# APC LocNet#3 2021
ref https://www.apc.org/en/call-local-network-2021-grant-programme
(deadline: apr 30, 2021 deadline)

## title: Servelots Servicing the COW

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C. Information about your project proposal
### C1. Which of the three focus areas does your project address?
(select one or more from list)
Focus Area 1: Technology, Innovation and Development
Focus Area 2: Gender and Women’s Participation
Focus Area 3: Enabling Policy and Regulatory Frameworks
Describe how you think your project will contribute to the focus area(s) you selected in section C1 above. *
Maximum 300 words

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We are primarily focusing on area 1, however we focus on solutions for women and operations and ownership by women and girls (area 2). Also we are involved with working groups on accessibility and rural inclusion so help steer the policy bodies. A functional model that is a meshed region with exemplary services and knowledge transfer via workshops, camps and alternative open source technologies would go a long way in catalysing the policy makers to look at the community networks as significant for the future of communities and network services. In the meantime, this will already help as the local regional and district bodies would be voice their appreciation of and the significant of the mesh network.

Our activities would be all of these, with focus on ease of replicability and encouraging instructional workshops:
* Local services and server implementations, especially using low-cost single board computers such as the Raspberry Pi, captive portals, non-literate services, education and learning management systems (LMS), local voice calls and audio/video streaming for local radio/TV;
and
* Frugal technologies and innovation with an environmental justice lens such as reuse and repurposing of technology and the use of alternative energies and local materials;

Community inclusion, incentivisation and monetization
* we have a number of dweb and decentralised services that we are planning as longer term research experiments,
* Network stability, analysis and handover to local groups,
* Support for online classes and learning content delivery,
* We are collectively working on gaming learning with internet vouchers as incentives, and
* On a number of local social networking and hyper-media annotation services for the many in the area who are marginalised by the literates.

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Problem or challenge
### Problem or challenge
C2. What problem or challenge of a group of people, community, country and/or region will you be addressing in this project? *
Maximum 250 words

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We reckon that over 70% of the peoples of South and East are “marginalised by the literates' ', more so since the Internet/Web. In India alone this would be over a billion people. While the service applications like Whatsapp and social networking companies like Facebook are making inroads into these segments, there is a visible lack of attention among the tech standards, protocols and policies to address the possibility of enfranchising them with a vision of cohesive community networks. General direction of our work is to provide perspectives toward a modus vivendi by establishing exemplary community networking contexts.

Incidentally, in a region of 5 villages near Bangalore India, we have successfully deployed (thanks to APC support) libre-router based community network with 6 significant nodes around where we have set up a rural research lab. During the lockdown of 2020, this mesh network has been the source of the Internet for a number of girls for online classes and a few work from home people. A number of these nodes are solar powered while all of them are back by uninterrupted power supplies. The network is extended by Raspberry Pi (sub-nodes) with offline first content caches and unPCs (not personal single-board computers). With this grant, our work will be to set up a replicable model mesh network and services, open it for workshops on various aspects of the mesh-networking, decentralised services, and to bring gender equality by championing women to manage and provision for online inclusion of their low-literates.

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Objectives
### C3. What is/are the main goal(s) and/or objective(s) of your project? (3 objectives max.) How is your project relevant to the problem or challenge you described in question C2? *
Maximum 300 words

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1. tune our current mesh network - hardware, software, services and power supplies
2. bring a learning activity that is offline first and facilitate monetization
3. provision instructional and explorary workshops for outsiders and facilitate codevelopment programs

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Expected change
### C4. At the end of the project, what do you expect will have happened or changed? What impact will have been achieved? *
Maximum 150 words

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1. Availability of the mesh network for the community, tourists and instructional needs,
2. Inroads into demonstration of potential protocols, policies and standards that can help reconsider the low-literates participation possibilities, and
3. Development of a number of tools and services to help forward the collective ownership of the network by the community.

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Beneficiaries
### C5. Beneficiaries: Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project? *
Please explain how the project expresses their needs/goals, how they will benefit and what changes it will bring to their lives

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1. The diverse range of people in the area would be able to rediscover the capacities and possibilities by being included in the monetization of their participation,
2. Storytelling and hyper-media linking of rich media content made available in their network can open up the possibilities of a cohesive mixed age groups of women and girls working together on income generation activities, and
3. The larger groups of students, hacker tech communities and activists will be using the mesh-network as a platform for their learning and exploratory needs.

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Project Activities and Outputs
Provide a brief summary of the proposed activities of the project. Activities can be, for example: policy advocacy, gender research, documentation, networking and movement building, development, adaptation or roll-out of technologies, building/testing sustainability models, capacity building, content creation and communications.

For each activity, identify what outputs will be produced.
### C6. Describe all the activities that you will carry out in your project. *
For each, list the outputs (deliverables) and the expected start and end dates.

