect—they compose alternative forms of political life in the digital age.

Acknowledgements

This chapter builds upon a line of research I have pursued within the framework of two projects on community networks and the development of alternative digital communication infrastructures. I am particularly grateful to Paolo Magaudda, a colleague at the Padova Science, Technology and Innovation Studies research unit (Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology, University of Padova), with whom I have shared important moments of fieldwork and numerous stimulating discussions on these themes.

References

Akyildiz, Ian F., and Xudong Wang, 2005. ‘A Survey on Wireless Mesh Networks.’ IEEE Communications Magazine 43 (9): 23–30.

Albert, Sylvie. 2013. ‘The Case of Chapleau Network: Why Community Wireless Networks Fail?’ In *Social and Economic Effects of Community**Wireless Networks and Infrastructures*, edited by Ahmed Abdelaal, 178–194. Hershey: IGI Global.

Antoniadis, Panayotis. 2018. ‘The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots.’ In Co-Designing Economies in Transition, edited by Vincenzo Mario Bruno Giorgino and Zack Walsh, 235–254. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baig, Roger, Ramon Roca, Felix Freitag, and Leandro Navarro. 2015. ‘guifi.net, a Crowdsourced Network Infrastructure Held in Common.’ Computer Networks 90: 150–165. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1389128615002327

Banks, Michael. 2008. On the Wayto the Web: The Secret History of the Internet andIts Founders. Berkeley, CA: Apress.

Barry, Andrew. 2020. ‘The Material Politics of Infrastructure.’ In TechnoScienceSociety, edited by Sabine Maasen, Sascha Dickel, and Christoph Schneider, 95–112. Cham: Springer.

Belli, Luca, ed. 2018.*The Community Network Manual: How to Build the Internet**Yourself*. Rio de Janeiro: FGV Direito Rio.

Bollier, David. 2008.*Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic**of Their Own*. New York: New Press.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999.*Sorting Things Out: Classification and**Its Consequences*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Burke, Gary T., and Carola Wolf. 2021. ‘The Process Affordances of Strategy Toolmaking when Addressing Wicked Problems.’Journal of Management Studies 58 (2): 359–388.

Callon, Michel. 1986. ‘The Sociology of an Actor-Network: The Case of the Electric Vehicle.’ In Mapping the Dynamicsof Science and Technology: Sociology of Science in the RealWorld, edited by Michel Callon, Arie Rip, and John Law, 19–34. London: Macmillan.

Callon, Michel, and John Law. 1995. ‘Agency and the Hybrid Collectif.’ South Atlantic Quarterly 94 (2): 481–507.

Crabu, Stefano, Federica Giovanella, Leonardo Maccari, and Paolo Magaudda. 2015. ‘A Transdisciplinary Gaze on Wireless Community Networks.’*Tecnoscienza—Italian Journal**of Science & Technology Studies* 6 (2): 113–134. https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/view/17261.

Crabu, S., and P. Magaudda. 2018. ‘Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in Building a Wireless Community Network.’ Computer Supported Cooperative Work 27: 149–176. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9301-1.

Downing, John D. H. 2001. *Radical**Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements.*London: SAGE Publications.

Edwards, Paul N. 2010. *A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data**, and the Politics of Global Warming*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Franquesa, David, and Leandro Navarro. 2017. ‘Sustainability and Participation in the Digital Commons.’ Interactions 24 (3): 66–69.

Gillespie, Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, eds. 2014. M*edia**Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society*. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hartley, Sarah, Sujatha Raman, Alexander Smith, and Brigitte Nerlich, eds. 2018. Science and the Politics of Openness.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Hussen, T. S., N. J. Bidwell, C. Rey-Moreno, and W. D. Tucker. 2016. ‘Gender and Participation.’ *Proceedings**of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction*: 12–23. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998581.2998584

Ishida, Toru. 2005. ‘World Digital Cities: Beyond Heterogeneity.’ In *Digital Cities III: Information Technologies for Social**Capital: Cross-cultural Perspectives*, edited by Peter van den Besselaar and Satoshi Koizumi, 190–205. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Karasti, Helena, Karen S. Baker, and Eija Halkola. 2006. ‘Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network.’ *Computer Supported**Cooperative Work* 15 (2): 321–358.

Karasti, Helena, and Jeanette Blomberg. 2018. ‘Studying Infrastructuring Ethnographically.’ Computer Supported Cooperative Work 27 (2): 233–265.

Kelty, Christopher M. 2008. *Two Bits: The Cultural Significance**of Free Software*. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Köhn, Sebastian. 2025.*Island in the Net: Digital Culture in Post-Castro**Cuba*. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kostakis, Vasilis, and Michel Bauwens. 2014.*Network Society and Future Scenarios for a**Collaborative Economy*. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kubicek, Herbert, and Rose M. Wagner. 2002. ‘Community Networks in a Generational Perspective: The Change of an Electronic Medium Within Three Decades.’ *Information, Communication &**Society* 5 (3): 291–319.

Latour, Bruno. 2005. *Reassembling the Social:**An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory*. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.’ *Annual**Review of Anthropology* 42: 327–343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522

Le Dantec, Christopher A., and Carl DiSalvo. 2013. ‘Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design.’ *Social**Studies of Science* 43 (2): 241–264. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712471581

Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday.

