[00:00.000 --> 00:01.220]  The technical issues.
[00:03.560 --> 00:08.200]  Our next two speakers are discussing building community open-source networks.
[00:10.000 --> 00:14.920]  All over the world, wherever you go, generally speaking, cell phone networks have the same problems.
[00:15.680 --> 00:18.680]  They're owned by big companies, and most of them are in bed with governments.
[00:19.720 --> 00:23.040]  Our speakers have worked to build an answer to that.
[00:23.680 --> 00:27.920]  I'd like everyone to please welcome Peter Bloom and Maka Munoz.
[00:27.920 --> 00:29.500]  Thank you.
[00:31.120 --> 00:32.680]  Thank you for your patience.
[00:34.000 --> 00:34.220]  Yes.
[00:35.560 --> 00:36.880]  Hola, buenas tardes.
[00:37.680 --> 00:40.000]  My name is Maka Munoz.
[00:40.780 --> 00:52.940]  I have been coordinating Palabra Radio for the past eight years, and have been a collaborator of Rizomatica Project Science It Begin.
[00:53.780 --> 01:00.120]  I would like to take a few minutes to do a short introduction of the Rizomatica Project.
[01:00.800 --> 01:11.640]  After, Peter Bloom, founder of Rizomatica, will talk more in details about the community cell phone network in Mexico.
[01:13.760 --> 01:15.860]  I have some questions.
[01:16.280 --> 01:17.160]  Wait, wait, wait, wait.
[01:17.600 --> 01:17.940]  Okay.
[01:18.860 --> 01:24.520]  When I say Mexico, what kind of image come to your head?
[01:25.980 --> 01:26.660]  Drugs.
[01:26.920 --> 01:27.140]  What else?
[01:27.240 --> 01:27.760]  Drugs.
[01:28.020 --> 01:28.220]  Good.
[01:28.820 --> 01:29.360]  Corruption.
[01:29.600 --> 01:29.920]  Corruption.
[01:30.260 --> 01:30.320]  Corruption.
[01:30.320 --> 01:30.440]  Sure.
[01:31.500 --> 01:32.100]  Tortillas.
[01:33.040 --> 01:33.640]  Tortillas.
[01:34.020 --> 01:34.500]  Tequila.
[01:35.740 --> 01:36.340]  Tequila.
[01:36.520 --> 01:36.980]  Tequila.
[01:37.320 --> 01:37.540]  Tequila.
[01:37.560 --> 01:37.580]  Chocolate.
[01:38.300 --> 01:38.680]  Great.
[01:39.360 --> 01:39.660]  Good.
[01:39.960 --> 01:40.120]  Okay.
[01:40.320 --> 01:40.840]  Good, good, good.
[01:41.280 --> 01:41.560]  Great.
[01:42.340 --> 01:43.440]  Well done, everybody.
[01:44.540 --> 01:51.360]  For many people, some here, in the world, Zapatistas, you are right, good.
[01:52.320 --> 02:03.820]  For many people in the world, Mexico is synonymous of violence, corruption, narcotraffic, immigrants, tourists, tequila, and all indigenous culture.
[02:04.360 --> 02:06.500]  And I have another question for you.
[02:07.020 --> 02:09.520]  Who has been in Mexico before?
[02:09.520 --> 02:10.820]  Please, can you?
[02:11.040 --> 02:11.920]  Hey, great.
[02:12.280 --> 02:13.120]  That's amazing.
[02:13.440 --> 02:19.180]  And how many of you have heard about or been in Oaxaca?
[02:21.160 --> 02:21.800]  Great.
[02:22.360 --> 02:24.420]  So, I don't need to tell you more.
[02:25.640 --> 02:32.620]  Okay, so, well, Oaxaca is a state, yes, please.
[02:33.360 --> 02:39.420]  Oaxaca is a state in the south of Mexico, next to Chiapas, where the Zapatistas army is.
[02:39.420 --> 02:50.780]  And Oaxaca is crossed by three mountain chains that made colonization of the state by the Spanish very difficult in the 16th century.
[02:51.220 --> 03:03.860]  This permit that the 16 different original ethnic groups, sometimes wrongly called Indians, continue to exist with different language, different dress, different traditions.
[03:05.560 --> 03:15.080]  Most towns or communities in Oaxaca live under the own code of local government and have a defined territory.
[03:15.760 --> 03:21.240]  In many cases, private property is not existent in these towns.
[03:21.820 --> 03:30.260]  All the decisions are made by community assembly and the decisions are enforced by the locally chosen officials.
[03:30.260 --> 03:41.240]  When some public works need to be done, like making a new road or building a school, the townspeople work together voluntarily.
[03:42.060 --> 03:43.440]  This is called tekyo.
[03:44.220 --> 03:54.960]  And finally, as a way to celebrate life and traditions, every town has its party or fiesta, one of the most important moments of the year.
[03:56.560 --> 03:57.240]  Thanks.
[03:59.840 --> 04:00.520]  Thanks.
[04:00.520 --> 04:00.900]  This sign.
[04:01.520 --> 04:03.380]  So I want to show you...
[04:03.380 --> 04:08.540]  Well, this is part of Oaxaca, the town where the cell phone network is working.
[04:08.820 --> 04:12.220]  This is very common in Oaxaca to find.
[04:12.900 --> 04:18.780]  This sign is the best example that you can find in the entrance of the some towns.
[04:19.080 --> 04:22.240]  The private property doesn't exist in this community.
[04:22.960 --> 04:25.260]  Prohibit to buy and sell community land.
[04:28.220 --> 04:29.340]  Yes, it's great.
[04:29.460 --> 04:32.380]  It's great to find this in some parts of the world.
[04:32.380 --> 04:33.500]  So...
[04:33.500 --> 04:40.660]  In 2006, there was an important social uprising led by the state's rural teachers.
[04:41.380 --> 04:45.660]  More than 60,000 of June went on strike.
[04:46.560 --> 04:58.960]  This strike was brutality repressed, leading to a general strike and rebellion of the population and the date taken of the city of Oaxaca for more than six months.
[05:00.040 --> 05:05.060]  Who of you know who was Brad Will?
[05:07.160 --> 05:08.300]  Few people.
[05:09.020 --> 05:10.200]  Okay, let me tell you.
[05:10.880 --> 05:24.700]  Brad Will was a New Yorker based indie media reporter who was assassinated by paramilitary during this rebellion as well as dozens of teachers and activists.
[05:25.480 --> 05:49.220]  Meanwhile, their corporate media told another story which led over 10,000 women to march in and then take control of the 12 radio stations and the state television station where they transmitted the truth about the movement and the injustice for more than one month.
[05:49.220 --> 06:03.530]  From this point on, people in Oaxaca begin thinking about radio spectrum as an integral part of the people's territory in which the right to communicate is defended and exercised.
[06:04.420 --> 06:14.880]  In fact, Oaxaca has the highest concentration of low-powered community FM stations in all of Latin America and probably in the world.
[06:15.120 --> 06:20.740]  With over 60 unlicensed stations operating all over the state.
[06:21.400 --> 06:33.840]  Mexico's own constitution as well as international tribal allow for unlegitimized the rights of First Nation to establish and operate their own media infrastructure.
[06:33.840 --> 06:47.020]  So, this is a very short inter-introduction where we are and why we are there doing this project, the cell phone network, community cell phone network.
[06:47.480 --> 06:49.920]  So, Peter Bloom, please.
[06:49.920 --> 06:51.100]  Yeah, can you open the other thing?
[06:52.460 --> 06:54.200]  And let me take this over here.
[06:58.490 --> 06:59.530]  Okay, so...
[06:59.530 --> 07:00.310]  Hi, everybody.
[07:00.910 --> 07:05.630]  Thanks for sticking around through the technical problems.
[07:06.850 --> 07:08.050]  My name is Peter Bloom.
[07:08.250 --> 07:16.730]  I am the general coordinator of Rhizomatica, which is a group, an organization that I started some years ago, three or four years ago.
[07:16.830 --> 07:21.370]  It's kind of hard to know when it started because it's not an official organization.
[07:21.370 --> 07:22.990]  We're not registered anywhere or anything.
