Community Networks are large scale, self-organized and decentralized networks, built and operated by citizens for citizens. In this paper, we make a case for research on and with community networks, while explaining the relation to Community-Lab. The latter is an open, distributed infrastructure for researchers to experiment with community networks. The goal of Community-Lab is to advance research and empower society by understanding and removing obstacles for these networks and services.

Crowdsourced computer networks refers to network infrastructure built by citizens and organisations who pool their resources and coordinate their efforts to make these networks happen. Community networks are a subset of crowdsourced networks that are structured to be open, free and neutral. In these the infrastructure is contributed by the participants and is managed as a common resource. Many crowdsourcing experiences have flourished in community networks. This paper discusses the case of guifi.net, a success case of a community network daily used by thousands of participants, focusing on its principles and the crowdsourcing processes and tools developed within the community, the role they play in the ecosystem that is guifi.net nowadays, the current status of its implementation, its measurable local impact, and the lessons learned in more than a decade.

Community networks (CNs) have gained momentum in the last few years with the increasing number of spontaneously deployed WiFi hotspots and home networks. These networks, owned and managed by volunteers, offer various services to their members and to the public. While Internet access is the most popular service, the provision of services of local interest within the network is enabled by the emerging technology of CN micro-clouds. By putting services closer to users, micro-clouds pursue not only

Internet and communication technologies have lowered the costs to collaborate for communities, leading to new services like user-generated content and social computing and, through collaboration, collectively built infrastructures, such as community networks. Community networks are formed when individuals and local organisations from a geographic area team up to create and run a community-owned IP network to satisfy the community's demand for ICT. Internet access is often considered the main service of community networks, but the provision of services of local interest within the network is a unique opportunity for community networks, which is currently predominantly unexplored. The consolidation of today's cloud technologies offers community networks the possibility to collectively build community clouds, building upon user-provided networks, and extending towards an ecosystem of cloud services. We propose a framework for building a collaborative distributed community cloud system that employs resources contributed by the members of the community network for provisioning infrastructure and software services. This framework is tailored to the specific social, economic, and technical characteristics of community networks and requirements for community clouds in order to be successful and sustainable. We materialise this framework in the implementation of the Cloudy distribution. We conduct real deployments of these clouds in the Guifi.net community network and evaluate cloud-based applications such as service discovery and distributed storage. This deployment experience supports the feasibility of community clouds and our measurements demonstrate the performance of services and applications running in these community clouds. Our results encourage the development and operation of collaborative cloud-based services using the resources of a community network. We anticipate that such services can effectively complement commercial offers and have the potential to boost innovation in application areas in which end-user involvement is required.

Community networks have flourished around the world as complementary models for enabling access to the Internet and its services. Nevertheless, there is still an ongoing debate on how to make them sustainable and scalable beyond voluntary efforts and non-refundable contributions. The approach taken by Guifi.net has been to enable professional activity and to develop a set of tools to ensure the reinvestment of a fraction of the benefits of this professional activity. This has contributed to building the largest community network, with an annual turnover of millions of euros and the creation of dozens of direct jobs. The implementation of these tools is producing extensive data sets that allow characterisation of key parameters in the deployment and operation of these infrastructures to examine behaviours and trends and to identify good and bad practices, fraud, etc. A more detailed knowledge of the economic aspects has a positive effect on reducing the uncertainty of investments, expansion plans, and operations.