Lo Cigno, Renato, and Leonardo Maccari. 2014. ‘Urban Wireless Community Networks: Challenges and Solutions for Smart City Communications.’ In*Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International**Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Smart Cities,* 49–54. New York: Association for Computing Machinery.

Maccari, Leonardo, Quang Nguyen, and Renato Lo Cigno. 2016. ‘On the Computation of Centrality Metrics for Network Security in Mesh Networks.’ In *2016 IEEE**Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM)*, 1–6. Washington, DC: IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOCOM.2016.7842049

Mann, Michael. 1986. *The Sources**of Social Power: Volume 1*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marres, Noortje. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

McCaughey, Martha, and Michael D. Ayers, eds. 2004. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Medosch, Armin. 2008. *The Rise of the Network**Commons: A History of Community Infrastructure*. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.

Micholia, Panagiota, Merkouris Karaliopoulos, Iordanis Koutsopoulos, Leandro Navarro, Roger Baig, Dimitris Boucas, Maria Michalis, and Panayiotis Antoniadis. 2018. ‘Community Networks and Sustainability: A Survey of Perceptions, Practices, and Proposed Solutions.’ IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 20 (4): 3581–3606.

Milan, Stefania. 2024. ‘Emancipatory Communication.’ In The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy, edited by Renee Hobbs and Paul Mihailidis, 1–6. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Mongili, Alessandro, and Giuseppina Pellegrino, eds. 2014. *Information Infrastructure(**s): Boundaries, Ecologies, Multiplicity.*Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Parks, Lisa. 2015. ‘“Stuff You Can Kick”: Toward a Theory of Media Infrastructures.’ In *Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media**Infrastructures*, edited by Patrik Svensson and David T. Goldberg, 355–376. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. 2016. ‘Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook.’ New Media & Society 21 (1): 163–185.

Powell, Alison. 2008. ‘WiFi Publics: Producing Community and Technology.’ Information, Communication & Society 11 (8): 1068–1088.

Sadowski, Jathan. 2019. ‘When Data Is Capital: Datafication, Accumulation, and Extraction.’Big Data & Society 6 (1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549

Sandvig, Christian. 2004. ‘An Initial Assessment of Cooperative Action in Wi-Fi Networking.’ Telecommunications Policy 28 (7–8): 579–602. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2004.05.001

Schoonmaker, Sara. 2007. ‘Globalization from Below: Free Software and Alternatives to Neoliberalism.’ *Development and**Change* 38 (6): 999–1020.

Schuler, Douglas. 2005. ‘The Seattle Community Network: Anomaly or Replicable Model?’ In *Digital Cities III: Information**Technologies for Social Capital: Cross-cultural Perspectives*, edited by Peter van den Besselaar and Satoshi Koizumi, 29–48. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Shade, Leslie Regan. 1999. ‘Roughing It in the Electronic Bush: Community Networking in Canada.’ Canadian Journal of Communication 24 (2). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.1999v24n2a1094

Shaffer, Gwen. 2020. ‘Community Wireless Networks.’ In The Handbook of Peer Production, edited by Mathieu O’Neil, Christian Pentzold, and Sophie Toupin, 254–267. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Sinnreich, Aram, Nathan Graham, and Andrew Trammell. 2011. ‘Weaving a New ’Net: A Mesh-Based Solution for Democratizing Networked Communications.’ The Information Society 27 (5): 336–355. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.607056

Söderberg, Johan. 2014. ‘Users in the Dark: The Development of a User-Controlled Technology in the Czech Wireless Network Community.’ In *Hacking Europe: From Computer Cultures to**Demoscene*, edited by Gerard Alberts and Ruth Oldenziel, 179–201. London: Springer.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure.’ American Behavioral Scientist43 (3): 377–391.

Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. ‘Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.’ Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134.

Tapia, Andrea H., and Julio Angel Ortiz. 2010. ‘Network Hopes: Municipalities Deploying Wireless Internet to Increase Civic Engagement.’ *Social**Science Computer Review* 28 (1): 93–117.

Turner, Fred. 2006. FromCounterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, andthe Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Van Oost, Ellen, Stefan Verhaegh, and Nelly Oudshoorn. 2009. ‘From Innovation Community to Community Innovation: User-initiated Innovation in Wireless Leiden.’ Science, Technology, & Human Values 34 (2): 182–205.

Vaseva, Lora. 2016. ‘Out of Altruism or Because It Reads Well on the CV?’ In *Proceedings of the**12th International Symposium on Open Collaboration*, 1–4. New York: ACM.

Vega, David, Llorenç Cerdà-Alabern, Leandro Navarro, and Roc Meseguer. 2012. ‘Topology Patterns of a Community Network: Guifi.net.’ In *2012 IEEE 8th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing**, Networking and Communications (WiMob),* 612–619. Washington, DC: IEEE.

Velicu, Irina, and Gustavo García-López. 2018. ‘Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and Vulnerability.’ Theory, Culture & Society 35 (6): 55–73.

Verhaegh, Stefan, and Ellen Van Oost. 2012. ‘Who Cares? The Maintenance of a Wi-Fi Community Infrastructure.’ In Inverse Infrastructures: Disrupting Networks from Below, edited by Tineke M. Egyedi and Donna C. Mehos, 141–160. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

von Hippel, Eric. 2017. Free Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Winner, Langdon. 1980. ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’ Daedalus 109 (1): 121–136.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. *The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight**for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power*. London: Profile Books.