This will be a presentation about the work we've doing on a coalition of 15 organizations from Latin America. Coming from grassroots media and autonomous infrastructure activisms, we decided to start the Escuela Común as a synthesis of the different campaigns and project we had been working together or separately along the years. The presentation will be about sharing the story behind this, how it came to be, our ideas, findings, and learnings, with pictures and videos.

Many activist organizations and indigenous communities have decided to build and be their own media, like radio and TV stations for a long time, knowing most of the time this is the only way to get accurate and timely information about their communities' struggles out to the world. This translated into other communication infrastructures, like community networks, collective mapping, etc.

They also gather lots of audiovisual media, like pictures, video, and audio recordings, not only covering and documenting what's happening on the ground, sometimes they're also use as evidence for their legal strategies against fossil fuel extraction, minery, water contamination, police brutality, and so on.

What we've found together in these experiences is that the archives and catalogues of this collective memory are almost always somewhat precarious: copies stored on someone's private cloud storage, a portable hard disk that gets knocked over the table, or destroyed by parapolice violence. The looming sense of losing years of work on a second, or having the copies accessed without permission, is sometimes paralyzing.

Here's how our experience in the autonomous infrastructure space kicks in, since we've not only been building antennas and transmitters, we've also built servers to host our e-mail, websites and archives. What if instead of entrusting their data to us, the free software experts, we could learn together how to build and host our own infrastructure, sharing and hosting the technical knowledge within the organizations that are the most interested in keeping these archives safe?

So "la escuelita" is a two-track training and sharing environment, where we meet with two members of 12 applicant organizations during a week-long offline event, followed by two months of weekly online sessions. The first edition happened in 2024 in Puyo, in the Ecuadorian Amazonia, hosted by the Amazonian indigenous nationalities confederation (CONFENIAE). We just finished the second Escuela that happened in Haedo, Argentina, hosted in Antena Negra, a grassroots TV station, within a space reclaimed by the train workers. We finished with an open event at IMPA, one of the first factories reclaimed by its workers in Buenos Aires. It was even streamed with the infrastructure we built during the event, and you can watch the recordings here.

During this time, we collectivelly agree on mutual care and aid practices, we form bonds and alliances, while we learn how to gather better information through grassroots media, work on our own narratives, at the same time that we share digital safety practices that can later be practiced within each participant organization.

During the digital gardens track, where I'm one of the facilitators in, we talk and envision how the sysadmin work can be socialized, how it can be embedded within the organization as a shared responsibility towards our infrastructure and data, and that's how the analogy to tending a community garden came to be, as resistance to Big Tech's monoculture. La Escuela provides the server hardware for each organization, and together we install and setup services that can host digital archives and catalogues, video streaming, and anything the participants consider necessary for their work, along with proper encrypted and offsite backups, disk encryption and other safety measures.

We achieve this by using Coopcloud tools, which make it very simple to introduce folks to the Linux command line, rather than making it about clicking through web interfaces --because we want to empower our friends and allies. We're working closely with Coopcloud, and one of the features we initially requested and then built together is the ability to use the tools in Spanish (currently the main language). This is the first command line tool that I know of whose commands can be written in any language, rather than "technical" English. This not helped a lot during the training sessions, it's also an exercise on technical appropiation.

We also knew right away that Internet connectivity was going to be an issue, so the Red Abya Yala project was developed in parallel. The servers of each organization are part of a network that can be accessible from the Internet via public proxies. This makes it simpler to host a server, since the only requisite is for it to have Internet, and we can protect them and even hide their locations using the proxy. The Red Abya Yala project is getting a life of its own, and we're working on common agreements and commitments to be able to bring into more community servers, even ones not built within or with the Escuela Común framework.