hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1412.txt

Episode: 1412
Title: HPR1412: ohmroep hpr live 2, 31-06-2013, advancing local communities
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1412/hpr1412.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 01:04:10

---

music
Good afternoon and this is Nidomedia reporting on Home Radio for Hacker Public Radio.
I am Nidomedia.
On the other side is Cecil.
She is a journalist and she is my co-host for today.
On the left to me I have Chiabi from Rizomatika.
Yeah, correct.
Hi.
Welcome.
And on the other side of the table we have Bicycle Mark.
Oh, greetings.
Hi.
And he's a journalist and he's also a podcast host for the citizen reporter.
That is correct.
Okay.
We have two separate subjects to discuss, but let's start Chiabi.
Let's start with you.
You have a t-shirt and you have it for sale.
Yeah.
I'm a t-shirt.
Yeah, I'm selling t-shirt for my project, Rizomatika.
This t-shirt has actually been made in Mexico and brought here with a lot of effort.
And what do you want to know?
Well, tell us about the project.
Okay.
Rizomatika is a project that wants to bring affordable communication to all the people in the world that don't have it or if they have it, it's not affordable enough.
In what we are doing now, practically in Mexico, we're basically building community mobile networks for the Indigenous villages in Oaxaca, southern of Mexico.
And is there a reason why it's in Oaxaca?
Well, yes.
There are multiple reasons for that.
The first reason is the fact that the person who actually started the project lives in Oaxaca.
And there is a very strong tradition of self-government of the communities themselves.
So it's probably the best place to start this kind of project because we are already working with people that know how to manage themselves and they do it since thousands of years.
And that they didn't have possibilities for communication.
Are they not sort of connected to the bigger infrastructures of Mexico or what's going on on the communication in Mexico?
Well, Mexico is complicated because the entire telecommunication market is kind of monopolized.
So there is the biggest company, which is Telsal, which has more than 70% of the mobile market, which also means that they can do whatever they want in terms of coverage.
And they tend to focus mostly on the densely populated areas.
They don't care so much about rural areas, especially because they say that if your village is less than 5,000 people, they won't ever install a network there.
So that may be also where your both projects of Marc and Chavi sort of touch can, I mean, not connected, but they are both in difficult areas.
One, but they are also both sort of deep local.
You both go into communities that have difficulties with internal and external communication for different reasons.
I think in Oaxaca it's because of the poverty, because they are really remote.
And for that somewhat isolated and Marc, you do these things in difficult areas because of war.
Indeed, I do. I mean, Chavi deserves a ton more credit and attention than I do in my opinion.
You should keep that in mind because what I do is, I mean, as part of a collective, small world news, and sometimes on my own, but hopefully always with SWN, we go to not always conflict zones.
It could be post-conflict zones. I prefer post-conflict zones because, well, sometimes people can concentrate better.
They're ready to learn things. There's less stress outside.
And sometimes it's a good time to develop media and skills in general.
But the difference is though, I mean, Chavi is talking about a community development project that really stays and connects many, many people.
I would love to give myself more credit than I deserve, but I teach young reporters or people who don't know if they're going to be reporters.
Some of them use video editing skills, storytelling skills for other work, which I'm fine with. I always have that in mind.
But my people are more handfuls, and I think you're dealing with a much larger cross-section of people using the tools that you're setting up.
Well, yeah, in our case, the entire village, the entire community is actually the user.
But the idea is not only to build an infrastructure as a service, but build it more like a shared resource.
So not only to give them the possibility to communicate, but to also experiment on the idea that if you own your own infrastructure, you can use it for many different things, which are not immediately obvious.
So, for example, connecting to your point, what we are trying to think is merge the idea of having a community network and make it coexist and cooperate with the community radius that already exists in Oaxaca.
So you can actually use an infrastructure as an additional mean of communication, which is not only one to one, but it can be used to, for example, one single example we talk yesterday is the fact that you can send messages every day to everyone, including the latest news, the weather forecast,
the price of coffee in that specific example. And, yeah, basically develop it also from a journalist point of view.
I enjoyed four years ago when, at, was it hard, we had a GSM network and we were sending messages. I mean, it was, it reminds me of that sometimes only, you know, you're talking about people's lives and we're talking about four days of people's lives here at camp.
Yeah, anyway.