[07:25.470 --> 07:34.610]  I asked MACA to give us some context because I think it's important that we draw some lessons from what we do in Oaxaca and the story of Oaxaca.
[07:36.090 --> 07:41.310]  And also in the context of many of the talks that happened this morning that I had a chance to attend.
[07:41.610 --> 07:44.190]  And the first one is we need to have our own infrastructure.
[07:44.490 --> 07:46.410]  I think that that's very obvious.
[07:50.750 --> 07:59.630]  Everything else that we do is going to be mitigating a problem that we really cannot resolve unless we own, operate, and have full control over our own infrastructure.
[08:00.770 --> 08:08.250]  In the case of Mexico, it also means being able to actually have infrastructure.
[08:08.670 --> 08:14.830]  So, whereas here, you know, pretty much everybody is connected, sometimes more so than we want to be.
[08:15.290 --> 08:31.150]  In Mexico, we have a different problem, which is that many people who want to be connected to the Internet, to a phone, etc., are not able to because where they live is deemed to be too rural, too isolated, etc., for the companies that are in charge of this to go and do it.
[08:31.250 --> 08:33.570]  So, if they don't do it themselves, no one is going to do it.
[08:35.050 --> 08:40.250]  Secondly, if we want to operate and own our own infrastructure, it requires working with communities.
[08:40.250 --> 08:42.750]  It requires working with people, human beings.
[08:45.150 --> 08:51.910]  Otherwise, we will go back to the same sort of corporately, you know, controlled networks that we have right now.
[08:52.030 --> 08:54.250]  We won't really have changed any problem.
[08:54.470 --> 08:54.990]  I'm sorry.
[08:55.070 --> 08:56.570]  We won't have really changed the situation.
[08:57.210 --> 08:59.070]  So, those two things, I think, are important.
[08:59.310 --> 09:12.710]  And it's a huge lesson that we, as Rhizematica, and myself personally, and Maka as well, and the others who work on the project with us, have drawn from our experience in Oaxaca working in community where there are still community assemblies, places where there's no private property.
[09:14.410 --> 09:22.830]  It makes you think differently about how and, you know, how we should be building our own networks.
[09:24.010 --> 09:25.390]  So, a little bit about Rhizematica.
[09:25.490 --> 09:27.030]  Like I said, we started a few years ago.
[09:27.570 --> 09:32.410]  It's basically four of us, two of whom are here.
[09:32.590 --> 09:33.150]  They're right here.
[09:33.730 --> 09:36.410]  Shabi and Tele, who are in charge of all the sort of technical stuff.
[09:37.790 --> 09:38.930]  And then we have a lawyer.
[09:39.190 --> 09:40.770]  It's always important to have a lawyer.
[09:41.890 --> 09:45.050]  I think the guys from the last presentation can speak to that as well.
[09:45.430 --> 09:48.390]  Always have a good lawyer if you want to do anything.
[09:49.110 --> 09:50.170]  So, it's the four of us.
[09:50.290 --> 09:57.490]  We've been able to do what we've been able to do, which we've, you know, we're quite pleased with, but there's a lot more to do without any kind of external funding.
[09:57.710 --> 10:02.790]  We don't have the backing of any government, of any agency or anything like that.
[10:02.890 --> 10:05.310]  We don't have, you know, money from USAID or any of those things.
[10:05.550 --> 10:10.650]  So, this is all a bunch of out-of-pocket money.
[10:10.910 --> 10:13.290]  It's selling t-shirts of which, of course, I brought three.
[10:14.790 --> 10:19.130]  So, we can start the bidding at $400 per t-shirt.
[10:20.130 --> 10:23.370]  I honestly thought that I was going to be speaking to, you know, 10 people or something.
[10:23.570 --> 10:26.970]  So, I'm happy that everybody's here.
[10:27.150 --> 10:29.130]  So, sorry I didn't bring t-shirts for everybody next time.
[10:29.650 --> 10:35.130]  But literally by selling t-shirts, good old crowdfunding and stuff like that.
[10:35.810 --> 10:38.230]  And then the communities help us a lot.
[10:38.390 --> 10:39.090]  They feed us.
[10:39.150 --> 10:39.850]  They put us up.
[10:40.110 --> 10:43.270]  They pay for and maintain the infrastructure.
[10:44.630 --> 10:45.890]  So, that helps a lot.
[10:46.070 --> 10:49.090]  But, again, you can do a lot with no money.
[10:49.210 --> 10:54.970]  And I think it's really important that that lesson also sort of come out from the work that we've done.
[10:55.530 --> 10:59.030]  Right now we operate three networks, three rural networks in Oaxaca.
[10:59.550 --> 11:03.710]  And we sort of collaborate with another organization or another company who runs two others.
[11:03.710 --> 11:07.210]  So, there's five networks, five of these autonomous networks.
[11:07.390 --> 11:16.490]  There's approximately 1,000 total users who use these systems every single day for their critical communications both inside their villages and with the rest of the world.
[11:17.530 --> 11:19.930]  So, from that it's fairly obvious what we do.
[11:20.610 --> 11:30.170]  We install relatively low cost and easy to set up and manage networks based on open-source software and many times open-source hardware.
[11:30.170 --> 11:32.930]  I actually want to show you what one of these looks like.
[11:36.230 --> 11:38.530]  So, it's not very light, but it's quite small.
[11:39.230 --> 11:40.470]  This is a base station.
[11:40.690 --> 11:43.730]  And not only is it a base station, it's also a BSC.
[11:44.050 --> 11:45.410]  It has all the amplifiers.
[11:45.570 --> 11:48.570]  This is an entire cell phone network right here, sitting here.
[11:49.310 --> 11:52.210]  You put a couple of antennas on it and you're ready to go.
[11:53.590 --> 11:54.310]  This is it.
[11:54.450 --> 11:56.730]  There's no other parts.
[11:56.850 --> 11:58.110]  There's no other thing going on.
[11:58.230 --> 12:01.550]  You connect it here through an Ethernet cable to the quote-unquote Internet.
[12:01.550 --> 12:03.370]  And you're off and running.
[12:03.570 --> 12:06.130]  If you want to have long distance calls.
[12:06.350 --> 12:10.050]  Otherwise, you can just set up a local network and you're good to go.
[12:10.410 --> 12:12.750]  So, this is a huge step.
[12:12.950 --> 12:19.170]  This is a huge change in how or what a cell phone network can be.
[12:19.290 --> 12:24.090]  It's no longer about huge multinational corporations.
[12:24.130 --> 12:28.790]  It's no longer about proprietary knowledge, code, and all of that.
[12:28.790 --> 12:31.870]  You know, there's an open-source version of all of this stuff now.
[12:32.070 --> 12:33.310]  It works fairly well.
[12:33.470 --> 12:34.290]  It could still be better.
[12:35.410 --> 12:36.870]  But this is all we need.
[12:37.450 --> 12:41.830]  And one of these, without ruining our friend's business...
[12:41.830 --> 12:43.170]  Maybe I won't even get there.
[12:43.250 --> 12:43.750]  We'll go into that.
[12:43.910 --> 12:46.930]  It costs us about $10,000 to set up the entire network.
[12:47.070 --> 12:48.670]  It can sometimes cost us even less than that.
[12:48.670 --> 12:54.690]  And if you look at what it costs a big company to do the same, especially in a rural area, where they're putting a diesel generator.
[12:54.910 --> 12:58.030]  They're putting up a huge fence because they're worried about people stealing their shit.
[12:59.450 --> 13:02.270]  We don't have to worry about that because this is community property.
[13:02.390 --> 13:04.090]  So, who's going to steal from themselves, right?
[13:04.170 --> 13:05.170]  I mean, there's always somebody.
[13:06.550 --> 13:09.110]  Generally speaking, it's fine.
[13:10.910 --> 13:12.250]  So, we don't have to put up a fence.
[13:12.250 --> 13:14.710]  We don't usually have to put up a generator.
[13:14.710 --> 13:16.110]  We'll just go right into grid power.
[13:16.230 --> 13:17.630]  We can use solar power, et cetera.
[13:19.310 --> 13:25.990]  We don't have to send some asshole technician out to fix the stuff because the people are there dealing with it themselves with our help.
