Postgraduate Thesis: "The Exploitation of Digital Technology as a Growth Factor in Remote and Rural Areas - The Case of the Sarantaporo Nonprofit Organisation"
The purpose of this postgraduate thesis is to investigate how a nonprofit organization, in this case the Sarantaporo.gr NPO, has undertaken the installation, operation and expansion of a Community Wireless Network in the greater Sarantaporo area, Elassona Municipality, in collaboration with residents and stakeholders of the region, can benefit the socio-economic development of a rural and remote area.
On Saturday, April 16, 2016, as part of the FOSSCOMM 2016 event that will take place at the University of Piraeus, the documentary "Building Community of Commons in Greece. A Documentary about The Sarantaporo.gr Community Network" will be shown for the first time publicly at the Amphitheater 002.
Transmediale is a festival of media art and digital culture that has been held every February for a week in Berlin since 1988. The main pillars on which the festival's themes are developed are reflective, aesthetic and hypothetical that develop between art, technology and culture. As Wikipedia puts it: "The festival seeks to express a critical understanding of technology as something more than the digital world, as well as culture as something more than what emerges through the regulated fields of production".
The workshop that Sarantaporo.gr participated in and presented the community network as well as excerpts from the upcoming documentary: "Building Community of Commons in Greece. A Documentary about The Sarantaporo.gr Community Network" was the "Off-the-Cloud Zone" co-organized in collaboration with the ΜΑΖΙ project. The term or otherwise is used to describe the applications, transfer and storage of information in large databases commonly owned by companies, such as Google or Facebook, a practice that is at the heart of criticism nowadays as security, privacy and ways of using content that users produce and market, are questioned.
With the opportunity of the kick-off meeting of the MAZI project in Volos, the Sarantaporo.gr team organizes on 15-17 of January 2016 a 3-day symposium at Sarantaporo area in Greece to guide the MAZI partners and guests in the area and introduce them to this remarkable initiative in network commoning. Together with local actors we engage in discussions about the expansion of the network and its potential role as a common network infrastructure that can support local services of different types.
MAZI (meaning "together" in Greek) is a new EU Horizon2020 project in the CAPS framework, which brings together researchers and activists from various fields around the development of a DIY networking toolkit, and the comparison of its deployment in different pilot studies in Europe.
The Sarantaporo.gr non-profit, in collaboration with local actors and with the support of the CONFINE EU project, Greek FOSS, and TEI of Thessaly, has built in the area of Sarantaporo a modern wireless community network. The network connects 14 villages in the municipality of Elassona to the Internet through a long-distance wireless to the University of Applied Sciences (TEI) of Thessaly, which offers a 1Gbps Internet access.
