A technology is considered ‘open’ when it gives users the freedom (a) to study it, (b) to use it any way they wish, (c) to reproduce it and (d) modify it according to their own needs. By contrast, closed technologies are those that restrict these freedoms, limiting users’ ability to study them, reproduce them and modify them so as to adapt them to their needs. That is precisely the advantage of open technologies from the perspective of end users: whereas closed technologies limit the spectrum of possibilities of what end users can do, open technologies ‘liberate’ them, giving them the possibility to tinker with them and evolve them. Paradoxically, despite the fact that open technologies are greatly appreciated by the global technological community because of the freedoms they offer, the technology products manufactured and marketed by the vast majority of technology firms around the world are ‘closed’. This, of course, does not happen because of technological reasons: most of these companies supply their clients with closed machines and tools simply because in that way they can easily ‘lock’ them into a relationship of dependence.

It is not hard to see why this type of client-supplier relationship is particularly harmful for SSE organizations, as it implies their dependence on economic agents with diametrically opposed values and interests. To put it simply, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for SSE organizations to evolve into a vehicle for the transition to a truly social economy when they are dependent on the above economic agents for the tools they need on a daily basis. By contrast, open technologies may well be strategic resources for their autonomy and technological sovereignty. As brazilian activist-philosopher Euclides Mance remarks, SSE organizations should turn to open design and free software tools (like the Linux operating system for computers) in order to extricate themselves from the relationship of dependence they have unwillingly developed with closed technology companies.

A documentary about Sarantaporo.gr

To find the tools which fit their needs and goals, SSE agents should turn to the ‘community’ itself: in most cases, the development and the transfer of open technology to the field of its application and end-use is carried out by collaborative technology projects with the primary aim of covering needs, rather than making a profit. A great example is that of Sarantaporo.gr in Greece, which operates a modern telecom infrastructure of wireless networking in the area of Sarantaporo since 2013, through which more than twenty villages have acquired access to the Internet. The contribution of those collaborative projects – and that is crucial – is not limited to high-technology products, but extends to all kinds of tools and machines. A characteristic example is the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Catalonia and L’Atelier Paysan in France, which develop agricultural (open design) tools geared to the particular needs of small producers of their region.

The above examples show clearly the great potential of the SSE for positive change. However, for that to happen, it should have sufficient support structures for reinforcing its entrepreneurial action. That is where it is lagging behind. The SSE does not have structures analogous to the incubators for start-ups, the ‘accelerators’ and the liaison offices operating at most universities for the transfer of know-how to capitalist firms. Addressing this need is an area in which government policy could play a strategic role: in that regard, it is extremely positive that the recent action plan of the Greek Government tries to combat this problem through the development of more than a hundred cooperatively-organized support centres for the SSE across the entire country by 2023. That is precisely the kind of impetus that the SSE needs in order to grow. Of course, the capacity of these centres to support the SSE technologically will be of decisive importance: those are the structures that can and must make open technology accessible and user-friendly at local level, supplying the SSE organizations of their region with technology tools that promote the principles of the SSE and ensure its autonomy.

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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.

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“Sarantaporo area, situated at the North of Greece, is an agricultural and husbandry region, also hit by the crisis. But even prior to the crisis, state’s attention to the area was poor. Youths were migrating to big cities or abroad. There was no Internet connection, and locals were isolated and deprived of basic services, e.g. medical aid.

At 2010 a group of people forms a community wireless network aiming to connect the villages among them and with the rest of the world. In time, and as the project matures, Sarantaporo.gr community aims even further. They want to be the catalyst so that the locals (re)organize cooperatives based on the wireless network, (re)enliven their economy, make it sustainable, more extrovert and independent of state and corporative control.

In doing so, they produce knowledge and build bridges between the hi-tech of a wireless network community and the real-life challenges of a rural community.

What are these challenges? How can a community be born and how are the existing ones transformed or affected during this course? What are the real-life stories of the people involved, one way or another, into this process? How can an effort in a small rural population in a remote part of crisis-ridden Greece relate to an ICT project in Catalonia University and -in a broader context- to the efforts to construct a new common ground for peoples in Europe?These are some of the inquiries we explore in the documentary.

In October 2015, the media arts collective Personal Cinema which produced the documentary, in collaboration with the Sarantaporo.gr team, launched a crowdfunding campaign at the Spanish crowdfunding platform goteo.org and succeeded to collect an amount of money that facilitated the realization of the documentary.

The documentary music score can be downloaded free or with a contribution to the artist here.

Credit list of the documentary and crowdfunding campaign contributors here.

Related texts to the documentary, the campaign and the Sarantaporo.gr Community, here.”

