Minimum Viable Governance for Community-Owned Connectivity

This paper examines the role of governance in sustaining community-owned connectivity initiatives in rural low-resourced settings, arguing that long-term viability depends as much on social organisation as on technical infrastructure. While community networks are often positioned as locally grounded responses to connectivity gaps in sub-Saharan Africa, many deployments struggle to persist beyond initial implementation. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Minimum Viable Governance (MVG), defined as the smallest set of roles, rules, and decision-making processes required to support early adoption, accountable operation, and ongoing service evolution. Drawing on three days of community-based engagements with caregivers (local mothers), farmers, and local leaders in two low-resourced South African communities, We report early findings on how governance is articulated in these communities in relation to both the shared network infrastructure and the locally valued services such as content sharing and health or farming information. Across sites, participants foregrounded service-level governance, including, for example, verification of announcements, safeguarding and consent, moderation, and appeals, as a prerequisite for building trust and supporting adoption, while the form that ``legitimate authority'' should take diverged between traditional and civic governance settings. Based on these findings, and previous work on commons and network governance, we propose a MVG toolkit as an adaptable, community-owned governance framework that can act as a mechanism for enacting local autonomy through three main pillars, namely decision rights, capability building, and safe participation that supports the long-term sustainability of rural and peri-urban connectivity initiatives.