Local Ownership, Exercise of Ownership and Moving from Passive to Active Entitlement: A practice-led inquiry on a rural community network

Abstract

This paper examines the build up of local ownership in an externally-initiated community network in rural South Africa. Based on this analysis, and in constant dialogue with the community informatics and social science literatures, the paper makes two contributions. First, it clarifies the meaning of the concept, and shows how it relates to other key concepts in community informatics scholarship. Second, it provides an outline of the factors found to be positively correlated with the build up of ownership, elicited from the analysis of the design and deployment of a rural community network.