Unwired Collective Action: Motivations of Wireless Community Participants

Abstract

A new organizational form which creates an innovative method for the deployment of a wireless communications infrastructure and promotes end-user collaboration has emerged in metropolitan areas all over the world: community-based WLANs. Insofar, research has focused on comparing the community model with commercial offerings of WLAN access and on placing wireless communities within a policy agenda. This paper attempts to explore the capabilities of community-based WLANs through a combination of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence. It applies collective action and social dilemmas theories to attest that motivation plays a critical role in the formation and sustained existence of wireless communities. Using evidence from a large-scale survey, it characterizes wireless community participants based on their motivational inclinations. Furthermore, the paper develops a taxonomy of community participants to be used for explaining how individuals solve the social dilemmas associated with their participation in a community-based WLAN.