Can you just tell me, tell me more of how you, how you developed the, the platform that, that you developed and with how many people you're working, as I understand it, there's no, there's no specific sponsorship by Fox IT or Microsoft or something.
Okay, the project at the moment is really, really small. The people working full time on it and with their own money are actually two me and my friend Peter.
We have a couple of friends that are helping out. There is a lawyer who actually made the whole legal part possible, but yes, we didn't get any funding at all.
And the first part of the project has been basically self-funded, as in I spent all the money, I'd say.
Yeah, and yesterday, when you spoke in the, in the double T.P. at the Noises Square about the project, you also mentioned a project that's in Indonesia and that's similar or, you know, similar in the technical part.
It's a working group of University of Berkeley and there are some students or postdoc, I think, which are doing this project of developing rural, mobile networks.
And they have the first project in the island of Papua, Indonesia.
And you have also exchanged what you're doing, you make it, as I actually are still developing all these platforms, it's all working progress.
We don't have anything completely stable yet, but we met with them and we're now doing a cooperation on actually building a common platform between the two projects so we can then move forward and then do the job twice.
Yeah, that's the thing, because we are so few and so far in between that it basically makes sense to just work together. Otherwise, we will probably not make it.
Yeah, and you also spoke about the very strong community sense of the people that you work with in Oaxaca.
Yes, the thing is, like you told something in that small community that people also take all kinds of roles on them, like they have to do like one or two years police service.
Yes, it's a thing called the Uso Sikostumres and it's the tradition of the state of Oaxaca and that basically comes even before the colonization.
It comes straight from the Maya and from all the population that were there before the Hispanic invasion.
And the idea is every person in the village has specific roles that he needs to do during his life in the village.
This is called cargo charges. So basically during your life, you need to do some things which are, as you say, mandatory for everyone and then you can basically progress in the chain of command of the village.
And the entire thing is managed by an assembly. The assembly is composed by all the people of the village and every year they change the assignment.
So you can be mayor for one year and then you can become the judge and then you can become the secretary or nothing.
And you also told something about the culture of how they meet, how they talk about what is important for their community.
You talked about meetings that lasted 11 hours? Yes, that's quite common.
But that's quite common because the idea is that you don't go by majority. As in you don't vote, you try to get a decision which is a good compromise for everyone.
It's based on consensus and not strictly numerical majority, which means that sometimes even a small problem needs to be discussed with more than a thousand people in the room.
Sorry, it reminds me of Occupy, but anyway. I mean, maybe not 11 hours, but three or four.
And they had much less experience and much greater egos, probably.
Yes. But well, this is so basically it's the GSM networks in areas where big companies will not place them because probably because of monetary reasons.
But how are you able to do it yourself? What do you mean?
How do you get the ability to actually make the network go? Where do you get the people who do the work? Where do you get the money?
At the moment, we are in a funny situation because the equipment we are using is not both. It has been landed to us by a company that produced it because we managed to convince them that we had a nice project and it would be nice to actually start a test installation.
And they were so happy about it. They actually shipped it to us and said, go use it if you like it, you buy it. Otherwise, send it back.
The equipment we are using at the moment, it's based on OpenBTS, which is the same software which has been used.
I think at the CCC camp and here as well, or maybe I'm wrong.
I'm not sure, basically there are two main platforms to do GSM networks, both are open source, which is OpenBTS and OpenBSC.
The current network is running on OpenBTS but we are exploring other alternatives because the main problem we have at the moment is not to scale up but to actually reduce costs and scale down because the
communities we are talking about, they go from 100 up to 1000 people. So we are talking about very small villages with not so much money they can invest.
So we need to be able to reduce the order to the bare minimum and be able to sell to them without a huge cost.
What are the main difficulties you encounter? On a daily basis?
Okay, there are technical difficulties of the Moscow, maybe. That's not a problem.
Okay, there are technical difficulties because I never worked with GSM before. It has always been a dream but considering that you need a degree in telecommunication to actually do it professionally.
For me it was a test to see if I could actually do it, which means that you do mistakes every single day and you try and you try and you try again until it works.
It's not working perfectly but it's good enough.
Then you have social problems as in you are relating yourself with a community that works in a totally different way from your point of view.
So there is a kind of culture difference that needs to be compensated.
I think you need to adapt to them and they have to adapt to you. I think Mark can probably explain it a bit more.
