From Sustainable Community Networks to Sustainable Community Clouds

The advent of community networks has shown that citizens can take action not only at the technical level to expand the Internet but also at the governance level. What started as isolated and uncoordinated efforts to, mainly, bring connectivity to undeserved areas (using hacked WiFi devices -- the so called Wireless communities) has evolved into self-organised groups offering effective tools to empower people to self-satisfy their telecommunication needs under sustainable alternative models to the dominant one in the global Internet. Inspired by the success of community networks we propose the community network cloud (community cloud) as an instrument to fight the threat posed by the concentration of vast amount of data in few multinational corporations (privacy, vendor lock-in, etc.) and to make the use of the community network infrastructure more efficient.