2026-07-09 –, Solidarity Station
We invite anyone who self-hosts and has an interest in community technology for an open discussion on local first cloud services such as file sharing, e-mail, DNS. We will share our own experiences in providing digital services for the neighborhood, find similar initiatives and discuss challenges and affordances.
In this session, we describe two initiatives In Brazil and Spain, where a group of neighbors self-organize to provide on-line services to the community. By using recycled desktop computers, we've created a local cloud that gives support to the neighborhood as a local cloud, website, e-mail and even local LLMs.
The main goal of the activity, though, is not as much to talk about our experience, but to gather similar initiatives from around and the world. Maintaining services for the community is not as much as technical challenge but a social one. How do we convince people to switch from google drive to our own self-hosted cloud? How do we communicate the importance of keeping our data under our control, and to run our modest processors instead of surrendering them to water hungry datacenters?
To discuss this, we want to invite like-minded projects from DWeb participantes, and we hope they can contribute with experiences and insights.
Bruno Caldas Vianna lives in Barcelona. In 2024, he obtained a PhD in Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Helsinki, Finland, investigating visual arts and artificial intelligence. Bruno is a professor at the Centre for Image and Multimedia Technology, Polytechnic University of Catalonia (CITM-UPC) and also teaches at Elisava University in Barcelona. He has a degree in film, and a master’s degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His artist practice traverses poetical affordances of technology, by creating visual narratives in innovative and traditional supports, short and feature films, live cinema, augmented reality, mobile apps, installations. Between 2011 and 2016, he ran Nuvem, a rural space dedicated to art and technology in Brazil. From 2012 and 2018 he taught at Oi Kabum, a school for art in technology in Rio de Janeiro. He is a founder of the autonomous technology collective Coolab, which was awarded a Mozilla grant in 2017, with a project to finance community networks.
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.