Greek and English subtitles are available (use the CC button at the Youtube player).
Optionally, choose: Settings/options/background opacity/25%.

This documentary was originally published here.

Photo by INCITE

Photo by INCITE

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“The Area Around Mt. Olympus

When the unMonastery visited Sarantaporo and the surrounding villages during the eponymous Symposium, it became clear that the overall population of the area of is in decline. There are very few children since many young families are moving to the cities for work. People who originate from these villages often return in the summer, but there seems to be a disproportionate amount of pensioners who actually remain in the area as permanent residents.

Some writers claim there is a trend of young people moving “back to the countryside” all over Greece, but the numbers are still too insignificant to really call it an exodus as many news sources would have it. And there is a good reason why that exodus hasn’t begun…

The Wireless Testbed

The project in Sarantaporo presents an interesting situation. The main narrative is that this commons based Internet infrastructure is creating community, but that is not the reason why the non-profit Sarantaporo.gr received funding from the CONFINE consortium. If you read the call that Sarantaporo.gr won, it was to create a testbed. And that is what is there: a testbed nestled in foothills of Mount Olympus.

Now what is meant to happen in this testbed? That is the experiment. The network is supposed to be like FUBU: “for us, by us”, but the fact is that the tech-guys from Sarantaporo.gr (who live in major cities in Greece and elsewhere in the world) can only go so far in providing services to the local residents. The village inhabitants need to meet them halfway.

During a “round table” discussion with some of the local residents (literally around a table laden with local delicacies), we heard their impressions of this network. The things they were saying were not promising. Many saw the network as a way of simply providing Internet. To check FB, etc. Others did not take the “commons” approach very seriously, stating that they are ready to cut off Internet from people who don’t participate enough, or even if they are disliked by someone else in the village.

Towards the end of the discussion I heard something very promising: “One of the farmers wants to use the network to install video cameras to monitor his animals.” – and that is when everything clicked. That sounds like an experiment, like something you would deploy in a testbed, that also sounds like it came from the community and not from the technologists. It sounds like they might just possibly be answering the call of CONFINE and that sounds like success. Why?

Misconceptions about Country Life

The problem with the so-called exodus “back” to the countryside is that not many people (especially young ones) can hack it. Many return to the city, go abroad, or just give up within months of their “escape”. Very few are actually successful at running a farm. If running a farm was easy, why are so many experienced farmers worldwide abandoning their land and heading to urban environments?

Many of the people associated with unMonastery dream of spending more time in the country. But being in the country means even less free time than you have now. Being in the country is oppressive, even if you have high speed Internet. But what if it was easier?

The farmers in Sarantaporo complain of not having enough time to learn the intricacies of their own network. Their lives are hard, they would like to understand networking better, but they barely have time to finish all their work. What if the network could give them more time?

The Network of IoT Farm Apparatus

The testbed could be developed further toward this end. Just that little idea of the farmer monitoring his sheep could be the beginning of everything. An Open Source IoT farm, running on the testbed, could alleviate some of the time constraints of agricultural work. It starts with an animal monitoring system. Now the people tending the animals doesn’t have to wake up at 3:30 in the morning to check, they can sleep in.

From there you go to telemetry to manage water resources communally. Then you can have automated feeding and irrigation systems, again running on the testbed, again freeing more time. Data can be collected about these activities, not by Facebook, but by the community, and that “data commons” can make all the farms in the area more efficient. They can see what crops are best to plant and where to plant them.

Corporate farming companies are already working on this technology for large scale industrial farms. Why are so few people working on open source solutions that can fight global hunger in a distributed, decentralized way that profits people instead of shareholders?

One man from an ecovillage in the neighboring region rattled off a list of needs as soon as he heard of the Sarantaporo network:

“We could use this technology to coordinate harvests, coordinate with local markets to see what to produce, and at what price. To coordinate with mills for pressing and for processing facilities. To manage the canning facilities, to create a collective brand, to crowdfund instead of using banks. To share tractors! Every farmer has their own tractor and can barely afford it.”

Technology like Origin could also be deployed to make the best use of meteorological conditions in order to produce renewable energy (very windy on Mt. Olympus). You can monitor rainfall and sunshine more precisely with a sensor network, you can share that data with all the members of the community and optimize resource allocation based on changing local needs. Isn’t this the kind of data that derivatives traders would kill for?

Community data can be open while creating autonomy and value for the producers of the data. But all that data is useless unless the right filter is applied to it, and only the locals can create that filter.