It depends on where you work but you always have to fall into the way things work.
So if you have a culture that's more closed or more suspicious of some of the, not just the project you're doing but the values and who are you, what's behind it, I mean you always have to deal with that.
It could be political, it could be religious. You face that.
And then it's gaining the trust I suppose of people who don't know you initially but then I guess you meet the right people in that country who become your sort of spokespeople.
Which countries do you work mainly?
In the last three years it has been Afghanistan.
Turkey for Syrians.
Republic of Georgia.
And Kosovo for me.
But my organization small world news or the organization I'm a part of has been working we gave trainings.
So journalism and basically storytelling training in Morocco's in Bobway, Egypt.
It's been a busy few years and Libya and Libya of course Libya you can't forget Libya.
And Bobway is interesting.
Yeah, it is. I didn't get to go on that one.
But I do get to hear the stories and see some of the results.
There are some pretty media wise.
Zimbabweans who had, I mean they had these sites.
And made also quite funny jokes really with their own information.
They have a funny sense of humor.
Yeah, well the training was actually held outside of Zimbabwe.
Over the border in fill in the blank I can't remember.
But over to the left.
Why can't I think of anyway.
But that tells you something of course about the climate in Zimbabwe where you know even the opposition is now not the opposition.
You know it's part of the sort of the governing thing.
And so there's a new opposition and they don't feel so safe to do any kind of media training.
And that kind of goes back into what gets in the way when you're trying to do a project.
If a government doesn't trust you or people don't feel free to even learn something taught by outsiders.
Then you've got to deal with that and maybe you have to move through it somewhere else.
Oaxaca is particularly interesting place because it always seems to me never having been there as a place of people who are very independent and very,
they don't just fall in line with what the Mexican government says or whatever.
Absolutely independent.
And you know you have to deal with bureaucracy and bureaucracy in a country in your case that you weren't born in.
I mean you have to become kind of a legal expert in some ways if you're well.
The good thing is we add the Mexican lawyer who helped out with the whole thing.
And that's why we're probably the first known profit organization.
The GSM licenses assigned which is kind of funny because I mean the GSM spectrum worldwide it's basically saturated.
And there is no country in Europe which can give you even a tiny split of the spectrum.
And if they give it to you they will sell it for hundreds of millions.
We got a lot for free and we could probably get it forever as if we can manage to demonstrate that the model works and the government is happy with what we're doing.
So we basically have now two years of experimental license to push the project forward as much as possible.
So we can then show that yes it's working now converted from an experimental license to a permanent one and then we're done.
I don't know if this is a question you can answer but I wanted to put it out there anyway.
In such a situation if Oaxaca ever has a large protest movement of any kind which the government doesn't like do they have the power to I suppose yes to shut down that GSM network just as they would in cooperation with a corporate one.
Well if they send the tough guys yes but in general we are not officially a public network so they cannot ask the same thing that they can ask for a network operator.
Of course they I mean it's Mexico but there's some okay there's some autonomy there there's some.
The nice thing about Oaxaca is the fact that since the huge revolt in 2006 and the fact that they basically took the city for six months.
And the entire movement was pushed by radio and telecommunication means at one point they even took they even managed to gather hands on the TV channel and for one month they only made their own programs and only women were allowed.
So there is a strong tradition of organizing themselves that's why the project works for us because they already know how you can do that and it has been proven many times.
Trying to export this model outside we don't know yet but you also talked about that there's other places like Honduras and Colombia or something you mentioned other south or central American countries where there is sort of your.
Your group or is looking at it to maybe also expand waste kind of projects we have been contacted by people in Latin America yes because they have the same reality as in small rural areas which are not covered and where the main companies don't give a shit basically.
Thing is we are not enough people we don't have any resource at the moment so we're looking at it as a possible future expansion but then again each place is as its own story and you cannot export the model because that model will change over time yeah and do you maybe have a site or somewhere where people can find out if they would like to support the project financially.
Of course the website is www.relizometica.org spell it just in case yeah air h i z o m a t i c a dot org yeah yeah that no number man this one of those tricky things of you know when when a project works in a certain place and maybe you yourself or maybe people around you say
you should do this here or there in another place and sometimes yeah of course it would be nice if it worked and you could and you have the resources and sometimes you i don't know you don't want to over stretch yourself either i mean i find.
