Social Issues in Self-Provisioned Metropolitan Area Networks

This position paper frames a set of issues in the collaborative development of self-provisioned metropolitan area networks (MANs). The tantalizing promise of this infrastructure is free access to other people, computing resources and information at any time in a reasonably large metropolitan area. The paper reviews literature in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and relates notions of ad-hoc collaboration to existing notions of opportunistic collaboration in CSCW. The paper briefly describes studies of networking in CSCW and preliminary investigation of a group that is developing a MAN. The paper closes by introducing several social and technical issues that will be of interest to the CSCW community.