So, what about politics? (#SWAP) is a fully packed symposium presenting mainly very concrete projects that deal with new forms of political action and governance in the contemporary network society. With examples from liquid democracy, e-governance, civic intelligence, platform cooperativism and autonomous self-organisation.

From the event website:

So, what about politics? looks at initiatives that could be seen as the avant-garde of a new political era. In a critical period of crisis in our political systems, we welcome artists, activists, academics using innovative technological tools to reclaim political processes or to shape new forms of organisation, from local collectives to global movements.

As  Rebecca Solnit says, “It’s equally true that democracy is flourishing in bold new ways in grassroots movements globally”, and “There is far more politics than the mainstream of elections and governments, more in the margins where hope is most at home.” How does this apply to the margins of our technological imagination? Which tools and practices are being dreamed of, tested and explored?

In short, what is the impact of today’s Internet-inspired post-institutional thinking on the practice of political action? For this we focus on tactics, tools and visions of grassroots initiatives, as well as on changing government policies and strategies.

The symposium revolves around questions such as: What are the politics of a P2P society? How can we perceive a network as a real “distributed agora”? What can we learn from artist- or activist-led experiments focusing on collectivity and political agency?

And most important: What are the concrete tools and initiatives today that really try to facilitate and use new forms of agency such as liquid democracy, e-governance, civic intelligence, platform cooperativism and autonomous self-organisation?

PROGRAMME
Digital culture and technology. But what about politics?

Final Programme coming soon!

Day 1: FRI 3 November
Lectures and Debates, 10:00-18:00

Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation), Geert Lovink (Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam), Sandrino Graceffa (SMArtbe, Brussels), Xavier Damman (OpenCollective.com), Virgile Deville (Democracy.earth), Saya Sauliere (Medialab-Prado/ParticipaLab, Madrid), Arianna Mazzeo (DesisLab, Barcelona), Khushboo Balwani (Civic Innovation Network, Brussels), David Potocnik (totalism.org, Lanzarote), Lauren Lapige (unMonastery, Athens), Penny Travlou (University Edinburgh), Monica Garriga (Decidim, Barcelona), David Gómez (Texeidora, Barcelona), Emmanuele Braga (Macao, Milano), Panayotis Antoniadis (NetHood, Athens-Zurich), Sanna Ghotbi & Vanessa Metonini (DigidemLab, Gothenburg/Madrid), Barret Brown (PursuanceProject.org, USA).

Day 2: SAT 4 November
Workshops and Participative sessions, 10:00-17:00

Sanna Ghotbi & Vanessa Metonini (DigidemLab, Gothenburg), Arianna Mazzeo (DesisLab, Barcelona),  Civic Innovation Network (Brussels)

Register for Day 1 and take option for Day 2

Credits

The symposium is curated by Bram Crevits (KASK / School of Arts Gent) and Yves Bernard (iMAL.org).
This event is organised by iMAL (Brussels center for Digital Cultures and Technology) in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), Medialab Prado (Madrid) and KASK / School of Arts (Gent).

After the symposium Blockchain.Fact.Fiction.Future in 2016, So what about Politics? continues our exploration of how society can be improved with the digital world.

So what about Politics? is supported by KASK / School of Arts Gent and Saison des Cultures Numériques 2017, Ministery of Culture (Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles).

Photo by Artur Netsvetaev

The post So what about Politics? Toward a new political era appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The refugee crisis has revealed the limitations of the telecommunications market to offer internet connectivity to people in need. As is often the case when the market fails, citizen organisations have stepped in.

Freifunk.net, one of the most successful such community networks, has come to fill the gap and provide vital internet services to refugees in Germany.

This was made possible thanks to an innovative way of using communications technology: DIY networking.

DIY networking is an umbrella term for different types of grassroots networking, such as mesh networks. According to Vice magazine, mesh networks not only allow wifi routers to provide signals to wifi-enabled devices, as usual, but also, “routers have the ability to connect to and talk to each other. By ‘meshing’ them, or connecting them together, you are creating a larger wifi zone.”

Artists have been looking at these networks as a way to expand and diversify our communication abilities, while questioning mainstream access to internet. In this spirit, Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter recently used the technology to “talk back” to the NSA.

DIY community networks have been also used as social tools to reconnect citizens, for example, the Sarantaporo.gr initiative in Greece. Sarantaporo has provided a community solution for affordable internet access, but it’s also a revolutionary model for building networking infrastructure, attracting the attention of academics and institutions.

The Spanish community network Guifi.net even won a European Union broadband award last year.

These networks have an important role to play as a counter to the few corporations that dominate the internet, and also as a way to raise awareness of the challenges of privacy, net neutrality, censorship, surveillance and manipulation.

How does it work?

A wireless router, in essence a special purpose computer, can do more than just connect your devices to the internet. It could host a wide variety of web services, from a simple site to a fully fledged collaborative platform, accessible only to those in physical proximity.

These include a virtual announcement board for a block of apartments, an online guestbook for an urban garden, a file-sharing platform for a workshop, and many more creative uses of “self-hosted” web applications, like WordPress, Owncloud and Etherpad that anyone can host on a private web server.

These services are accessible through the router’s wireless antenna announcing a network name, a Service Set IDentifier (SSID), exactly as it works when you connect to a free or home wifi. They can appear automatically on a splash page or captive portal when you open you browser (as is often the case in airports, cafes and hotels).

If the router is equipped with a second antenna, it can easily connect to a similar router residing in the coverage area whose size depends on the type of antenna and environmental factors.

The first antenna can then be used to allow people with their personal devices to connect. And the second to exchange information with the neighbouring router. Each router then becomes a “node” in a small network: anyone who connects to one of them can access the services offered by, and people connected to, the other as well. As more nodes get connected, larger areas are covered, and a community can be formed, initially by the owners of the nodes and eventually by everyone in the area.

