Collective Infrastructural Speculations: A Situated Understanding of Pasts, Presents & Futures of Resilient Community Networks.

Community Networks (CNs) offer a means for high-quality communication infrastructure growth, especially in rural areas providing benefits to social and economic development; CNs hold potential to be community-owned infrastructure fostering community resilience. Towards realizing this potential of CNs, we explored two research questions: What does resilience mean for the communities who build, maintain, and use a CN; and what are community-based visions for fostering resilience and sustainability of their CNs? We carried out four speculative design workshops with different stakeholders at two CNs: Ocean View Community's CN in South Africa and the Channapatna Health Library's CN in India. We report our findings as two design fictions that emerged as collaborative articulation of our collective visions, acting as ‘Infrastructural Speculations’ nuancing our understanding of resilience in CNs. We offer insights into how speculative design could become a part of ongoing, situated participatory design and infrastructuring work.