I listed several countries where i worked in the last three or four years i wonder what i could have done or how much better i could have done if i had focused only on one.
You know how many more people i could have read so it's it's a it's a choice and it's this is also something you talk talk about with Brian Conley of have because that that sort of he started to make these small films or in or have you with journalist in Baghdad to have these films and so on but he also broadened his project alive in Baghdad to a lot of other countries yeah it's it's a hard conversation to have to be honest and Brian's not going to hear this so ha ha.
But you know and he never comes to hacker camps which is which is the biggest mistake you can make in life.
Don't forget we also have to syndication record with radio right now i don't know anything about it doesn't exist but yeah yeah so he may hear this and i would have no problem with that i wish he was here but so Brian is of course the founder one of the co founders of small world news and indeed it started in Iraq in in 2003 with the idea that you know a country was being bombed again
and about to be invaded and you know what if people there could tell their own stories could tell you not just about how they don't want to be bombed that that would probably be quite easy but about about what it's like to run a liquor store what it's like to be a border guard what it's like to run the train service
that was a really simple but but insightful series and the the i think the problem became the idea was just like with i think chubby's project you teach people and then they do it themselves we don't want to make ourselves you know we do get paid to go
because we need to survive but the idea is not to milk a country you know later on it's it's teach what we can go away and let people take it from there of course you know teach a person to fish and then they'll they'll fish
I love butchering good good sayings but so Iraq of course in 2003 and in the aftermath of the war I mean we know pallets of money were flying in and when it comes to projects that actually helped people not that money that was on the pallets
I don't know who that helped but um you could you could do something and you would have resources to back you now that doesn't mean they were from the american government but they could have been from the state department but they could have also been from a press NGO as there are many
what happens of course is that after a conflict and the years that follow interest dwindles and then money dries up so then if you want to do a project in that country
and you need resources you need money basically if you don't have any support that's very difficult that's more than difficult it may be you know close to impossible but never impossible of course we're at hacker camp so what ends up happening is Afghanistan becomes an interesting place not only because you know they need all the help they can get
but also because there was good will there was interest on the part of organizations in the U.S. and in Europe to teach people to teach skills and to invest in that and then what's happened in the last five years is that of course no one wants Afghanistan anymore not the militaries not the organizations so there's a big drop in interest and you see it I mean even journalists are you know you're not getting much support from your newspaper or wherever you work
if you still want to focus on Afghanistan I think it's it's the same sort of story goes up for Iraq yeah and with all the well I quite I'm really I'm starting starting again to call it the meat machine Iraq because it's it's it's started up again and there is not much attention for it and there is even less
less idea of how things could better yeah yeah and this is a problem and and so I mean this is also something for us to discuss but interest moves and the question is
what are you going to do about it as someone that wants to do good in the world that's concerned about people that aren't being reached that are the most vulnerable that are currently living in you know hell or the equivalent of
in the case of small world news and I can't speak for the organization but I can speak for me there is attention to okay we want to help people but where could we possibly get funding to to be able to do that help
and so sometimes you'll notice I mean Libya it's no coincidence that in the last two to three years we've tried and we've succeeded in some cases to do projects in Libya because there was interest
now this is not necessarily good thing because of course you see the downside right I would love to go back to Afghanistan I wish I could teach more there maybe there is still a way
but I also see the difference between 2013 you want to do a project in Afghanistan and 2009 you want to do 2008 or even before it's it's so much harder and you're you're dealing with so much less support
so this isn't a good thing but there's also have something to do with like really the citizen reporting sort of started with with the Iraq war
and there is really gay got a big boost blogs were very important yes well the citizen reporting really every blogger journalist the whole discussions about that can you trust it more
but now you see that there that it's that it's weakening and and are we also not living in an information disaster
I mean it's true the war in Iraq was a sort of a very interesting time for for to be a blogger I mean we read right in the middle and we read a lot of great writing that was coming from Iraq in either English or Arabic
but I don't know because what I'm talking about is more this whole in a way it's a bad spiral of funding for projects and of course a lot of times you're talking about big organizations who want big money
but I'm also talking about small projects that don't need that much money to do good but still need need something.
So that's where it's interesting you know Chavis here and we started by talking about a t-shirt and of course you know the real reason we talk about that t-shirt is also because I think that you're seeking funds in different ways
to maybe to avoid the exact problem I'm talking about where if you're looking to governments and big organizations their attention moves too much perhaps.