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| Activity | Output | Start date | End date |
| -------- | -------- | -------- | -------- |
| network stability | documentation and delegation | 1st month | 6th month |
| provisioning unPCs | non smartphone based devices | 2nd month | 3rd month |
| Vochures for all | activity type voucher facility | 1st month | 8 months |
| Offline first apps | Captive learning and discovery | 1st month | end and beyond |
| Workshops | instructional tech events | every 2 months ||

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### C7. Gender component: You need to clearly address gender-related issues in your project. *
This includes gender or power dynamics, gendered policy activities or exploration of the FPIs in relation to community networks. Please describe how it will include and transform the lives of women and girls and other socially excluded groups such as queer, trans, gender-diverse persons and sex workers. Max 200 words

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Over the years, we have been bringing together a diverse set of socially excluded groups. The highlights of these are made available via the captive portal and other links on the mesh network. Often, the local communities are also included in these activities directly or for logistics and they get to become familiar with diverse groups of people. Using the mesh, a local map with timelines and community events, landmarks, podcasts and video stories will bring attention and a certain normalization of the excluded groups. We are also exclusively promoting women and girls when it comes to devices, access and management of the network and content.

We strive to be mindful of the historic sidelining of care workers and the labour classes. From a reading of Periyar: "man-woman polarisation is linked to the one between Brahmin (upper caste/Clergy) and non-Brahmin (other colorful castes/others), as well as that between capitalist and worker; that, in other words, caste and capitalism were linked to reproductive heteronormativity. ..as Shudras (lowest caste/artisans and labourers) are denied the status of workers because their work is ascribed to nature, so are women denied the same status for domestic labour .."

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### C8. People living with disabilities: Does your project include people living with disabilities as leaders or beneficiaries? If yes, tell us how they will be involved and what changes you expect. *
Max 150 words

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There are various forms of disabilities and we have identified low-literacy (people who have eyes but cannot read and write) as a disability of a significantly large segment of people - especially women. Also, by attending to this segment, we consider voice narratives and visuals for textual content (visually and hearing impaired). A signifcant goal of ours is to make local girls and low-literate women become leaders and managers of the mesh related content and work. Our team is inclusive of physically impaired people, women leaders and minorities.

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### C9. Indigenous people and climate informed groups: Are Indigenous leaders, persons of traditional societies or its beneficiaries part of your project? Does the project involve groups working on climate justice and those protecting land rights? If yes to either or both, tell us how they will be involved and what changes you expect. *
Max 150 words

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Our mesh-network is situated among the indigenous people. The mesh network is setup in a forest setting, where the commons, the flora and the fauna need to be protected by the outsiders and often by the community who become land grabbers as the price of land there is skyrocketing compared to their miniscule daily and seasonal incomes.
We are working with pastoral networks and natural farming groups, inaddition to crafts and maker spaces, solar powered devices and farm tools including irrigation when beyond the reach of the grid.

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### C10. Overcoming barriers: Does your project address technical and/or national regulatory barriers to the replication, expansion and sustainability of bottom-up, user-governed, small-scale network operators, co-operatives and other social purpose networks that build and operate their own physical networking infrastructure? *
Max 150 words

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India is in the process of evolving PM-WANI (Prime Ministers Wifi Access Network Interface) and a number of ISPs that build cell phone towers and provide data to a very large number of people at an "affordable" price. Effectively, these require a biometric identification of the person seeking access while requiring connectivity to the phone network to receive an OTP for data. Above all, this has come from a nation wide monitoring and surveillance needs of the central government. The Panchayat Raj (democratic decentralisation) approach to governance which came as an addendum to the Indian Constitution has been usurped in the name of provisioning biometric based services and digital empowerment. Our hope is to demonstrate and help reaffirm the possibility and efficacy of community owned and managed community networks, services, content and communication which is uplifting of the hitherto suppressed voices of women and the dalit low-literates.

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### C11. In what ways does the project adopt the use of Free, Libre and Open-Source (FLOSS) technologies? *
Max 150 words

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We are 100% open source, copy right and patent free. See open.janastu.org

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### C12. If relevant, how does the project propose ways to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic in ways that facilitate specific, local and community-driven contextual responses. *
Max 150 words

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As we write this, Covid infections in India are estimated to be atleast a million everyday!
A year ago we initiated a number of COVID related campaigns (https://blog.janastu.org/covid-19-campaign-namma-halli-radio/) where a significant effort was put into renarration of letters from medical bodies and bringing awareness of the pandemic in local languages and offline small community engagements. When it comes to the mesh-network now (COWmesh), we have setup administrative and monitoring Pi devices which we can access using overlay networks from outside the network. This will help not only sustain the mesh-services but also push timely content and programs to the community using the captive portal pages.

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Available capacity and partnerships
### C13. Please describe the relevant experience and capacity your organisation has to undertake this project. Please tell us about similar experiences, past projects and other related activities. Include links if relevant. What are the current skills and resources that the organisation has to carry out this project? *
Max 250 words

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This will be our 3rd APC support for the mesh-network and services. At every stage, we have futhered the mesh and we now imagine we are uniquely available as a community mesh not only for the communities in the network region but also as a demonstration of a Libre-mesh, services and community engagement using single board computers and local servers and services. (see https://open.janastu.org/work/projects/cowmesh)
Thanks to APC, we are empowered by a number of people and other mesh providers in the region and aruond the world including APC core team which has always been of support even during strange hours of the day and during holidays. Our team is composed of hardware engineers, software developers, server admins, fabricators, graphic artists, designers with biodiversity, environment, crafts and science forums and open source open education groups as part of our network.

