Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

dc.contributor.authorCrabu, Stefano
dc.contributor.authorMagaudda, Paolo
dc.date.accessioned2020-06-06T13:06:17Z
dc.date.available2020-06-06T13:06:17Z
dc.date.issued2018
dc.date.issued2018
dc.description.abstractContemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures.de
dc.identifier.doi10.1007/s10606-017-9301-1
dc.identifier.pissn1573-7551
dc.identifier.urihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10606-017-9301-1
dc.identifier.urihttps://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/3786
dc.publisherSpringer
dc.relation.ispartofComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 27, No. 2
dc.relation.ispartofseriesComputer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
dc.subjectBottom-up infrastructures
dc.subjectInformation infrastructures
dc.subjectInverse infrastructures
dc.subjectQualitative case study
dc.subjectResearch in the wild
dc.subjectWireless community networks
dc.titleBottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Networkde
dc.typeText/Journal Article
gi.citation.endPage176
gi.citation.startPage149
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