[13:26.830 --> 13:29.370]  So, all these costs just go way, way, way, way, way down.
[13:29.790 --> 13:31.630]  And now we can put up one of these networks.
[13:31.710 --> 13:35.490]  There should be a picture at some point with some antennas on a piece of bamboo.
[13:35.730 --> 13:40.150]  So, one of the communities that we work in, they said, look, we don't have the money for a tower.
[13:40.150 --> 13:43.710]  And they came out with a 12-meter piece of bamboo.
[13:43.910 --> 13:44.550]  So, we said, okay, great.
[13:44.730 --> 13:45.730]  We'll mount on that.
[13:45.910 --> 13:49.710]  So, there's a cell phone network somewhere in the world mounted on a bamboo pole.
[13:50.490 --> 13:52.530]  Which makes me, before I go to bed, feel...
[13:52.530 --> 13:52.810]  I don't know.
[13:52.910 --> 13:53.750]  It just makes me feel better.
[13:55.670 --> 13:59.490]  Like I said, these networks are owned and managed by the community.
[13:59.750 --> 14:04.150]  So, that $10,000 approximate investment comes from the community.
[14:04.410 --> 14:08.250]  We don't give anything away for free to anybody because we don't have any money ourselves.
[14:08.250 --> 14:12.290]  And even if we did, that's just not... that's not how... it's not our philosophy.
[14:13.330 --> 14:16.630]  This project isn't about donating cell phone networks to people.
[14:16.750 --> 14:18.510]  It's about helping them build their own networks.
[14:18.730 --> 14:22.130]  We also feel that by paying for it, people are a lot more likely to take care of it.
[14:23.690 --> 14:28.550]  Generally speaking, that $10,000 amount is within the community's grasp.
[14:28.810 --> 14:31.650]  There are other situations where the community can't come up with all of it.
[14:31.650 --> 14:33.590]  So, we try to work out some kind of plan with them.
[14:34.350 --> 14:35.490]  So, they can pay for it.
[14:38.610 --> 14:40.690]  The other part of that is, again, that they manage it.
[14:40.810 --> 14:41.530]  So, they're in charge.
[14:41.590 --> 14:46.250]  The folks in the community that we sort of train and help to understand how all this works.
[14:47.710 --> 14:49.550]  They, you know, sign people up for service.
[14:49.670 --> 14:50.810]  They cancel people's service.
[14:50.930 --> 14:54.050]  They do the credit top-offs and all of that.
[14:54.170 --> 14:55.390]  So, we don't have to do that.
[14:55.410 --> 14:56.490]  And the community does that.
[14:56.490 --> 14:58.250]  They do it in the way that they feel is best.
[14:58.770 --> 15:01.790]  They have community assemblies around how they want to do that.
[15:01.970 --> 15:05.190]  They get to decide how much they want it to cost, for example, per month.
[15:05.550 --> 15:12.630]  Which, every time we tell people that, they can't really quite believe that they get to decide how much they pay for their network.
[15:12.750 --> 15:16.710]  It's kind of like when you're in school and their teacher says, you know, you can decide on your own grade or something.
[15:16.910 --> 15:18.310]  It's like, great.
[15:20.470 --> 15:22.910]  Then, so we basically set up a local network.
[15:23.210 --> 15:24.790]  You know, this thing transmits locally.
[15:24.790 --> 15:25.570]  It has a radius.
[15:25.690 --> 15:28.090]  It really depends on all different kinds of things.
[15:28.190 --> 15:32.150]  If anybody knows about RF, it's not even worth trying to explain.
[15:32.350 --> 15:35.230]  But we've gotten some really good results going over mountains and stuff.
[15:35.390 --> 15:40.370]  Sometimes it just gets stuck like we were seeing or like you can see from the pictures we work in the mountains.
[15:40.630 --> 15:41.510]  Lots of foliage.
[15:41.730 --> 15:42.350]  Lots of humidity.
[15:43.310 --> 15:47.470]  So, nevertheless, we get very, very good coverage from these machines here.
[15:48.930 --> 15:50.450]  So, we set up these local networks.
[15:50.450 --> 15:55.730]  And then these local networks all participate together with my organization and others.
[15:56.150 --> 15:59.690]  And then sort of an umbrella organization that...
[16:01.190 --> 16:03.990]  Of which all of the communities are voting members.
[16:04.130 --> 16:06.810]  They elect people from the village to be part of the organization.
[16:06.830 --> 16:13.990]  And we sort of decide about and talk about things that concern the network of networks, as it were.
[16:13.990 --> 16:16.950]  So, there's local ownership and local control of each network.
[16:17.190 --> 16:22.210]  And there's also this sort of federation, if you will, of all of these networks.
[16:22.910 --> 16:24.690]  And there's another reason for it.
[16:24.750 --> 16:28.290]  Not just because it's good practice and nice and participatory and all that.
[16:28.430 --> 16:34.270]  It also helps us build a political base to defend the work that we do.
[16:34.270 --> 16:38.370]  And that's another big lesson that we've learned from doing community FM.
[16:38.870 --> 16:44.970]  Is, you know, the government is always willing and able to come and shut your network down.
[16:45.190 --> 16:47.050]  Unless you have some way to defend it.
[16:50.050 --> 16:51.810]  So, just finally on that.
[16:52.070 --> 16:56.950]  All of the networks are run in a not-for-profit fashion or non-commercially.
[16:57.210 --> 16:58.910]  So, there is money that changes hands.
[16:59.290 --> 17:00.450]  But it's very inexpensive.
[17:00.450 --> 17:03.210]  So, the idea is to have something that breaks even.
[17:03.810 --> 17:05.630]  It doesn't throw off any real profit.
[17:05.810 --> 17:08.150]  But it allows the village to recoup their investment.
[17:08.550 --> 17:11.050]  It allows them to pay their ongoing monthly costs.
[17:11.230 --> 17:13.190]  Which are things like electricity and Internet.
[17:14.190 --> 17:16.870]  Possibly pay someone in the village to help administer.
[17:17.190 --> 17:18.930]  They give a small piece of the money to us.
[17:19.050 --> 17:23.590]  When I say a small amount of money, we're talking about $2.50 per user per month.
[17:23.750 --> 17:25.430]  That's the total what the user pays.
[17:25.750 --> 17:28.530]  So, that's 30 pesos per user.
[17:29.270 --> 17:31.190]  Of which, 20 pesos stay in the community.
[17:31.350 --> 17:32.530]  And 10 pesos come to Reizomatica.
[17:33.350 --> 17:33.910]  So, we can...
[17:33.910 --> 17:35.110]  Basically, so we can eat.
[17:35.410 --> 17:37.130]  And keep our car in working order.
[17:37.290 --> 17:38.590]  And come and visit them.
[17:39.550 --> 17:40.610]  So, why did we do this?
[17:40.710 --> 17:41.490]  And why in Mexico?
[17:41.850 --> 17:43.070]  Or how are we able to do this?
[17:44.650 --> 17:47.370]  Mexico is a particularly interesting case, I feel.
[17:47.490 --> 17:48.670]  Not just because I live there and I know it.
[17:48.770 --> 17:51.070]  But I think sort of objectively it's interesting.
[17:52.570 --> 17:56.110]  Because of this huge telecommunications monopoly that exists there.
[17:56.390 --> 17:58.990]  That has created the richest man in the world.
[17:59.210 --> 18:00.150]  Maybe he's the second richest.
[18:00.350 --> 18:00.550]  I don't know.
[18:00.630 --> 18:01.250]  He goes up and down.
[18:01.390 --> 18:01.990]  But the richest...
[18:01.990 --> 18:02.970]  Let's call him the richest man in the world.
[18:03.110 --> 18:03.510]  Sounds better.
[18:04.970 --> 18:05.790]  Carlos Slim.
[18:06.210 --> 18:08.070]  Who owns this huge monopoly.
[18:08.370 --> 18:08.990]  Covers broadband.
[18:09.230 --> 18:10.870]  Covers fixed line telephony.
[18:11.030 --> 18:11.950]  Covers cell phones.
