Ever since we decided to present at the 35th Vijayawada Book Festival, one thing was bugging us. We needed to be a book stall of some sort but we don’t have any books to sell – other than the Balaswecha book we created in mid 2024. So we came up with an idea – an e-book store of works in …
Category: Community
Swecha AP at the 35th Vijayawada Book Festival
The 35th Vijayawada Book Festival is taking place from 2nd to 12th January 2025, bringing together hundreds of publishers at the Indira Gandhi stadium. We set up a stall to present our initiatives, projects, our ideals and raise donations. Balaswecha handbook We presented our handbook we designed with the help of our volunteers at the stall which attracted attention from …
Free Software and Open Knowledge Systems as a catalyst to bridge digital divide through Community Networks
I want to present our experience on how Free and Open Source Software and Open Knowledge Systems worked as a catalyst in our mission to bridge the digital divide through Community Networks. Dates back to 2016 when we advocated community networks and Freedombox as tools to combat surveillance. But later we went on to implement in rural areas as Public …
Contribute to Wikidata and win prizes!
What is Wikidata? “Wikidata is a free, collaborative, multilingual, secondary knowledge base, collecting structured data to provide support for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, the other wikis of the Wikimedia movement, and to anyone in the world.” In simple terms, Wikidata is a database of structured data about anything in the world. But what is structured data? Structured data is something that …
Visiting freedom box villages and charting plans for community empowerment
The history One year ago, we visited some remote places in Andhra Pradesh, India where there is no cellular connectivity, to set up community-run, wireless networks. The idea was to provide access to offline-only digital-content with the help of freedom box server with a wireless local area network using long range outdoor Wi-Fi antennas. In some villages, there was a wired optical …
Freedom Box
We are building community networks in remote parts of the state.
Our trip to a “disconnected” world
Its somewhere around 2021 a five members from Swecha AP and KLGLUG (KLU GNU/Linux Users Group) went on a journey to a tribal interior and a scenic area called Maredumilli in Andhra Pradesh to understand the cultures and living style of people. In that process we went deep inside the the villages and spoke with few people. While we kept …