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Community Network Handbook

A practical, opinionated guide to building community networks from scratch — even with limited resources.

This project is an attempt to guide someone who has heard the community networks concept and wants to learn how to build one from scratch.

This guide is based on our experience at Hahatay Network. We explain everything we did — the good and the bad — and how the project still runs since 2021. The guide is written mainly by people who have been volunteering in the project since the beginning.

So this is a collection of lessons learned, but we believe many of those lessons are general enough to be useful for other people who want to start their own community networks.

The principles behind this handbook

  • Be practical: we focus on the how-to more than the why. There are many resources explaining the why, but not so many that explain how to do it step by step.
  • On a budget: we show how to build community networks at low cost, using affordable equipment and free and open-source software whenever possible.
  • This is an opinioned guide: there are many ways to build community networks, and this is just one way based on our experience. We don't claim it is the best way, just one that worked for us.
  • This is a living book: it is designed to be easy to extend (adding text files in the docs/ folder is enough).

Not just for community networks

Despite the name, this guide works for any small-to-medium network setup. We use "community network" terminology because that's the context it was born in, but the techniques apply broadly.

Contributing

The text lives on GitHub, which means anyone can contribute improvements, corrections, and new chapters. Even without technical knowledge, you can edit directly on GitHub.

See Contributing for details.