Compensation in HCI research is often the primary ethical interface between HCI researchers and low-income communities. Yet, prevailing models of compensation can perpetuate neocolonial extraction and frame participation as transactional labor. This practice risks creating dependency and obscuring power imbalances, ultimately compromising both research integrity and participant dignity. Drawing on the experiences of researchers working in Africa and the southern African philosophy of Ubuntu, this paper employs a decolonial lens to critique the research economy of participation and compensation. We propose a framework for relational compensation, which re-imagines compensation not as payment for data but as a form of restorative justice and relational accountability. Through analytic vignettes, we examine tensions around community-researcher interdependency, gendered care burdens, and community solidarity. We conclude with principles for relational research economies that prioritize communal benefit, long-term data sovereignty, and co-designed terms of engagement, offering HCI a path toward reciprocal praxis.

Community Networks (CNs) worldwide are promising low-resource communities new ways of connecting and interplaying with technology. The embedded infrastructures of the CNs are derived from the sociocultural, political, spatial, and economic practices of the people they are built with and the communities they are located in. CNs situated in an area are not only followed by the technical requirements and possibilities of making the networks alive and accessible but are also shaped and moulded by the people and their practices. Community members’ lived experience and awareness of the local knowledge and local practices materialize the network in the situated realities. Yet the knowledge and experiences of the communities are often invisible and not considered in future research agendas for infrastructure and technology developments. In this workshop, we aim to bring together community members from around the world working on the frontlines of CNs as experts to share their local knowledge and experiences of designing, developing, negotiating, and maintaining the network, while opening the space for early career researchers and students to listen and learn from the ground.