Community network is a term used broadly to indicate the use of networking technologies by, and for, a local community. Free-nets and civic networks indicate roughly the same range of projects and services, whereas community technology centers (CTCs) and telecentres generally indicate a physical facility to compensate for lack of access to information and communication technologies (ICTs).
Although there is no absolute agreement on the definition of the term, it is generally agreed that a community network is a computer-based system that is intended to help support geographical communities by supporting, augmenting, and extending already existing social networks.
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or network:
“The most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate, so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from preponderating.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)