Finding "commons ground" with Sarantaporo.gr
Submitted by yiota on October 20, 2016 - 9:44am
Sarantaporo.gr is a six-year old community network in the north-eastern part of Greece, serving 14 villages in an agricultural area near Mount Olympus. It was originally conceived as a means to address the digital divide in Greece by a small group of people, who ever since play an important role in its implementation, management, and constant evolution.
In the context of netCommons, we (AUEB team & Nethood team) have had a series of fruitful meetings and interactions with the Sarantaporo.gr core team. The main aims of these meetings have been to identify the real problems and needs of the local community that is served by the network, and jointly propose ways and actions to address them. The ultimate ambition is to turn the community network into a tool that best serves the local agricultural economy and an integral asset of what could become a new generation of techno-agricultural cooperatives. The seeds planted in these meetings have flourished in several directions:
- We have participated in an event organized by Sarantaporo.gr in the area of Elassona and informed the locals about the goals of netCommons, discussed their needs in person and received feedback for the proposed ideas.
- We are currently in the proccess of designing an application that addresses a basic part of these needs drawing on crowdsourcing principles. Its aim is to facilitate locally the information exchange and the provision of assistance in different types of tasks. The application itself is expected to serve as an incentive for enhancing the participation and active involvement of the locals in the community network.
- Core members of Sarantaporo.gr have recently joined our team as members of the netCommons project making the collaboration with them even tighter. We are jointly organizing a workshop in the home area of the community network, to bring the local community in touch with stakeholders from the areas of agriculture, ICT, and the commons.
AUEB team: Panagiota Micholia, Merkouris Karaliopoulos, Iordanis Koutsopoulos
Nethood team: Panayotis Antoniadis
Sarantaporo.gr members: George Klissiaris, Vassilis Chryssos, Rossie Simeonova
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