Of course, you cannot easily build a whole such network by yourself, but you can build yourself a single network node using cheap hardware (such as a Raspberry Pi) and free self-hosted software for installing the set of local services and applications of your choice.

The only legal issues appear when you also offer internet connectivity through such a network because of liability issues when it comes to copyrighted content.

Personal networks

It is perfectly legal, in principle, to operate such a node on its own, attached to your balcony or inside your backpack. This could be your personal network inviting your neighbours, fellow travellers, or any strangers sharing the same public space.

The presence of an invisible digital space can be announced through physical urban interventions: a visible marker on the device itself, a QR code, a poster, even through artistic performances or direct face-to-face communication.

Anyone in proximity can join without the need for credentials or other identification, except for being there, and without the need of any internet connection.

Examples of successful uses of such personal networks include occupy.here or the PirateBox. Polylogue allows people in proximity to post short messages and see them printed live on a piece of paper that as it advances, gets shredded on the other end. A sort of hybrid, real-world Snapchat.

Soon it will be possible to build and customise a wide variety of such DIY networks using the MAZI toolkit.

Community networks

Community wireless networks have been under development since the late 1990s by tech enthusiasts and activists advocating for a more open, neutral and democratic internet. They include a mix of local services, such as file sharing and live streaming (AWMN.net and Ninux.org) and the provision of internet connectivity. Freifunk, WlanSlovenja, Sarantaporo.gr, and many more focus on this aspect.

There are also important differences related to the governance model and the concept of the community itself.

Freifunk follows the “free internet for all” approach and depends mostly on voluntary contributions of their members to offer internet connectivity.

On the other hand, Guifi.net places significant focus on the concept of the “commons” implying concrete boundaries and resource management rules. It has developed a unique model in which the network infrastructure, including fibre cables, is treated as separate from the services they are involved with providing.

The success story of Sarantaporo

The Sarantaporo.gr Community Network in Greece represents another type of community network, deployed in rural areas with limited or no connectivity – places where the free market fails.

This particular network was built initially by a small team of young activists who received hardware by the OpenWifi project of the Greek Free/Open Source Software Society (GFOSS), and funding by the EU project CONFINE and free Internet access via the Technical University of Larissa.

It has provided broadband internet to around 15 small villages in Elassona municipality, but most importantly has raised awareness and hope about building communities of commons in Greece.

The main concern today is to include more local people in sustaining the network, providing suitable legal, economic, and political tools for ensuring its sustainability, but also shifting the focus beyond internet access and towards possible local services that could be offered over the existing common infrastructure.

When corporations move in

It is not only grassroots communities, researchers, engineers, and civil society organisations that make efforts to bring internet access to all. Facebook is trying to provide basic internet connectivity everywhere in the world for free, and competes with Google over “stratospheric internet plans”.

Such platforms have the power to become the only online places that people visit, at a huge price: our privacy and self-determination.

So, a very challenging question is raised for community networking activists: to which internet are they helping people to connect? And why should their offers be chosen over more mainstream, easily accessible, ones?

The answer to these questions reveal a tension between the immediate need to provide access for all and the need to make sure that the internet is built for the common good and not the interests of a few global corporations.

Building local alternatives can play a key role in creating necessary net-diversity and serve many important practical, political, and social purposes.

This is the first of two articles on the phenomenon of DIY internet.

Panayotis Antoniadis, interdisciplinary researcher on hybrid space and peer-to-peer systems, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post DIY networking: The path to a more democratic internet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the Introduction: “The hopes of past generations of hackers weigh like a delirium on the brains of the newbies. Back in the days when Bulletin Board Systems metamorphosed into the Internet, the world’s digital communications networks – hitherto confined to military, corporate and elite academic institutions – were at grasping reach of ordinary individuals. To declare the independence of the Internet from nation states and the corporate world seemed like no more than stating the bare facts. Even encrypted communication – the brainchild of military research – had leaked into the public’s hands and had become a tool wielded against state power. Collectives of all stripes could make use of the new possibilities offered by the Web to bypass traditional media, broadcast their own voice and assemble in new ways in this new public sphere. For some time, at least, the Internet as a whole embodied ‘alternativeness’. ”

Contents of JOPP# 9

Special Issue Editors’ Introduction

• Alt. vs. Ctrl.: Editorial notes for the JoPP issue on Alternative Internets – Félix Tréguer, Panayotis Antoniadis and Johan Söderberg

Peer Reviewed Academic Papers

• In Defense of the Digital Craftsperson – James Losey and Sascha D. Meinrath
• Hacktivism, Infrastructures and Legal Frameworks in Community Networks: The Italian Case of Ninux.org – Stefano Crabu, Federica Giovanella, Leonardo Maccari and Paolo Magaudda
• Enmeshed Lives? Examining the Potentials and the Limits in the Provision of Wireless Networks. The Case of Réseau Libre – Christina Haralanova and Evan Light
• Going Off-the-Cloud: The Role of Art in the Development of a User-Owned & Controlled Connected World – Daphne Dragona and Dimitris Charitos
• Gesturing Towards “Anti-Colonial Hacking” and its Infrastructure – Sophie Toupin
• The Interplay Between Decentralization and Privacy: The Case of Blockchain Technologies – Primavera De Filippi
• Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed Production – Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak and Kaitlin Kish

Experimental Format

• Alternative Policies for Alternative Internets – Melanie Dulong de Rosnay

The issue is available for free here.

All content by JoPP is in the public domain and is available here.

Photo by HarcoRutgers

The post New Special Issue at JoPP: “Alternative Internets” appeared first on P2P Foundation.