In this paper, we promote the use of online communities as a means to provide incentives for people to collaborate in building wireless community networks. To achieve this goal, we define a novel type of online community spanning a specific physical area (i.e., a neighborhood) called Wireless Neighborhood Community (WNC). On the one hand, in addition to the standard activities of an online neighborhood community (e.g. i-neighbors), a WNC??s members cooperate to build a network and share their resources at different layers. On the other hand, in addition to standard Wireless Community Networks being deployed today in big cities, a WNC incorporates the social layer in its design. It is a hybrid (both virtual and physical) community whose activities are linked to the operation and management of the underlying network. If designed appropriately, this cross-layer community will provide incentive to users to participate and share their resources, build trust, and increase the social capital in the city. We provide insights for exploiting this special characteristic of the WNC towards these objectives, introducing the notion of a cross-layer incentive mechanism and the corresponding network-aware social software.
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