Yeah the idea is that we really don't want any big funding and the actual business model of the project is it should be self sustainable.
So of course the first year is trying testing so you're just experimenting you cannot ask people to pay you for a job that you're not even doing properly.
So the first six months in the network we basically did the job for free because they were doing the test for us.
I mean they were actually testing on a live system and the system could work or not and we were working on it at the same time so let's say the quality of service was not great but we both learned how to deal with it.
When I'm going back we shall start to consider it as a production system so they will pay us a small fee to keep it running and with that fee and two three networks more we should be able to survive.
I mean we're not here to make money we are no profit so every money that comes in which is more than my salary and Peter's salary will be reinvested in the architecture itself.
But yeah the point is we don't want to become another organization NGO whatever which spend most of its time seeking funds and most of the time you don't even have a project.
You first look for money and then you look for something to do while we're trying to do the other way around we have a target we have a purpose money it's just a detail I mean.
We're not going to stop anyway if we don't have money now we can wait another six months and then continue we are not in a rush and we live in a very low cost country.
Yeah but it's also interesting when you're going somewhere where it doesn't cost that much to get there or to function when you're there yeah that's particularly good.
I mean I've also done projects I should say I'm here talking about big funding on my own I do projects as a journalist which are been crowd funded you know and that's I'm sure something that comes to mind for anybody and here I can't we have plenty of crowd funded projects you see them the evidence of the results.
So I've also used that as a method to fund not so much teaching but but going and doing reporting that's directly crowd funded from an audience that is either curious of the topic.
Or who already knows my work and says I want to see what what bicycle mark would do if he went to wherever he's going.
So of course that's another question for funding sources.
Yes and bicycle mark you've had you've worked at quite a few different places now can you tell us a bit about differences between between those places.
How it's different to teach an Iraqi person versus an Afghanistan person.
Well I mean I'd rather tell you about the similarities because what one similarity that comes to mind is war trauma you know you're in a classroom and you're trying to teach people something that maybe they've never done before and normally that's already a challenge people learn at different
places. Sometimes you see that people are dealing with a lot of other issues and so you've got people that are looking at you and you think that they're thinking of your notes or whatever it is that you're writing.
But they're thinking about someone that is suffering that is perhaps died something that went and happened this morning and it's very hard to isolate the classroom from what's going on outside.
And I've never actually taught in Iraq that was the organization that did that before my time but I've seen this in Afghanistan and I've seen this now with Syrians.
Of course if you want to start listing differences you know there's the man woman thing sometimes that's always been a complicated issue for me where you have classrooms especially in Afghanistan where there are very few women.
And the women that are there are not always treated as equals there are they're not treated badly well that's okay maybe they are there there's somewhat ignored which I would probably put to being treated badly.
And that's odd you know because you're trying to teach them as equals and half of their classmates are ignoring them and they themselves sometimes play down their role no don't help me go help him.
No no I don't really need anything and you know they do need some you know they need some attention some hands on right there.
So for me it's often been this kind of cultural difference that makes teaching very difficult and yeah so we also have women in your own organization to sort of challenge that.
Not actively doing teaching right now in the past that we've had people working for us females but at the moment we don't have any trainers that I know of.
Because then of course you would work with other role models in these situations and that would also complicate things but it would also be good for women that would want to learn things because you know the Afghanistan of course has since a long time already these stories about illegal schools for girls.
Yeah well now legal legal very legal I mean yeah but I go you know before before the last decade study yeah sort of.
I don't know because I you know I fell into this so that is a question I think that there has been an attempt and these attempts have failed and maybe we should try harder.
The other question is yeah how much I don't know.
Is it not tempting to work with us for some reason for females I have no idea.
It's definitely worth finding out.
Yeah I don't have a good answer for that.
Good.
And then you know differences go on and on I mean yeah I would rather answer more specific questions about differences but because in general it's just too much.
Yeah I also can imagine that in the Syrian chaos I mean nobody really seems to understand anymore what's going on everything is worth seeing.
And the Syrian thing is complicated above all because the people that we teach are from the start they're with the rebels okay that's and I have no problem with that except that they're you know they're not that old idea of a journalist that has no affiliation or some kind of some kind of independence.
They have to be I think they have to be against the people that are bombing them and so it's the government that's bombing them.
