2026-07-10 –, Decentralized Hardware @ Hackers Lab
A fishbowl-style discussion bringing together hardware geeks, solidarity activists, and infrastructure nerds, to explore how community networks can navigate the jump from "underground" projects to officially recognized infrastructure. We’ll swap strategies on securing formal support and resources without losing our decentralized soul or grassroots autonomy.
For years, the community network movement has thrived in the "gray areas" of the digital landscape. But how do we move from being "underground" experiments to becoming recognized, essential infrastructure?
"The Art of Not Being Invisible" is an informal, peer-to-peer Talking Circle focused on the difficult, often messy balance between achieving official legitimacy and maintaining grassroots autonomy.
We’ll dive into the tension of "fitting in" versus "selling out." How do we access government subsidies and get official recognition while keeping our decentralized, community-first ideology intact?
Senka Hadzic is a telecom engineer, researcher and public interest technologist working on affordable connectivity solutions for remote areas and disadvantaged populations. She is part of the iNethi team, a Cape Town based project enabling decentralized content distribution in community networks.
T. B. Dinesh is an Indian computer scientist and mathematician. He started his research with generating software based on algebraic specification and later focused on web 2.0, web accessibility, web annotation, hypermedia and mesh networking. In 1999, he co-founded the Pagelets project. In 2002, he founded [Janastu.org Janastu] in Bangalore, a non-profit where he serves as technical director, and a company called Servelots. Both serve non-profits with free and open-source software and developing ways for re-narration of the web with web accessibility for the print-impaired. He has studied and built community-based digital tools such as SWeeT Web, Alipi, Pantoto, CoLRN and Papad.
I'm an IT Specialist and the Founder of the Africa Rural Internet and STEM Initiative (AFRISTEMI), a Ghanaian startup nonprofit organization working to connect rural communities to the internet and providing STEM education these marginalized communities.
My interests include digital inclusion, digital education, community networks and tech policy. Current DWeb Camp Pollinator and 2024 DWeb fellow.
- Vibes from Back Home, Planet Earth
- Root to Rise: Morning Aerobics & Movement
- Spotlight Session: Get to know the Pollinators
- Community Networks Networking Session
- Root to Rise: Morning Aerobics & Movement
- Building the People’s Internet: Mesh Networks and Policy Advocacy in Ghana
- Root to Rise: Morning Aerobics & Movement
My work and activism is focused on investigating, adapting and implementing ecological and resilient technologies, specially autonomous, collectivelly managed infrastructure.
In the last seven years I've been working almost exclusively on resilient web sites using Jekyll and developing a platform for updating and hosting them called Sutty. In 2024, I also became an organizer and facilitator at Escuela Común and developer and sysadmin at Red Abya Yala.
Hiure Queiroz is a PhD candidate in Innovation and Technology at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), where he conducts research focused on the development of social technologies for community well-being. He holds a degree in Physics and a master's degree in Materials Science.
He is a member of the Associação Portal Sem Porteiras (redepsp.org) , where he has been actively involved in initiatives that combine participatory methodologies, territorial engagement, and the development of context-based technologies. He was part of the coordination team of LabLab (lablab.tec.br), a collaborative process that brings together farmers, technologists, and researchers to co-create technological solutions rooted in local realities. Rather than focusing on isolated products, LabLab emphasizes the construction of processes, local capacities, and shared governance models for technology development.
He is also involved in the SEMEA-TEC (semea.tec.br) extension group at Unifesp, which develops low-cost sensing and communication technologies for family farming through participatory approaches, bridging academic research and grassroots innovation.
Hiure works to promote the critical appropriation of science and technology through hacker culture and grassroots innovation. He is a founding partner of Transistir Social Tech, an initiative dedicated to the development of hardware and software focused on social and decentralized technologies.