[18:13.630 --> 18:16.070]  So, you know, the other side of that coin.
[18:16.270 --> 18:16.950]  Having this monopoly.
[18:17.070 --> 18:17.910]  Having the richest man in the world.
[18:18.170 --> 18:21.210]  Is there are 50,000 rural communities in Mexico.
[18:21.490 --> 18:23.450]  And something like 20 to 30 million people.
[18:23.750 --> 18:26.330]  Who don't have a cellular signal where they work.
[18:29.570 --> 18:31.930]  And this monopoly was allowed to exist.
[18:32.130 --> 18:33.030]  It kind of was...
[18:33.030 --> 18:34.310]  Came into existence.
[18:34.590 --> 18:38.430]  Due to a bunch of neoliberal reforms that happened in Mexico in the 1990s.
[18:38.630 --> 18:41.290]  Where they basically started selling off all the public infrastructure.
[18:42.090 --> 18:44.310]  And in the case of Telmex, Telso.
[18:44.430 --> 18:45.390]  Which is his company.
[18:45.510 --> 18:46.650]  They didn't even really sell it off.
[18:46.830 --> 18:47.870]  They just kind of gave it to him.
[18:49.110 --> 18:50.250]  And then after that.
[18:50.510 --> 18:52.630]  Having forced his company.
[18:53.010 --> 18:54.290]  Or any of the other cell phone companies.
[18:54.410 --> 18:55.950]  There are three or four other operators.
[18:56.550 --> 18:58.430]  Having forced them to go and cover these communities.
[18:58.610 --> 18:59.890]  As is the case in other places.
[19:00.130 --> 19:03.070]  Where the regulatory body actually does what they're supposed to do.
[19:04.750 --> 19:05.970]  And again, like I said.
[19:06.350 --> 19:08.470]  If the communities don't build their own infrastructure.
[19:08.750 --> 19:09.950]  It's not going to happen.
[19:09.950 --> 19:11.290]  The infrastructure isn't coming.
[19:12.910 --> 19:14.470]  We go into a lot of communities.
[19:14.510 --> 19:16.890]  And they show us letters that they've sent to the government.
[19:17.090 --> 19:17.850]  To the companies.
[19:17.950 --> 19:21.370]  Essentially begging for them to come and connect them to something.
[19:21.530 --> 19:23.050]  Maybe a fixed line telephone.
[19:23.290 --> 19:24.850]  Maybe a cellular service.
[19:25.530 --> 19:26.430]  At this point it's more.
[19:26.510 --> 19:27.950]  People are more looking for cellular service.
[19:28.330 --> 19:30.410]  So this is kind of the context in which we work.
[19:30.530 --> 19:31.630]  And why we do what we do.
[19:31.630 --> 19:36.550]  I mean I should also preface this by saying I f*cking hate cell phones personally.
[19:37.030 --> 19:38.710]  I find them to be really annoying.
[19:39.030 --> 19:39.270]  I don't...
[19:39.270 --> 19:42.210]  It's like super annoying that everyone just looks at their cell phone all day.
[19:44.670 --> 19:45.470]  So we...
[19:45.870 --> 19:46.450]  So yeah.
[19:46.590 --> 19:48.130]  So I should just probably stop talking.
[19:48.250 --> 19:48.330]  Yeah.
[19:48.430 --> 19:48.510]  No.
[19:48.650 --> 19:49.830]  So the idea is...
[19:51.530 --> 19:53.110]  How do we do it?
[19:53.150 --> 19:57.130]  How do we do this kind of thing without making it obnoxious?
[19:57.130 --> 19:59.370]  Like it is in New York, for example.
[20:00.110 --> 20:02.490]  And we do that by working with the communities.
[20:02.870 --> 20:07.410]  And coming up with different ways in which people...
[20:07.410 --> 20:10.690]  So people have already recognized that it's important to be able to have access to a telephone.
[20:10.950 --> 20:14.290]  Which is a very separate thing from being obsessed with your telephone.
[20:14.430 --> 20:17.270]  Or getting lost inside of your apps and all that.
[20:17.530 --> 20:19.030]  So people want to have access.
[20:19.430 --> 20:23.410]  We don't go and work anywhere where people haven't explicitly invited us.
[20:23.410 --> 20:27.630]  So we don't go and, you know, convince communities to let them work with us.
[20:27.790 --> 20:28.990]  People have to come and find us.
[20:29.110 --> 20:30.630]  Kind of like the A-team in that respect.
[20:32.950 --> 20:33.710]  And we try...
[20:33.710 --> 20:36.630]  We do a lot of hiding since, like I said, we're only a four-man operation.
[20:37.210 --> 20:40.750]  We don't really always have the capacity to, you know, attend the needs of everybody.
[20:43.150 --> 20:44.430]  So people want to be connected.
[20:44.750 --> 20:50.890]  But at the same time, we work in indigenous communities where there are still traditional, as you would call them, ways of life.
[20:50.890 --> 20:55.330]  People maintain certain level of community unity.
[20:56.370 --> 20:58.070]  Like there's tech-yo community work.
[20:58.210 --> 21:00.490]  Decisions are made through assembly and all these other things.
[21:00.650 --> 21:02.150]  Which I think are really cool.
[21:02.510 --> 21:07.750]  And we do our best to work together with the community so we don't ruin those things.
[21:08.110 --> 21:14.610]  So we don't change them or swap them out for, oh, everybody can attend the assembly via SMS or any stupid shit like that.
[21:14.730 --> 21:15.850]  Like we're not into that.
[21:17.610 --> 21:20.110]  We're really... that's not where we're trying to go with this.
[21:21.390 --> 21:23.790]  More to the point, the community tries to give us feedback.
[21:24.110 --> 21:26.450]  So like one thing, it's really simple stuff sometimes.
[21:26.870 --> 21:30.110]  The community basically said, okay, we want to have the calls.
[21:30.450 --> 21:34.030]  So once you own your own network, you can do whatever you want, right?
[21:35.130 --> 21:39.370]  So the community said, they said, look, you know, we want to be able to limit the length of the calls.
[21:39.530 --> 21:41.230]  One, so that the network doesn't get congested.
[21:41.230 --> 21:45.410]  But also so that people still go and talk to their neighbor.
[21:45.550 --> 21:48.850]  They still go and visit their comadre, you know, down the road.
[21:49.610 --> 21:55.190]  Because otherwise people could just get on the phone now and speak to each other for free for hours and hours and hours.
[21:55.190 --> 22:03.950]  And, you know, the community life, the sort of interesting part of what's still happening in these communities would slowly begin to dissipate.
[22:04.210 --> 22:06.530]  So we really don't want to be part of that at all.
[22:07.450 --> 22:18.310]  And instead look for ways that we can actually strengthen that and move forward technologically without having to like radically alter the social relations in the place.
[22:19.710 --> 22:21.130]  So we're at a hacker conference.
[22:22.470 --> 22:26.530]  And I guess what we do, we look at what we do as being based on sort of three main hacks.
[22:26.670 --> 22:33.150]  A technological hack, a legal and public policy hack, and a sort of social organizational hack.
[22:34.410 --> 22:39.490]  So from the technological side, it's quite complicated.
[22:39.870 --> 22:41.550]  But again, we set one of these things up.
[22:41.690 --> 22:42.490]  It sounds really easy.
[22:42.610 --> 22:46.690]  If you want to learn a lot more about this, you should come to the workshop tomorrow at 1 p.m.
[22:46.690 --> 22:50.830]  on the sixth floor.
[22:52.470 --> 22:53.330]  It's in the thing.
[22:53.990 --> 22:54.930]  You'll find it in there.
[22:55.450 --> 22:56.830]  So come to that.
[22:56.970 --> 22:57.810]  It starts at 1 p.m.
[22:57.950 --> 23:05.690]  We will be happy to allow you to listen to Edward Snowden speak during the workshop so that you don't leave en masse at 2 o'clock from the workshop.
[23:05.810 --> 23:06.430]  So please come.
[23:06.930 --> 23:18.610]  You can learn about all the software that we've written to actually make it possible for a villager or someone with very few computer skills, as it were, to be able to manage a cell phone network.
[23:20.390 --> 23:22.170]  So we basically set up one of these.