So although they're journalists they're reporters but they are with an army.
They don't pick up guns but they go with them and they trust to some extent they trust them.
And you know that.
That army changed in a way.
It depends on where you are in the country and it depends yes.
Yeah so they don't agree with everybody that's of that army that they're not the army but with the rebels I want to say the rebels.
So this is not unique but it's special to the Syrian case because you're talking to journalists but you're talking to journalists who are almost affiliated with the military is that good or bad it affects how they do their job.
And so if you talk about interviewing and you say oh well why don't you ask you know the general so and so of the rebels about this event that happened they'll say well you can't ask our generals that.
You know they really respect these sort of rules of he's too high up for me to ask that he'll get mad I'm not going to do that.
And I think that partially comes with when you really support a certain side.
And when you're just scared that's another thing.
Yeah.
You're just scared to be shut out to be hurt you know that that happened a lot.
You would you could see footage of students of something that the rebels did that perhaps the rebels don't want published and students would say look I'm showing you this but you can't show anyone because I got to go home and they're there.
So this is really complicated is really difficult.
So are you also talking about how to make a footage like that that could also make the dangerous for the persons involved bigger.
Are you talking about how you could sort of make this kind of this kind of footage less dangerous like like take out the very clear recognizable parts or whatever.
But the real node of the footage remains.
Yeah I mean you try and teach and they're interested of course once you get them out of their shells they're interested in taking some risks you know you see I tried to show a little here footage of hidden camera video taken in a community or in a city where it's run by the government and they're not supposed to be no one is supposed to be running around with the camera.
And you'll see them it's terrible quality video and it's shaky and you can't see much of what's going on and then I'll say I risk my life for this video what do you think.
All right all right what we need to do is help you so that next time you risk your life because I know you're going to do it you know because you're dedicated that you don't shake like crazy and get only pictures of tops of trees you know if you're going to risk your life let's let's make it.
There I say somewhat more worth it you know that it's a message that people could could process and then there's other things you know we and you get into that discussion you have to learn about culture to some extent.
But how do you talk to a general who thinks that reporters shouldn't ask nosy questions you know are there ways and we talk about getting you know a little more like friends with your sources and and choosing the right time to ask the more difficult question and it's there's all very basic journalism skills which you either learn with experience or maybe somebody can.
Can show you I mean it's it's either or yeah so you also have I mean Mark is talking about hierarchy also in in have working with the rebels and is there something with hierarchy in your project in Mexico that makes things more difficult or even more easy or.
Or does it is there no such thing as hierarchy and is there far more really communal sense officially there are no hierarchies I mean you have places of power which rotate so interior there is no possibility to create a hierarchy.
And officially you always have different powers in a community so you can have one family you can have a group of people you can have.
Certain people that tend to put pressure on you for you or against you and I mean the word is I mean people are the same everywhere you will never find a single community which I agree with you 100% and even if you do there's always going to be someone who tries to make his own personal business out of it.
I mean with us it happened a lot that some people in the village spread around misinformation about what we're doing and the fact that keeping we using is not up to date and we're basically selling them obsolete crap.
But why is that is that because they because you are new into the community or we found out we investigate a bit and there is one guy who is basically making secret deals or is trying to make a secret deal with the actual big telco and so he's trying to push us out of course this doesn't work because the network we have is already running and the big telco doesn't really want to invest money in it.
But this guy is still thinking you see that's a problem even if you're working in indigenous communities which keep the same mentality they had since hundreds of years the new way of thinking the colonialism of making business out of everything making your own personal interest above the general interest of the society it's something that already got there and you can see it.
What are guys probably one of the few places left in the world where you can still count on a community as a whole but you always have to keep in mind that even in a community which is very I don't know tightly connected you still have people that want to make their own business out of it and it's the poorest state in Mexico and in one of the poorest in Latin America.
So at one point you understand them the fact that if they add the opportunity to make some money for them and for the family even going above the bigger interest they will do that and I cannot blame them.
I think that's the same everywhere.
Now we have such a nice moment to put some music I think we have anything Mexican.
I love I love the expression from behind the board.
Let's just give him a.
That was a technical look for I'm not sure where the Mexican music is but I have some music ready for you guys but it's absolutely not Mexican at all.
Let's do it.
It's an Austrian world.
Almost.
Present watching your every move.
Judge police, why tapping off at 26,000 times?
