introduces a 4 day course aimed for activists to understand digital free technologies practices, develop autonomous communication environments, and safe habits for online presence.
This course will include technological practices in collective practices, aiming for sustainable development of independent usages, facilitating the adoption of singular solutions to respond to each participant’s specific needs.
Emphasizing that activists maintain their communication environment independent from major corporations, we propose a tool set that can favor solidarity and exchange.
Digital technologies seem very much antithetical to Degrowth: from gigantic mining operations to unsolved waste management, computers and smartphones, and most electronics pose a direct threat to life, and participate fully in the growth economy. Yet technologies are there now and can be used in ways that empower the trans-individual. With an adequate understanding, we can use them to accompany and amplify our existing collective practices, acknowledging that adopting a new technology is a hybridization that modifies our behavior and understanding of the world.
We will adapt the course to the Degrowth environment, among other things availability of electricity and network. Please bring your computers (phones are also computers - but constrained) charged as much as possible we will provide 3g as much as we have and then we will switch to documented exchange opsec playful models of networks. Depending on the conditions we will move from Internet to local networks expanding on similarities and differences between them.
Day 1 - Why Do We Need Free Technologies?
Introduction to the philosophy of free software and its political existence. Understand the importance of technical transparency, and collective approaches to technologies. This will be done with many prepared examples displayed live or from archives.
Day 2 - Identifying Your Computing Needs
Through discussion and exercises we’ll identify which free technologies can integrate your existing collective practices to amplify your action.
Day 3 - Free Software Applications and Autonomous Services
Whether you’re using a free software operating system or not, you can use several free software applications to handle your communication and documentation needs. Move away from privative computing into shared computing, according to the needs identified during the previous session.
Day 4 - Action : Testing Security Software and Best Practice
On the last day we’ll use the solutions devised and organize follow-up sessions online, come back on expectations, understandings, learnings, experiences. We will commit to self and collective improvement of computer hygiene with singular technologies fit to your community needs. Security isn’t only installing complicated tools, most importantly it is understanding when and how to do what operation, deal with this operator or that process; operational security (opsec) is a crucial part of it that considers the ways humans interact with the machine.