Local and Global Commons

And that is the commons part of the project. The network initially started as a conduit for learning and exploration which was deployed by external experts. If the local users can maintain a steady investment of time in order to better understand their system, then they might be able to govern and develop the network without outside help and create their own IT solutions that we can’t even imagine yet. But that seems to be the sticking point for progress. Locals need more time to learn the system in order to improve it, but an improved system is needed before locals will have time to invest in learning it. This is what Dante called a contrapasso.

If tangible progress is eventually made, then it could be exported. Using open source hardware and software means that Sarantaporo’s approach can be replicated in other rural areas quite cheaply. The whole network infrastructure for Sarantaporo was around €20,000. Divided by all the users it comes out to a few Euros per person per year.

There is a developing market for this technology as well. Individuals around Europe are increasingly designing their own hardware that’s suited to their specific needs. The online marketplace Tehnoetic, which aims to be the “Amazon” of open source, specializes in selling items that “respect user freedoms.”

Semi-Detached Farmers

Now some people from unMon I’ve talked to say, “That’s awful, you’re just going to have the farmers sitting in front of their computers all day.” This is an interesting point, especially since early consumerists were sold household appliances throughout the 50’s and 60’s because they were convinced it would give them more free time. Where did all that time go? They had to get jobs to pay for the appliances!

Perhaps making such “improvements” to independent farms could result in an over abundance of couch potatoes hitting the market. People might find themselves with more free time as their farms increase in productivity. They might spend more of that free time on FB, but I think people should be able to choose how to spend their time. If they want to sit in front of a computer, that’s their prerogative. If you spend most of your day sitting in front of a computer, why can’t a farmer? There is also a big difference between slacktivists in the city and in the country: the latter isn’t dependent on anyone else for their food.

Global Agriculture Under Threat

The point is that if we zoom out and look at what’s happening in global agribusiness, we see that all available arable land around the world is being snapped up by investors. If you are worried about GMO crops, industrial farming, indigenous seed extinction, and all that jazz then this should be of concern to you.

Why is this land for sale in the first place? Because all the farmers are leaving it! Why are investors buying it? Because it’s dirt cheap and no one else wants it. Why buy all this land? How else will you produce food for exploding urban populations? How will you keep so many people dependent on this industrial grade hog slop? By owning all the land and keeping autonomous humans off it!

So we are back to the original problem: everyone wants natural, organic, locally grown food, but no one wants to actually produce it. People prefer to abandon the countryside, and that is the exodus that’s really happening.

It’s like a continuation of the enclosures except now there’s no more land to be kicked off of; we’ll simply to be herded into the cities.

The people in Sarantaporo kept saying to us, “We need more people to come here.” They don’t realize it yet, but they might have some of the tools in their hands to make that happen. If people start playing around with the network and making their farms a bit more automated, then farming might appear more attractive to those fleeing their fields.

It’s already happening in other places. In Japan the world’s first fully automated farm plans to open soon. It is projected to more than double production for the vegetable producer Spread. Another dairy farm in France got international attention when it announced it was fully automated.

Standing Their Ground

However there needs to be a balance between automation and job security, too much innovation can lead to job losses. That’s exactly what happened during the Industrial Revolution in Italy when the introduction of farm machinery created mass unemployment. It is also considered to be one of the contributing factors to the rise of fascism.

However it’s also been shown that automation increases employment, and if people can live in the countryside, have healthy food, and also have time to spend with their families and kids, then why should they leave? And with all the IT work there is to do, there might be positions opening up for new people to move in. Maybe the Open Source Ecology people might be interested as well.

But let’s ask another question: how will independent farmers compete with automated industrial farms in the future? Will they be forced to buy patented seeds, pesticides, machinery and software at extortionate rates in order to survive? Or will they too leave their land like so many in the developing world have already done?

In Syria, people living in cities under siege have used gardening, food sovereignty, and heritage seeds to resist domination by the Assad Regime. The 15th Garden enables people to resist by producing their own food.

The wireless network in Sarantaporo could be quite revolutionary as a form of resistance to global capital’s land grabbing and industrial agriculture: if by using open source hardware and software independent farming can be made to be less oppressive and incite more people make the “exodus to the countryside” (or just not leave in the first place), then you might be able maintain some autonomy within the global food chain. Hell, maybe the pensioners can even run the farms remotely from their tablets using FarmBots. Either way, it’s just the beginning, especially since Sarantaporo.gr just qualified for the Ashoka Impact Program in Greece.

Coincidentally, for anyone who might be interested in helping to hack away at these solutions, there happens to be an abandoned schoolhouse (no kids = no school) in one of the villages. Please see the pictures for inspiration. Maybe there is an unMonastery hiding in there.”

Article originally published here.

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