[23:22.850 --> 23:26.070]  We work with wireless ISPs.
[23:26.530 --> 23:31.710]  We try to stay away from satellite because it's quite expensive and not very reliable.
[23:32.510 --> 23:33.030]  Huh?
[23:34.050 --> 23:34.570]  Lag.
[23:34.850 --> 23:35.030]  Yes.
[23:35.170 --> 23:35.570]  There's lag.
[23:35.810 --> 23:36.790]  There's latency.
[23:37.150 --> 23:40.730]  So we generally work with community wireless ISPs in the regions that we are.
[23:40.930 --> 23:48.330]  We get a dedicated line, plug this guy into that directly, and do all of our outbound stuff via VoIP.
[23:49.170 --> 23:50.810]  So that's the technological stuff.
[23:50.950 --> 23:51.510]  I'm not going to get...
[23:51.510 --> 24:01.070]  Like I said, I'm not going to get too far into that because you can come and hang out with us for four hours tomorrow and learn all about it if you're really into that stuff.
[24:02.590 --> 24:11.690]  So I think the biggest hack or whatever, or sort of our biggest success so far, has been on the legal and the policy front.
[24:12.370 --> 24:14.090]  We actually operate legally.
[24:14.090 --> 24:15.930]  We have a license from the government.
[24:16.390 --> 24:22.630]  That wasn't always the case, but they kind of were pressured into giving us a concession.
[24:22.630 --> 24:30.950]  So this actually puts us on equal footing with Carlos Slim's company, with Telefonica, who's one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world.
[24:31.110 --> 24:33.290]  We have the same rights and obligations as they do.
[24:34.610 --> 24:41.950]  We have this concession to operate in five states in southern Mexico, which cover Oaxacans and some of the surrounding states, not Chiapas, unfortunately.
[24:44.090 --> 24:47.110]  And the total population of these states is 21 million people.
[24:47.110 --> 24:52.910]  So we have the right to provide service to 21 million people.
[24:53.410 --> 24:56.510]  We try to stick into areas where there's no coverage.
[24:56.690 --> 24:58.530]  So that obviously reduces that number somewhat.
[25:00.170 --> 25:04.930]  But we began... and this is another lesson that I think was important for us to reinforce.
[25:04.970 --> 25:07.170]  Not exactly learn, because we've been doing this for a while.
[25:07.590 --> 25:11.990]  But basically this idea of it's much better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.
[25:13.790 --> 25:23.470]  When you try to deal with a national regulatory body, be it the FCC here, be it the IFETEL now in Mexico, they're very good at waiting you out.
[25:23.650 --> 25:25.850]  So you come, you say, hey, you know, we want to do this thing.
[25:26.010 --> 25:26.770]  We think it's really great.
[25:26.950 --> 25:28.150]  They say, oh, yeah, it's really great.
[25:28.490 --> 25:30.270]  We'll get back to you, right?
[25:30.550 --> 25:32.150]  And, you know, maybe they will get back to you.
[25:32.190 --> 25:33.870]  Maybe they won't, but years go by.
[25:34.590 --> 25:53.350]  So what we did is when we went to IFETEL, we went with a signed petition from 30 communities, exercising their constitutional right and their right under international treaty, the UN treaty on the rights of indigenous people, ILO, Convention 169, all these other things.
[25:54.390 --> 25:59.350]  And said, look, we have a legal claim that we feel is quite strong.
[25:59.350 --> 26:07.630]  We also found a clause in the Mexican telecom law that had to do with redistribution of unused frequency.
[26:08.230 --> 26:15.890]  So what happens with cellular frequencies is they assign frequency to a company for an entire huge area.
[26:16.150 --> 26:22.850]  So like in our case, we asked for a specific region of one state and they gave us five states, region seven.
[26:23.490 --> 26:26.210]  Like we didn't want region seven, but we're happy to have region seven.
[26:26.330 --> 26:28.090]  We wanted just this one little part, right?
[26:28.090 --> 26:29.730]  They said, no, we can't do it that way.
[26:30.410 --> 26:31.390]  We said, okay, great.
[26:31.750 --> 26:33.510]  So this is what happens with the large companies.
[26:33.650 --> 26:39.290]  They get, they get their, you know, their frequency use permission and then they don't operate in many areas.
[26:39.290 --> 26:41.650]  So there's a clause in the Mexican telecom law.
[26:42.250 --> 26:44.290]  As of a few days ago, they just changed the law.
[26:44.290 --> 26:47.490]  So we'll see what the new one brings or what it has in store for us.
[26:48.270 --> 26:53.170]  That allowed the government to reassign unused spectrum for social purposes.
[26:53.470 --> 26:57.770]  So we are the, we were the first people that I guess found this clause or decided we were going to use it.
[26:57.770 --> 27:08.690]  So we went, said we have this legal claim based on, you know, the law of this particular sector, based on the constitution, based on international law, and we're already doing this.
[27:09.050 --> 27:12.170]  So you should just let us continue.
[27:12.750 --> 27:18.450]  And simultaneously, so like the fines for this are like, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[27:19.730 --> 27:28.290]  But what we did was we tried to put the regulatory body in a really tough position, which was number one, come and shut our network down.
[27:28.510 --> 27:38.350]  Like come into this indigenous community where they've made a decision by consensus, where they've used their own money to connect themselves due to your negligence, and come and shut down their network.
[27:38.790 --> 27:41.070]  Like that's going to look really great, right?
[27:41.510 --> 27:43.630]  That's going to look really good when it's on the news.
[27:43.630 --> 27:48.870]  And thankfully, we were in the news a bunch of times kind of accidentally.
[27:48.890 --> 27:54.530]  It really wasn't something that we were asking for or were particularly happy about, but it ended up being very helpful.
[27:56.690 --> 27:59.670]  And so the government was like, oh, these guys are like, oh, they're in the news.
[27:59.790 --> 28:00.330]  They're on the BBC.
[28:00.350 --> 28:00.770]  They're here.
[28:00.850 --> 28:01.250]  They're there.
[28:01.430 --> 28:03.610]  It's not a good idea for us to go and shut this down.
[28:04.190 --> 28:10.330]  So we came with the legal part, you know, we came, you know, with the olive branch, and we came with the stick at the same time, right?
[28:10.550 --> 28:14.550]  And that kind of put them in a position where they said, okay, go for it.
[28:14.990 --> 28:16.230]  We're giving you a concession.
[28:17.150 --> 28:19.690]  So we have a concession, which is really great.
[28:20.730 --> 28:24.310]  And that allows us to pretty much do whatever we want.
[28:24.970 --> 28:28.750]  We can't interfere with the other operators, but we can run the service.
[28:28.890 --> 28:33.910]  Again, we're sort of... the one stipulation really is we have to run a non-commercial network.
[28:33.910 --> 28:44.870]  So we are forbidden from generating any kind of serious profit, because that would be offensive to the large operators who have been doing this, you know, forever with no real kind of competition.
[28:44.870 --> 28:46.750]  So we don't want to obviously upset them.
[28:47.150 --> 28:52.690]  And the regulators are actually quite honest about them, that that's the only thing that they really care about, is having the lawyers.
[28:53.150 --> 28:57.230]  Some of these guys are like married to people that work for the companies.
[28:57.930 --> 29:05.870]  I literally had one guy say, if I do anything against the big company, my wife won't sleep with me, because she works for whoever it was.
[29:06.170 --> 29:09.190]  I said, okay, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to compete with that, right?
[29:09.470 --> 29:11.430]  Like, I'm not going to sleep with you, so...
[29:15.890 --> 29:19.230]  The other thing that we try to do is, or that we sort of...
[29:19.230 --> 29:26.410]  we try to think a little bit more deeply about with the communities themselves, is about thinking about spectrum, because the real bottleneck to all this is spectrum.
[29:26.410 --> 29:31.050]  Like, there's VoIP, like, you can do amazing stuff with Wi-Fi, because it's open spectrum.
[29:31.350 --> 29:37.150]  I did, like, a really brief analysis of the way that they distribute frequencies in Mexico's spectrum.
[29:37.670 --> 29:43.710]  0.14% of all of the usable for telecommunications and radio and TV, etc.