A hacking plan to break into your computer and alter your data or even destroy it.
This is Omoop we love to talk about it because Omoop is pessimistic where we can and optimistic where we must.
104.7 Ivan.
And are we back again whoops we are back again I'm sorry for the dead air but here we are again back to a heck of public radio at home on 104.7 FM.
We're here I have Cecil with me who is playing the role of a co-host which I'm very grateful for and we have to my left.
We have Chabi or there is no Matika and I'm sorry it's not no Matika it's oh Matika.
Oh it's all Matika that's happy.
Okay great and we had vice co-mark with us a moment ago but he had to go because he had some heralding work to do so we had to excuse him.
Okay so Chabi we were talking about the project and you talked about what the open BTS software that you used could you perhaps say something more about that.
Yeah okay basically open BTS.
We're still talking about Chabi's projects in Oaxaca.
Yeah Mexico.
Basically open BTS it's a software platform which allow you to set up your own GSM cell with very little money.
In the cheapest option with less than a thousand euro you can actually set up small cell yourself.
The idea the revolution in GSM technology is the fact that we are not forced to use telecommunication, telco, grade stuff.
I mean we can actually build our own things and it works in this way because it's based on the concept of oops.
See okay we have little ham we have a little interruption let's continue.
The idea it's called SDR it's not a new concept but basically means that the entire modulation so the entire system of generating a digital signal and then creating all the framing and all the technical details.
It's all done in software. The transmitter itself only take a signal converted into waves in the air and that's it.
Then you need to amplify it and 90% of the job is done by a normal computer.
Yeah SDR being software defined radio.
And what kind of hardware do you need in order to link up such a village?
I mean are we talking like quad core multi CPU systems or is this like the old Pentium 2 you have and you pack in your attic?
It's something in the middle and it's a core to dual I think with one gig of RAM and that's it.
Easily handled 600 users at the moment and the new transmitter which we are receiving as exactly the same motherboard and she'll handle up to a thousand users with no problems and up to 30 something concurrent calls.
That's the main thing. I mean doing something like this four or five years ago could have been probably impossible because we don't have the knowledge about telco equipment.
I mean I don't have it and I know very few people that work in it professionally and the cost will be completely prohibitive.
Well nowadays with more cost and the fact that the entire box is basically Linux.
So the same thing we have been whole hacking on for years it just one software running on a Linux box.
Which makes it so much easier.
Yes so you're basically putting up a network for 1000 euros together.
No no the problem is at the moment the cost it's high because we didn't assemble the box ourselves.
We just got the entire package fully ready installed just plug it in and it kind of worked.
We had to fix some things but it was quite easy.
In the future we want to move more and more of the finding parts assembling it, testing it and doing it ourselves so we could reduce the price.
The actual equipment which is working now costs $15,000 which is still around one tenth of the cost of a normal telephone cell.
So we're ready to reduce it to the price which is acceptable for a community of 2,000 people.
We want to reduce it down to $4,000 or $5,000 so we can actually propose it to villages that are really really small and don't have that many resources.
Yes and you can basically do that all by using Moore's Law right?
Using Moore?
Moore's Law. Computers get twice as fast in about 18 months of time.
Yeah you see that's a point.
Nowadays computers are so fast that we don't even need to use the latest technology.
We are using computers that are two, three years old and they're working perfectly fine and we paid entire motherboard CPU and all less than 100 euros.
The main problem we have and if someone is listening and want to help out with it would be really handy.
We are missing some radio frequency engineers.
The software part I can handle it.
The assembly part I can handle it but to actually tune the antennas to cut the cables properly to do all the really radio stuff we are missing a bit of knowledge.
Because you told something that was quite funny about antenna.
Then we have now, we call it an antenna but it's a huge hack.
It's basically one pole of 10 meters of aluminum with the diameter of, I don't know, six or seven centimeters.
We are actually two pieces, solder together but when we try to pull it up the first time, the first two meters completely bent and we have to cut it off.
Shorten it a bit, put it back together and it's now kept in place with seven tensors made of metal wire, which is the duct tape equivalent in Mexico.
Yes, duct tapes everywhere.
One time the antenna already fell, they put it back and now it's stable in place with double metal wire.
Which according to them it's perfect and it will keep it stable forever.
Well, you know, you have to adapt during Mexico.
