Greek and English subtitles. Use the CC button at the Youtube player. (Optionally, choose : settings/options/background opacity/25%)
Building Communities of Commons. A documentary on networks in Sarantaporo area.
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.
Documentary: Knowledge as a Common. Communities of production and sharing in Greece.
Greek and English subtitles. Use the CC button at the Youtube player. (Optionally, choose : settings/options/background opacity/25%)
The free/open source software and design communities; the hackerspaces and the do-it-yourself enthusiasts; the movements for an independent Internet; the initiatives for free/communal wifi and open access to knowledge; the resilient/permaculture communities… What do all these have in common?
Trailer of the documentary: Knowledge as a Common. Communities of production and sharing in Greece.
English and Greek subtitles at the cc button on the player. Optionally, choose : settings/ options/background opacity/25%
We live in a time that has seen deep changes in the way societies produce perceptibly, at least in the West. It is as result of dramatic changes that have taken place in the production field. We live in an era of highly-networked society and it was the advent of internet, perhaps, the key element of this change. Fundamental labour practices have been altered. For the first time, we are witnessing groups of producers having the chance to meet up outside the traditional frameworks – like that of a corporation, or state organisation -People that take initiatives to form groups in order to produce goods that belong in the commons sphere.
George Papanikolaou P2P foundation
Trailer of the documentary: Building Communities of Commons. A documentary on networks in Sarantaporo area.
“Building Communities of Commons.
A documentary on Networks in Sarantaporo area.
The project is about creating a wireless networking infrastructure as a commons and building a community around it. It is not just about bringing the Internet to remote areas. Locals are already participating in and are offering their premises for infrastructure deployment, forming local support groups in which they organize their participation, acquiring knowledge, skills and expertise on deploying and maintaining this infrastructure.
Through our experience, we aim to create a model not only for deploying, operating and expanding wireless community networks, but also for community building, tackling all relevant legal, organizational and financial issues.
No proszę. Autor plus 5.
I am doing research on self-organizing in Greece around food system issues and would like to find some time to discuss your work. I will be in Greece in mid-December for a short time, but will be returning in the summer. Please contact me and perhaps we can connect in December. Thank you and thank you for your work!
Thank you Lisa for your comment , here is my e-mail : mbholgr[at]gmail.com. Yes, we can meet us in December.