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### C14. Does the project have plans for collaboration with partners in other continents/regions, or regional collaboration in the global South? If so, what are these plans?
Max 100 words

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We eagerly seek to share bodies of work, especially regarding all developments related to bringin low-literate communities onboard, demystifying the Web, social networking, marketing, learning and making. We likewise seek to learn and reuse from others in the region and generally from the global South.

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Project Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
### C15. How will you monitor and evaluate the implementation and outcomes of the project? *
Max 150 words

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We are setting up a few data gathering logs which we can use for analytics. We are also setting up mac-id based user idenfication and service provisioning such as quizes for students (with internet vouchers as incentive). We have identified a few girls in the area who are likely to lead management of local girl groups with whom we will be engaging over video conferences and physically when possible.

Evaluation of outcomes and implementation can be based on number of people and a discussion of merits of provisioning differential access and how it empowers low-literate communities (as that is an objective of ours).
We will also be getting an overview of community members how show interest in maintaining and managing the mesh network. We would also be getting an objective measure as any of these group can help further the network reach as self initiated local enterprenurial activity.

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### C16. What do you expect to learn from this project? What are your learning goals? Please also reflect on what can become shared learning for other CNs. *
Max 150 words

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Our main learning goal is to understand what it take to setup and experience a fully functional mesh-network where community groups can indulge in utilising it as a safe space for creating their story sharing and discovery. A significant sub-goal is invoving the community to own and manage the network. To understand what the incentives might be and to explore monetization possibilities. Our secondary goal is to communicate the availability of the mesh for instructional and exploratory needs for a multitude of interest groups.

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### C17. How will you know that you have achieved your objectives? *
Max 150 words

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Our primary target is the reliability and availability of the mesh and a significant set of services for us at the lab and for the communities and also for analysis and monitoring needs from outside.
Next measure is if a decent number of local girls become active along with the tech comfortable WFH people in the area. Then comes the engagement of low-literate community in storytelling and navigation of the content on the mesh. Lastly, the number of different themes of instructional and exploratory workshop that our larger networks will be able to facilitate with this mesh setup as an opportunity.
Yet another achievement would be if the mesh becomes a reference as model for including the low-literate and the women.

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Relevance to the community network movement
### C18. What is the relevance of your project to the community networks movement? Think about ways to make outputs reusable, generate content or tools, document the experience, etc. *
Max 150 words

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Our goal is to make replicability simple with documentation of a number of essential services and tools.
As we estimate on the number of low-literates is over a few billion in the South and South East, we intend to foresee seeding a number of discussions and possible directions regarding accessibity standards to inclusive policy disscussions.

In addtion, we hope for two significant but subtle outputs: 1. a demonstrable position on the possibilities of communities to slow down or address the "network ruins" by validating the local along with the "digital" and 2. process documentation of the potential expressiveness of the girls and women through articulation excercises.

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Sustainability and contribution to your work
### C19. How will the project contribute to the work and sustainability of your organisation(s)? *
Max 200 words

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Sucess of the project, tools developed and processes evolved can lead to continued activity regarding replication in several other places. We are already being approached by representatives of nearby areas and other national programs to help setup connectivity for their remote communities and campus needs for remote teaching in post pandemic scenarios. We are also part of collectives interested in developing archives of knowledge from indigenous and nomadic communities where we plan to extrapolate from the tools of a mesh network.

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Risk mitigation
### C20. What obstacles or risks could prevent this project from being successful? What will you do to try to prevent or overcome these obstacles? *
Max 200 words

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A regulatory overseeing body could ask use to cut the main link to the internet or community may start to fear the content on an open network albeit local.

Our plan is bring alternate ways of provisioning internet either via leased lines or multiple hops in case we fail to convince the district admin of the need for eduction and commnity skill development programs of the government and such. Also, we plan to provision sub-networks based on an activity of interest as we go along in case we see discomfort surface among the community. We will also set up local workshops and meetings with elders as we go along. From our experience from earlier years with the community, we are now more inclusive of the elders and women during our process and methods planning stages.

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Budget
### C21. How much are you applying for?

USD 15000

max USD 15,000 for individual organisations
upload sheet; see reference sheet: https://share2.apc.org/s/QxT5oirAJaEo3J8

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### C22. Please describe the types of support, beyond funding, that you would like to receive from APC and the LocNet project during the implementation of this project. *
For example you might need support for advocacy, communications, project management, financial reporting, narrative reporting, technical support, etc.

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We can use all the support mentioned here atleast cursorily on overseeing drafts and guiding us on reporting structures. Tech support from the larger APC tech group and others mesh collectives in different regions will ensure confidence and speed in developing our services and tools.

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