The Internet and cloud services are key enablers for participation in society. The need for Internet access in areas underserved by commercial telecom operators has often been a motivation to develop community networks. Many examples around the world show successful cooperative developments of open, participatory local networking infrastructures. Such collaborative models have not yet been applied to local cloud computing resources and services. In this paper, we elaborate on the sustainability model of the http://guifi.net community network as a basis for cloudbased infrastructures and services in communities. We first look at the elements of http://guifi.net, which support the sustainability and growth of the networking infrastructure.We then discuss their application to cloud-based services within the network and come up with a framework of tools and components for community cloud resources and services. Finally, we assess the current status of the experimental community cloud in http://guifi.net, where some of the proposed tools are already operational.

Peer Reviewed