[29:44.130 --> 29:48.410]  satellites, everything, 0.14% of it is open.
[29:49.090 --> 29:50.190]  You know, you don't need a license.
[29:50.330 --> 29:51.690]  0.14%.
[29:51.690 --> 29:52.850]  It's a joke.
[29:53.050 --> 30:01.150]  I mean, all of... everything that, you know, everyone in this room wants to do has to be crammed into 0.14% of the spectrum.
[30:01.290 --> 30:01.710]  It's ridiculous.
[30:01.930 --> 30:02.350]  It's stupid.
[30:04.650 --> 30:12.570]  And part of what we are trying to sort of make the claim toward the government is to say, look, spectrum is a territorial right.
[30:12.750 --> 30:16.930]  So the issue of territorial rights, especially in these indigenous communities, is very strong.
[30:17.090 --> 30:18.150]  It's in the Constitution.
[30:18.830 --> 30:33.130]  You know, if you're an indigenous community, specifically an indigenous community, in the case of Mexico, you have a right to your territory, to the physical land on which you live, to the things that are on that land, the flora, the fauna, the water.
[30:33.610 --> 30:37.530]  And, of course, the neoliberal state in Mexico being a wonderful example of that.
[30:37.630 --> 30:38.450]  They contest that.
[30:38.550 --> 30:39.810]  They want to privatize these things.
[30:39.870 --> 30:40.730]  They want to take them away.
[30:40.930 --> 30:42.070]  They want to do mining.
[30:42.230 --> 30:44.890]  They now want to do fracking in Mexico of all the f*cking things.
[30:45.170 --> 30:45.250]  Yeah.
[30:45.550 --> 30:45.570]  Yeah.
[30:47.950 --> 30:52.890]  And so there's this, like, circular logic that I think has been the way that, you know, generally,
[30:56.210 --> 31:01.770]  governments, nations have expropriated land and resources from people, indigenous people, and other people.
[31:02.070 --> 31:03.650]  It's a circular logic, right?
[31:03.650 --> 31:10.610]  So they say, okay, the state is the sovereign, and therefore, we have sovereignty over everything in this territory.
[31:13.290 --> 31:14.950]  Including the spectrum, right?
[31:15.150 --> 31:16.690]  They just, yeah, this is ours.
[31:16.830 --> 31:19.850]  We take it by sort of act of God, essentially, right?
[31:20.290 --> 31:35.610]  So the indigenous communities that we work with, and all throughout Mexico, and in many other parts of Latin America, are pushing back against us and saying, why do we not have the right to use the spectrum that's sort of present, if you will, which isn't even necessarily correct from a sort of physics point of view,
[31:35.670 --> 31:41.510]  but if you think about it that way, you know, why can't we transmit on these frequencies in our own territory?
[31:42.030 --> 31:43.350]  Like, how do we not have that right?
[31:43.410 --> 31:45.930]  If I have the right to my land, why do I not have the right to the spectrum?
[31:46.510 --> 31:52.610]  There's an interesting case of this that's actually been successful in New Zealand.
[31:53.590 --> 31:59.190]  The Maori people have been able to actually claim spectrum as an ancestral right.
[32:00.910 --> 32:08.610]  And we're given a concession, in fact, to operate a cell phone network, which they then, I think, farmed out to some private company.
[32:08.730 --> 32:10.770]  But anyway, what are you going to do, right?
[32:11.030 --> 32:12.670]  But it gets back to my first point.
[32:15.270 --> 32:20.010]  So we're kind of moving, trying to move this idea through the national regulatory body.
[32:20.010 --> 32:23.510]  We're trying to move it at the ITU, which is, like, made up of total...
[32:24.010 --> 32:25.410]  Let's not even go into it.
[32:26.090 --> 32:29.610]  But not the most forward-thinking people in terms of spectrum or all of that.
[32:29.910 --> 32:36.010]  But we're trying to push on this to say, look, we want to have the right to our spectrum, so that we can use it how we want to use it, right?
[32:36.170 --> 32:39.130]  And especially if it's not being used, why the hell shouldn't we be able to use it?
[32:39.310 --> 32:43.550]  So that's really fundamental right, as far as we're concerned.
[32:43.550 --> 32:45.950]  So that's the sort of political and legal hack.
[32:46.090 --> 32:46.890]  We have this concession.
[32:47.150 --> 32:49.210]  We have this concession for the next couple of years.
[32:49.850 --> 32:55.730]  Now, with the new telecom law, apparently we can extend that concession for another 15 years.
[32:56.050 --> 32:59.070]  So we're hoping to have this for the next 15 years.
[32:59.290 --> 33:06.230]  The interesting part of this is that we now have exclusive frequency access rights solely, essentially.
[33:06.230 --> 33:13.390]  We don't have any, quote-unquote, competition from any other organizations like ourselves, which we're actually hoping happens.
[33:14.110 --> 33:15.770]  We're very open about all of our knowledge.
[33:15.910 --> 33:17.470]  We're releasing our software, actually, here at HOPE.
[33:17.650 --> 33:23.010]  So anybody that wants to do what we're doing is more than welcome to come and join us, do their own thing, et cetera.
[33:24.450 --> 33:29.410]  So the second hack I'm going to talk about really quickly is the social part, the organizational part.
[33:29.850 --> 33:35.930]  And it gets back to what I was saying at the beginning, which is, okay, we build our own infrastructure and then what?
[33:36.630 --> 33:36.970]  Right?
[33:37.110 --> 33:42.070]  Like, it's really easy to just go and buy a SIM card and stick it in your thing and that's the end of it.
[33:42.130 --> 33:43.090]  You don't think about it.
[33:43.210 --> 33:45.410]  You don't have to worry about if the tower falls down.
[33:45.690 --> 33:50.870]  You don't have to worry about if a rat gnaws through the coaxial cable and on and on and on.
[33:51.190 --> 34:00.270]  But when you own the stuff, when you operate it, when it's the sole means of communication for your community, you do have to worry about that and you have to develop mechanisms to deal with it.
[34:00.870 --> 34:09.530]  And this is so important for any kind of infrastructural project is who's going to manage it, who's going to be in charge of it, and how is that going to happen?
[34:10.810 --> 34:14.590]  So we opened up the talk speaking about Oaxaca in the context.
[34:14.810 --> 34:21.030]  And there's something in Oaxaca called usos y costumbres, which is essentially traditions, customary law.
[34:21.210 --> 34:27.810]  It's the way that things happen, the way that decisions are made, the way that the territory, the land itself is governed and all of that.
[34:28.250 --> 34:38.350]  That for us is a huge resource because there's essentially an organized base, a social, organized social base that allows us to do our work.
[34:38.350 --> 34:41.170]  So we don't have to go in and say, hey guys, you should really work together.
[34:41.370 --> 34:42.870]  And people are already doing that.
[34:42.950 --> 34:44.310]  They're already building their own roads.
[34:44.470 --> 34:46.050]  They're operating their own schools.
[34:46.390 --> 34:49.490]  In many places, they're operating their own police and auto defense forces.
[34:49.490 --> 34:54.350]  So we don't need to explain to anybody how to run their own business.
[34:54.510 --> 34:56.370]  And in fact, we learn so much from them.
[34:56.930 --> 34:58.870]  And a lot of what we do is based on what we've learned.
[34:59.210 --> 35:07.670]  So having this idea of usos y costumbres, this sort of community life, is incredibly helpful when thinking about, okay, who's going to manage this infrastructure?
[35:07.970 --> 35:09.530]  That system is already in place.
[35:09.670 --> 35:10.410]  It's fairly strong.
[35:10.670 --> 35:11.550]  It's reliable.
[35:11.550 --> 35:16.570]  When people make a decision, take a decision, they do so in consensus, and that's a decision.
[35:16.570 --> 35:20.510]  There's no like, oh, you know, they make the decision and that's it.
[35:21.370 --> 35:22.510]  So that's really helpful.
[35:23.130 --> 35:34.850]  And we sort of come up with a really simple division of responsibilities between ourselves and the communities, which is they're in charge of purchasing, managing the network.