You cannot set your standards the same way you will do things in Europe.
You have to be more inventive because you have like, you have less possibilities to have all the material.
On the other side, Mexican people are fantastic because they are completely careless about their own lives.
I mean, I've seen people walking and climbing 10-15 meters on antennas without any hardness, without any protection.
Just like, are you sure you want to do that?
Yeah, not a preoccupied.
And in that sense, they don't make that many problems really.
Everything can be done, even impossible sometimes.
But until now, everybody's still surprised.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no accident, nothing. We are all alive and well.
I use an harness when I climb on antennas.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just so.
Okay, what else?
If someone wants to know more about this project, they can always pass by the Italian Embassy,
which is in the most noisy part of the camp.
I will be there and you can also buy t-shirts.
The noisy rebel camp square.
Exactly.
We are in front of the noisy square. We are the noisy Italians.
Where there was no discussion about the sponsorship of this conference.
No such discussion.
Okay.
Let's see.
What will be the next program?
Is anybody aware of what?
I guess it will be, you know.
Ah.
Okay.
Can you tell us a bit about what happens after you've been there and brought the stuff and set up the network.
And it gets taken over by the local people.
Have you been there in a later stage after they have controlled the system themselves for a while?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We actually went there already five, six times by now.
But yeah, we're basically friends by now.
We go back and forth a lot.
What we found out is that they use the telephone a lot.
I mean, they make on average 4,000 calls per day.
And they are what less than 600 users.
So on average, they call at least five times a day.
They find it really, really useful, especially for small communication.
But how they're going to handle it in the future?
And what are going to be the actual consequences for the society as a whole?
We don't know yet.
We think that it's a positive improvement.
And they were the first to actually request that.
I mean, we didn't force anything.
We made the proposal and accepted it.
But there is no...
We want to avoid the approach many NGOs and groups have.
Which is we go to a place and we tell them that it will be nice to do that.
And we do it.
And that's it.
Our approach is more a dialogue.
We want...
We would like to do this.
But we understand that you have different requirements.
Or maybe what we think that you could do with that.
It's completely different from what you think it could be useful.
So it's going to be very interesting in the next one to years.
To see if we can really make a difference.
And if this difference is positive or negative.
Or if we just create another monster full of teenagers texting each other.
I still don't get...
How did you end up at exactly that place?
Because you had plans for like, I don't know...
You would have started in Central America and you would be away for a year.
You would have sort of traveled the whole south of America or something.
But you never got out of Mexico.
I never got out of Mexico.
The southern place I got was Oaxaca.
No, it happened that I've been to the Mexican Hack Meeting.
Which is the equivalent of the home camp.
But it's not every year.
And it's a bit more...
I don't know, on the cheap side.
But basically...
How big is that?
There are many people.
Hundreds.
Some people.
From home, Mexico or...
Yeah.
Well, in Mexico, of course.
It has also a particular story of the digitalization use of computers.
And we saw that in the first with the Zapatero movement,
with Subcomandante Marcos, blah, blah, blah.
No?
So there is a specific...
There has been some sort of very...
They have been ahead very much on using the internet for their popular movements.
Yeah, there is quite a big support in it.
What is constantly lacking in the Mexican part is like everywhere.
You have tons of people who want to do a lot of projects.
But they don't have that many technicians.
And that always creates a chain of dependency between the people who want to do stuff
and the people who support them.
But...
The hackers meeting in Mexico...
Are there also people from the Zapateros involved?
Or...
Zapateros?
Zapateros?
Sorry.
Yeah.
Well, officially...
Yes and no.
I don't want to talk much about it,
because it's a very big topic and...
Okay.
Not enough time.
Yeah, okay.
But...
I think, yeah.
If someone wants to continue the discussion offline,
I'll be around the camp for the next two days,
and you can see me around every somatic on my t-shirt.
The Mexican t-shirt.
Yes.
By Mexican t-shirts.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio, or at Hacker Public Radio, those aren't.
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday.
Today's show, like all our shows,
was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself.
If you ever consider recording a podcast,
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is.
Hacker Public Radio was founded by the digital dog pound
and the infonomicum computer club.
HPR is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com.
All binref projects are crowd-responsive by linear pages.
From shared hosting to custom private clouds,
go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs.
Unless otherwise stasis,
today's show is released under a creative commons,
attribution, share a like,
lead us our lives.