P2Pvalue report from HOPE X

I’ve been on the road quite a bit the past month but I thought I should share a little of where I’ve been and some of the inspiring CBPP projects I have come across. July 18th to 21 I attended HOPEX or Hackers on Planet Earth, one of the more grassroots and community oriented hacker conferences in the US which takes place biannually in New York. It was my first time to attend and it was great to see, meet and speak with so many people working for the commons. I was there to introduce people to our work on P2Pvalue.

There were many excellent projects and you can find many videos from the talks online but two in particular really caught my attention both relating to community owned cellular networks.

I met with Lisha Sterling who does great work with Geeks Without Bounds empowering and supporting communities in times of crisis by working with not for profit organisations, leveraging free and open technologies for aid and disaster relief. They also regularly run hackathons to encourage the hacker community to contribute to the development of software tools for disaster relief.  This first video introduces Geeks Without Bounds and shows an example of a diy cellular network they built for the burning man festival.

Next up were RHIZOMATICA who gave a wonderful presentation on their work in rural Mexico developing low cost community owned cellular services for areas underserved by the big telecoms companies. Following their lecture Rhizomatica gave workshop where they went deep into the techinal features of their network. Their work is inspired by P2P practices and the Commons you can find further details on their website. rhizomatica.org