I was helping Prasanna ( U know what ? he runs self hosted cookipedia serving apartment home makers ) from FSHM & PyMesh in organizing his session, bringing up the router, etc... stuff, to demonstrate to the attendees a good idea about commons-infrastructure & the grass-roots oriented mesh networks. The session is organized to share the stage equally for introducing about FreedomBox and the experimentations Bhuvan Krishna and his Hardware/Software community in Swecha conducting with it. The goal of the shared introduction is to trigger an alternative thought process by igniting about the state of current infrastructure that connects us, and make them understand how fragile it is.

However, the FreedomBox, session took much time than anticipated, as it has to be explained properly for all the attendees, and the interesting experimentations, successess, failures they had with it, while deploying in a village, etc... People seem to understand atleast a little bit about where FreedomBox is attacking the problem to solve the Man in the middle, as well as Commons-infrastructure approach to solve the same problem. What i have learned is that, both the vector is necessary and complement each other essentially. For example, project like FreedomBox, could run overlay web services that enable people communicate with their present knowledge - respecting empathy, creating a social mobilization one at a time, creating an emergent awareness socially.

Whereas, we hacktivists, who cannot hold our horses, to try new stuff and bang our heads with problems and philosophies, have decided to try FreedomBox style and then moved to a Radio-Mesh, in other words, community networks where the network architecutre and topology will primarily be decentralized/federated, that essentially requires commons based peer production and social auditing in the long run, requiring people who could understand the fundamental functional nature - which is what we believe FreedomBox like projects will enable in near future.

With more and more democratic uprising, people will ask and require more and more independent, disaster/delay tolerant networking infrastructure - while affordable by all. This is a alternative path towards Communication is not luxury, not even utility, but a necessity. The potential in Indian scenario is just now starting and lot of cracks, emptiness, grey areas needs to be filled by interested and skilled people.

The session, ended smoothly with queries raising about hidden centralization in decentralized networks, about hardware used in FreedomBox, etc... which we were expecting from the audience. Prasanna & Bhuvan have optimally answered the questions they could answer, and with hunger, everybody were eager to have lunch.... :D.

I and some of my friends/peers attended Smart Cities session handled by Francesca Bria & Evgeny Morozov. I was waiting for their opinion and Barcelonas experience in having grass-roots strategy, contribution towards building real smart cities that embraced participation of citizens. One best example would be consulting Guifi & Freifunk.

Sicne, i have been working in GIS, where lot of international, grass-roots collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia is happening - especially in Open Street Maps, i know that there is a best opportunity that Union of India, and corresponding departments will access those data along with their own surveys to build Smart cities that they invasion. In this case, there is a good chance that the data could be used unethically for panopticon surveillance atleast theoretically... Here people are contemplating GIS using GIS information regulation bill, where as around the world, all major public funded research institutions have been releasing data to the public under public domain, and using public participation from city planning to surveying, to forest fire mitigation, and disaster recovery. On the other hand, our smart cities, seems to be filled with surveillance cameras in a panopticon fashion, as one nation under CCTV, even before taking eradicating actions against poverty - which is the true cause of social unrest, and emergence of anti-social elements.

Definetely, the government here does not seem to solve the real problems by facing the truth, instead uses Technology as a blanket to paste a membrane in front of people, literlly fooling them and make believe using voluntarily mandatory & economic push strategies as the path towards development.

My question to her was, what are all the strategies people in Catalonia to make their governance enable what people need and embrace the participation eventually leading to a effective social auditing system by culture. Her long answer, is that, they initially faced lot political depressions and changes which they have to go through and make it work in order to make use of technology properly - which is what i was expecting. And that further made peers in the hall, accept and encourage such points, which have sowed new seeds in new people influxing into communities - who have initially believed that technology alone can change everything. After this conversation i have heard people talking about social and political stands that they need to face with technology in hand. Which is a great improvement, and i believe as one of the expectations of this conference.

