Interviews

SUMMARY OF RESULTS of Interviews with 40 Swiss Foneros:  (new)

The possibility to get free Internet access from other members is seen as the major incentive for members to join FON, with other secondary aspects like getting cost-effective hardware or revenue sharing being perceived as additional benefits. A second strong motivation is the appeal towards sharing, albeit with various nuances: for part of members it is simply a reciprocal exchange a side aspect they kindly accept to get other benefits, but others are truly motivated by it as a purely altruistic act or as a way of better exploiting existing infrastructure. Other motivations are idealistic (a way to promote universal Internet access or support alternatives to commercial operators) or related to technical interest and curiosity. Social and intrinsic motivations result rather weak: the community aspect lies mainly in the sharing of common resources rather than forming social ties with other people. Whereas members are generally aware of potential risks, they are not really concerned by them as the presence of a company supporting the community plays a major role in reassuring them.

Details about the Interview:

We have developed an Interview Guide with the help of which we would like to guide our interviewees through a semi-structured conversation about their experience with the FON Community and about their motivations for joining and participating.

We would like people to spontaneously talk about their experiences and will ask some specific questions where we consider it important and relevant.
The interview will last about half an hour but the duration might vary highly depending on how much someone has to tell.

Some sample questions:

To give you an idea, on what kind of questions we are going to ask, I will provide some examples:

How did your experience with FON begin?

What were your motivations to join FON?

In what occasions did you use a FON Spot?

How was your experience offering Internet access to other people?

Update:

We have started our Interview sessions in Ticino and up to now have collected 5 testimonies. By interviewing those Foneros, various motivations and different experiences have been identified. All interviews have been very pleasant and we want to thank again all participants for their interesting and useful contributions.

We will now extend the interviews to other parts of Switzerland and hope to be able to do about 40 interviews by the end of summer.
If you are or have been a Fonero too and would like to participate at an interview your contribution would be of great value to our research and very much appreciated. In this case you can contact Anna directly by sending an e-mail to anna.picco.schwendener@usi.ch
Thank you!