[35:35.230 --> 35:37.730]  They buy it, they own it, they have to take care of it.
[35:37.810 --> 35:39.790]  If someone comes and steals it, that's their problem.
[35:39.910 --> 35:42.410]  If it gets hit by a lightning bolt, that's their problem.
[35:42.410 --> 35:48.670]  If like a bunch of squirrels somehow unscrew it from the pole and carry it off, that's their problem.
[35:50.890 --> 35:57.290]  And they also, of course, have input on the design of the network, the services that run on top of the network, and like I said, the price.
[35:58.690 --> 36:03.290]  Meanwhile, we at Rhizomatica, we mainly do capacity building.
[36:03.470 --> 36:09.630]  So we help put up the network, we show folks how it works, the really simple web interface, which you can learn about tomorrow at the workshop.
[36:11.390 --> 36:13.030]  And then we help them maintain it.
[36:13.150 --> 36:20.890]  So if anything sort of goes wrong, like if something chews through the coaxial cable, you know, they call and say, something chewed through the coaxial cable, can you bring another one?
[36:20.950 --> 36:24.070]  Or, hey, this frickin' thing isn't working, we don't know why.
[36:24.330 --> 36:26.370]  We can log in remotely, check it out.
[36:26.450 --> 36:30.050]  If it's something we can't fix remotely, we drive up there and figure out what's going on.
[36:30.390 --> 36:33.190]  Which we do a lot more than we wish we had to.
[36:33.870 --> 36:35.910]  But things are moving along.
[36:36.710 --> 36:43.290]  So those two things, sort of using existing, pre-existing community resources.
[36:43.690 --> 36:50.790]  You know, for example, the tower will go to the local welder, and the local welder will build the tower, or the local bamboo farm will give us this bamboo, as the case may be.
[36:52.810 --> 37:02.510]  We really try to involve local people in all this, because it makes it less expensive, and it makes it much more sustainable, not only economically, but socially, and in every other aspect.
[37:03.150 --> 37:09.670]  And this idea of having a really clear division of who does what, who's in charge of what, and making sure that all of that is clear from the beginning.
[37:11.230 --> 37:12.870]  I'm going to wrap with that.
[37:12.990 --> 37:15.110]  If there are any questions, I'd be more than happy to take them now.
[37:15.210 --> 37:19.610]  I think we still have a few minutes, even with our snafu on the projector.
[37:19.850 --> 37:22.270]  So, you know, however you want to do it.
[37:23.830 --> 37:27.290]  Can you tell us more about the hardware that you've got there?
[37:27.530 --> 37:29.910]  How that came into being?
[37:30.750 --> 37:31.730]  Who developed it?
[37:31.730 --> 37:35.330]  Yeah, I mean, you can actually speak to the folks from Fairwaves who built this.
[37:35.450 --> 37:38.750]  Fairwaves is a company based in Moscow and Boston.
[37:39.790 --> 37:44.450]  They build open-source GSM hardware that runs open-source GSM software.
[37:44.970 --> 37:46.510]  They've been around for some years.
[37:46.510 --> 37:47.350]  We met.
[37:47.510 --> 37:53.790]  They've been very helpful to our projects in donating hardware, and thinking through things with us.
[37:54.050 --> 37:55.250]  So, you can look up them.
[37:55.390 --> 37:56.870]  There are some other vendors that we work with.
[37:56.990 --> 37:58.610]  One is called NewTac, based out of Canada.
[37:58.950 --> 38:00.190]  There's a couple of options.
[38:01.510 --> 38:05.890]  How many people do you have on the network, or the five networks that are running?
[38:06.150 --> 38:06.970]  How many users?
[38:07.330 --> 38:07.590]  Yeah.
[38:07.770 --> 38:08.790]  Around 1,000 people.
[38:10.190 --> 38:11.130]  1,000 people.
[38:11.930 --> 38:14.470]  And our network handles per village.
[38:14.470 --> 38:20.130]  It's somewhere between 4,000 and 1,000 calls per day, each network.
[38:20.770 --> 38:22.790]  And, I don't know, thousands and thousands of SMS.
[38:23.010 --> 38:27.790]  So, since the use is unlimited in most senses, people use it a lot.
[38:27.930 --> 38:30.490]  It just gets used and used and used, which is great, because they own it.
[38:30.550 --> 38:31.370]  So, why not use it, right?
[38:31.890 --> 38:39.170]  Can you talk more about the self-governance aspect of the communities, and, in particular, what might U.S. radicals in the U.S. learn from them?
[38:42.430 --> 38:42.830]  Yeah.
[38:43.190 --> 38:44.530]  I kind of get asked that question a lot.
[38:44.610 --> 38:45.410]  It's an interesting question.
[38:45.710 --> 38:49.210]  We have a fundamental problem here, and it gets back to what we were talking about.
[38:49.350 --> 38:50.350]  Private property.
[38:50.590 --> 39:00.110]  It f*cks up a lot of attempts to try to duplicate, replicate, the sort of social organization that happens in these places.
[39:00.110 --> 39:13.290]  It's much different organizing around property that you own communally, that literally nobody owns except for the community, than it is everyone having their own property.
[39:13.370 --> 39:16.090]  It's kind of hard to explain this in, you know, a couple minutes up here.
[39:16.830 --> 39:20.910]  That makes some of the lessons not totally applicable here.
[39:21.190 --> 39:27.370]  You know, this idea of individualism that we have, rugged individualism that we have in the U.S., is a huge barrier to social organization.
[39:28.170 --> 39:44.950]  It's not unsurmountable, but I think a lot of what we see in Oaxaca, it's very difficult to try to replicate that here, because there are some really fundamental things at the base of that, that do not exist here, or that exist in very, very small sort of pockets.
[39:45.350 --> 39:46.590]  So, I'm not really sure.
[39:46.990 --> 39:47.550]  Huh?
[39:47.850 --> 39:48.690]  Russians tried.
[39:48.910 --> 39:49.870]  Russians tried.
[39:50.130 --> 39:50.350]  Exactly.
[39:50.510 --> 39:51.150]  Our Russians friends.
[39:51.670 --> 39:52.390]  Russians tried.
[39:53.810 --> 39:54.710]  There you go.
[39:55.930 --> 39:57.210]  How about handsets?
[39:57.570 --> 39:58.550]  What do they use for phones?
[39:59.050 --> 39:59.150]  Okay.
[39:59.370 --> 40:02.150]  So, this is really, you know, why do we do cellular?
[40:02.310 --> 40:04.450]  Why don't we just put, you know, regular landline phones?
[40:04.630 --> 40:09.270]  Turns out, even though there's no coverage, most people own a handset.
[40:09.570 --> 40:11.290]  And a lot of people actually have a smartphone.
[40:11.550 --> 40:11.710]  Why?
[40:11.890 --> 40:13.070]  Because it's useful as a camera.
[40:13.230 --> 40:14.710]  It's useful as a flashlight.
[40:15.150 --> 40:16.070]  You listen to music.
[40:16.190 --> 40:16.850]  You watch videos.
[40:16.850 --> 40:19.790]  So, like for example, when we, you listen to the radio.
[40:20.890 --> 40:30.930]  When you, when we went to the first community in Talea de Castro, and set up the first network, nobody, like we had come to an agreement with the local authorities, but nobody knew we were coming that day.
[40:31.610 --> 40:40.930]  Sort of happened, you know, we just showed up one day and set up the network, and saw over 700 phones switched on in the village of 2,500 people.
[40:41.910 --> 40:42.990]  Where there's no network.
[40:43.290 --> 40:44.430]  There was no network there.
[40:44.710 --> 40:47.270]  700 phones were on.
[40:47.390 --> 40:48.610]  And you say, okay, what the hell?
[40:49.730 --> 40:51.310]  Because people were using them for other things.
[40:51.450 --> 40:53.630]  And I guess they hadn't turned it into airplane mode if they had that.
[40:53.710 --> 40:53.890]  Whatever.
[40:54.010 --> 40:55.930]  The point is, a lot of people had phones.
[40:56.090 --> 40:59.570]  And from there, we saw that about half of the population already owns a handset.
[40:59.690 --> 41:01.950]  They go to the, they go into the city, they use it.