Our Digital Future session was handled by Neville Roy Singham. As usual, he has expressed his activist side and have shown really good presentation that recorded and reported statistics on current state of employment and the projected future state, social action, etc... and so on. However, i personally felt that his talk was more emotionally motivated that too have created a paranoia among the crowd with fear of losing jobs :D, that actually made the crowd emotionally attached to this talk.

you see paranoia, is a great tool, to draw & leverage attention - lights up the senses.

I kind of felt over honourary in the crowd - even among my peers, toward the speech. However, the speech is great. It would have been even great, if he has extended his speech on how would it be when nobody has a job to do and there might be a good chance to pursue whatever they are passionate and interested in. That would be so faaaawwwking awesome, and would have further raised questions about critical use of technology - dispersing its usage in all fields possible.

Third day, we were enjoying melodical songs from carnatic origins, and the orchestration initiated with Thirukkural ( திருக்குறள் ), continued to sing great inspirational and melody songs from atleast 5 different language which i could recognize the difference. Its truly a awesome and diversified expereince. I could still hum something that caught my attention, which i cannot express in words... or even with my vocals.... dont ask me to do that.... With the lack of words to express, i am not going to say anything further.... :D

After the completion and great send off for the carnatic orchestration, folks filed 100 years of Tamil Cinema, which is a great video collection of Movie clips of famous scenes, put together by Raj Video Visions. People enjoyed it watching and could really witness how the cinema over here has emerged and evolved with lot of variations, updates.... etc... But sadly with lack of time and strict regulations, the movie was abruptly stopped and we disbanded back to our hostels discussing stuff which we left last night.

I remember some great youthful discussion going in mechanical department's entrace by night after dinner. I intervened and cunningly derailed them towards the topic around rational & emotional behaviors of individuals & groups. Then the discussion was somehow tracked towards Law & Unjust Law and i remember some of the faces in the dull light were actually in kind of awkward explosion on knowing that there is something called as "Unjust Law". It took time to explain that is what that drives us to practice Civil Disobedience. Suddenly, somebody in the crowd questioned me "What do you do for a living ?". I struggled a bit, and answered his serious of questions & doubts on independent research and how it is eccentric and differ from official institutional & authority based research.

Some situational example came up associated with Soft drinks and beverages (factory foods), which encouraged me to speak more about it, and shared my thoughts that how really, motivational reasoning are playing in our decisions without ever being recognized by the thinkers who practice themselves to be as rational as they can. In order to make my point concrete, i even pulled up a real example of local beverage manufacturer, whose products are being supported by the boys. Discussing about stopping themselves, from purchasing & consuming factory foods that are mass manufactured by these multi national some Factory Food Corporates, i cautioned about they their reasoning to apply same rationality to locally manufactured products too. With stead raise in Water stress, i believe that sharing such information using open data is vital even when i cannot prove with measurement data from a laboratory. Because i feel, that the problem of water stress has to be addressed from multiple angles, and if water consumption of factory food manufacturing is one of the angles, then we must not slipd our rational thought to emotions promoting motivational reasoning, which will not solve the problem at all atleast in that direction.

Then with boys from pondicherry team, joined the discussion routed towards about domestication of animals, ecosystem, & how current financial structures subjugates farming community driving towards a disaster disaster situation - i believe in a simple interesting & interpretable manner. I do remember discussion about Bovine induced growth used in cattles, which i learned about when i was working as a research intern. The discussion never stayed on a topic, but travelled among multitude of concepts like Psychedelics, when i introduced about Paul Stamets and continued talking on positive & negative effects on Psychedelic usage completely from a noobs/unexperienced point of view.

Some others came and jumped on to Over honourary which produced heated arguments that side tracked to Scientism. After some time we switched to talk about Uberization, its massive ill effect, synthesizing a disaster disaster scenario in transport and logistics at international scale. I learned a looooot about it, and felt so dumb even i am self studying about GIS usage in transport/transit systems. And you know we boys are boys, and atlast they successfully landed on their most lovable and interesting topic and that continued for almost until asleep. Still some of us folks, who got hyper, had a cold night walk out of the campus to have an awesome elaichi tea right near the entrance of the university and came back to find no one was there in the department entrance, by the time when we decided to crash ourselves in one of the classrooms (i slept there because by morning i could use the toilet there :D).