How to Use Affordable and Open-Source Software Tools for Community Network Mobilization

The Seattle Community Network (SCN) is a volunteer-based, grassroots community nonprofit with a small operating budget (currently averaging $10-$50K in grants, donations, or in-kind contributions per year) that installs and provides internet access for homeless shelters. This post describes the software infrastructure we use to run our network and operations. The solutions detailed here will be most apt for other community networks that feature similar organizational styles and seek to minimize operating costs. The time, technical labor, and expertise that our volunteers contribute allows us to save money. As a DIY “community learning network,” we collectively enjoy and gain valuable experience from configuring and maintaining SCN's software stack. Doing so, and writing public documentation about it, also furthers our mission of contributing technical knowledge and facilitating learning experiences for the broader public. Our software “stack,” a set of technologies that work together, is a dynamic, evolving system that reflects volunteers’ interests, capacities, and opinions on how we should operate and organize. Operations vary widely between community networks, so it may not be necessary or worthwhile for all groups to deploy or maintain the same software. When our network was bootstrapping in 2019, we started with just a simple free website hosted on GitHub, a shared Google Drive folder for documentation, a Slack group for team communications, and a management virtual private network (VPN) for remote site access that we self-hosted on Azure (Microsoft’s public cloud) using $2000/year of free credits available to qualifying nonprofits (for which we have to re-certify each year). Since that time, we have grown the number of services we self-host to support our activities and migrated most of them to an on-premises server to save money.

[Through the Benton Opportunity Fund fellowship, Dr. Esther Jang will be publishing how-to guides or recipes to help community-based organizations establish and operate local connectivity projects for low-income and marginalized groups.]