[41:02.810 --> 41:04.790]  We run, essentially, an open network.
[41:05.090 --> 41:07.030]  So, we're SIM agnostic.
[41:07.270 --> 41:10.110]  So, it doesn't really matter what SIM you are.
[41:10.210 --> 41:15.510]  We didn't want people to have to go and pay to get their phones unlocked, because we think the fact that the vendors locked the phones is bullshit anyway.
[41:15.670 --> 41:18.270]  So, why I have to spend more money to unlock your phone?
[41:18.390 --> 41:22.170]  So, our phone accepts any SIM from any company.
[41:25.290 --> 41:29.270]  And you just get on the network, and you get a message with your extension.
[41:29.430 --> 41:30.570]  You get a five-digit extension.
[41:30.570 --> 41:34.590]  You take that to where the administrative person is, usually in the center of the village.
[41:34.810 --> 41:35.810]  You say, is it my extension?
[41:36.050 --> 41:40.570]  You give them 30 pesos, you know, $2.50, and you're off and running.
[41:42.370 --> 41:43.590]  Two quick questions.
[41:43.990 --> 41:49.350]  Have any of the communities wanted phones to not work from, like, let's say, midnight to 6 AM?
[41:49.610 --> 41:50.690]  Like, any ideas of ours?
[41:50.910 --> 41:55.050]  And second, what's the attack vector if the NSA wants to listen up to their phone calls?
[41:55.110 --> 41:57.310]  Do they have to crack the GSM or the VoIP?
[41:58.830 --> 42:04.730]  We haven't had any requests to shut the network off ever from, you know, people set certain time.
[42:05.030 --> 42:12.010]  We do see a lot of late-night traffic between teenagers that I know that, you know, people are probably concerned about.
[42:12.130 --> 42:15.030]  There's a huge concern about people calling other people's wives, actually.
[42:16.990 --> 42:20.310]  When the guy's, like, off in the field working, that's, like, the big question that we get.
[42:20.310 --> 42:31.450]  But, no, we basically don't... we essentially... we talk about it with folks until they kind of understand that it's not really beneficial to be monitoring people shutting off the network and all of that.
[42:31.790 --> 42:35.530]  So, since we don't have any power constraints at night, we just leave it running at night.
[42:35.650 --> 42:36.790]  It doesn't really draw very much power.
[42:38.670 --> 42:45.850]  In terms of the NSA, etc., they would have to physically be present to capture the traffic locally.
[42:46.170 --> 42:48.950]  Which, frankly, since we're sim-agnostic, is unencrypted.
[42:49.210 --> 42:49.870]  I know, boo.
[42:50.090 --> 42:54.610]  But someone would have to physically show up in these communities and listen in.
[42:54.790 --> 42:58.090]  Which would be... I feel like would be quite obvious to the people in the community.
[42:58.090 --> 43:03.270]  And, again, this is... this gets back to this idea of community ownership.
[43:03.470 --> 43:05.570]  People will defend their network.
[43:05.910 --> 43:07.910]  We see this with community radio all the time.
[43:08.110 --> 43:10.970]  You know, the unmarked vans pull into these communities and what happens?
[43:11.050 --> 43:13.270]  The community comes out and is like, you want to come in here?
[43:13.470 --> 43:15.010]  We're going to f*cking kill you, basically.
[43:15.410 --> 43:15.850]  So...
[43:17.690 --> 43:18.730]  It's your choice.
[43:19.650 --> 43:26.330]  And the idea of having everybody organized in this umbrella organization is to say, you don't have to shut down one network.
[43:26.550 --> 43:28.790]  You have to shut down hundreds of networks, thousands of networks.
[43:28.950 --> 43:30.450]  You can close down Rhizomatica.
[43:30.590 --> 43:31.170]  It doesn't matter.
[43:31.570 --> 43:39.730]  You're going to have to go physically to every single community and get into a physical altercation, essentially, and every single community to shut this network down.
[43:40.030 --> 43:43.230]  So, if our concession expires, who cares?
[43:43.630 --> 43:45.210]  Like, the communities own the stuff.
[43:45.350 --> 43:46.550]  They're going to keep operating it.
[43:46.790 --> 43:48.850]  And that's kind of like the real politic of it.
[43:48.970 --> 43:50.750]  They already run illegal radio stations.
[43:51.050 --> 43:53.710]  What's another, you know, $100,000 fine, right?
[43:55.930 --> 43:57.190]  In terms of the NSA, so, right.
[43:57.350 --> 43:58.750]  So, someone would have to go there and do it.
[43:59.170 --> 44:05.890]  The really vulnerable part is all the VoIP interconnection, which, unfortunately, pretty much all runs through the U.S.
[44:06.090 --> 44:06.610]  Boo again.
[44:06.830 --> 44:08.090]  But that's how it works.
[44:08.170 --> 44:09.450]  There's no exchange point in Mexico.
[44:09.470 --> 44:12.350]  So, kind of all of the Internet traffic pretty much has to come through here.
[44:12.530 --> 44:13.990]  So, it sucks.
[44:14.210 --> 44:14.570]  But...
[44:14.570 --> 44:17.810]  Have you had any resistance to connecting you to the PSTN?
[44:17.950 --> 44:19.250]  Or are you connected?
[44:20.650 --> 44:22.170]  Connecting people or the network itself?
[44:22.310 --> 44:22.630]  The networks.
[44:24.410 --> 44:24.810]  Um...
[44:24.810 --> 44:25.210]  Should I stop?
[44:25.530 --> 44:26.130]  Yeah, one minute.
[44:26.390 --> 44:26.730]  One minute.
[44:26.730 --> 44:26.850]  One minute.
[44:26.950 --> 44:27.410]  Okay, quickly.
[44:27.630 --> 44:28.990]  We use a VoIP provider.
[44:29.130 --> 44:30.290]  They connect us to the PSTN.
[44:30.450 --> 44:32.590]  People choose if they want to do long distance or not.
[44:32.730 --> 44:34.250]  They can receive calls always.
[44:34.510 --> 44:42.850]  If they do a top-up, they pay whatever the exact price of the VoIP call is, which is, like, hundreds of times less expensive than a satellite phone or whatever they normally have.
[44:43.370 --> 44:44.970]  So, they're receiving U.S. numbers or...?
[44:44.970 --> 44:48.310]  No, we give them one Mexican DID number assigned to the village.
[44:48.490 --> 44:48.630]  Okay.
[44:48.630 --> 44:49.430]  You call the village.
[44:49.670 --> 44:50.610]  You get a PBX.
[44:50.770 --> 44:51.050]  Answers.
[44:51.230 --> 44:52.390]  Says, hey, welcome to this village.
[44:52.490 --> 44:53.330]  Who do you want to talk to?
[44:54.250 --> 44:55.010]  Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop.
[44:55.030 --> 44:55.850]  You talk to that person.
[44:55.970 --> 44:56.710]  Rings on their cell phone.
[45:09.300 --> 45:10.180]  Thank you very much.
[45:11.020 --> 45:14.840]  If you want to buy the T-shirts, like I said, starting bid is $400.
[45:15.560 --> 45:16.700]  Now, I have three T-shirts.
[45:16.900 --> 45:17.800]  You know, come and find me.
[45:18.020 --> 45:20.400]  If you don't want T-shirts, it's cool.
[45:20.740 --> 45:22.340]  Workshop is tomorrow at 1 o'clock.
[45:22.500 --> 45:27.160]  Edward Snowden will be available streaming in the large room on the sixth floor.
[45:27.320 --> 45:27.960]  Thank you very much.
[45:28.280 --> 45:29.160]  Enjoy the rest of your afternoon.
[45:29.520 --> 45:34.360]  Stick around for the following workshop about a different take on community and DIY Cellular.
[45:34.440 --> 45:34.700]  Thank you.
[45:38.200 --> 45:39.460]  Thank you, Peter and Maka.
[45:39.700 --> 45:44.100]  Again, their workshop is tomorrow at 1 o'clock on the sixth floor.
[45:45.060 --> 45:46.280]  A couple of quick announcements.
[45:46.280 --> 45:49.980]  First off, we do have openings...