SEATTLE -- Wearing a traditional feathered headdress and using a Power Point presentation, a leader of the Ashaninka Indian tribe from central Peru described how his village created a presence on the Internet.
Mino, also known by his Spanish name Eusebio Castro, described the situation faced by the indigenous people living in the Perene River Valley at the mouth of the Amazon jungle. More than 50 Indian villages exist in isolated patches throughout the valley, removed from one another and from the coastal cities where political and economic power are centralized.
"In the place where they live, they don't have the basic necessities. They don't have running water or electricity, yet these people have been able to do so much," said a translator.
Mino's presentation was one of many at "Shaping the Network Society," a four-day conference sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the National Communications Association. Participants described community-based initiatives ranging from the Peruvian jungle to a housing project in the Roxbury section of Boston, the objective being to encourage similar grassroots projects.
In the past several years, the Ashaninkas put up their own Internet server and website to tell their story. Mino said they are using Web-based tools to educate their people, and village Internet kiosks have enabled small villages to communicate with one another.
A key part of the program, he said, was their insistence that the villagers establish their own Web servers and learn to maintain the system for themselves. This led to a year of negotiating with the Peruvian state telephone company to provide the resources necessary for the Ashaninkas to install a network. It was important that the Ashaninkas be able to demonstrate their self-sufficiency to the dominant society in Lima.
After a fire destroyed the Ashaninka's community center last year, the entire village turned out to rebuild it. They hope to be up and running again with new equipment by the end of next month. The next project for the Ashaninka, Mino said, is to establish an indigenous television station in the jungle.
Nurturing environments where people can grow programs to fit their own needs was a key concern for academics, activists and computer geeks meeting here. About 250 people from five continents and 20 countries shared their experiences with building community networks in local areas and across the Web, plotting a course for future action to ensure continued open access to the Internet.
And not just in developing countries, either. Randy Pinkett described a three-year project building a community network in the Camfield Estates housing project in Roxbury. It is co-sponsored as a research project by MIT, and uses grant money to provide residents with computers, high-speed Internet connections and 12 weeks of training in a local technology center.
"We also worked with the residents to build out a series of Web applications designed for the purpose of helping to build community -- helping neighbors connect with neighbors, helping residents to connect with resources, helping parents to better provide resources for their children," Pinkett said. The idea was to look at "how community building and technology can be mutually supportive instead of mutually exclusive."
Personal Web pages were created where residents could list their interests, skills and needs. The project catalogued the information into a searchable database so people could easily make connections with one another when they needed a plumber or a babysitter, or to find others in the project with common interests or concerns.
At an evening reception, activists warned of what they saw as threats to the open, inclusive nature of the Web. Independent media pioneer Dee Dee Hallek, of Deep Dish Television, and Jeffery Chester, a self- described anti-corporate media lobbyist and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, sounded the alarm. Chester said a series of FCC rulings have paved the way for two or three media giants to control broadband access to the Internet.
Noting that 85 percent of American households are paying for TV over cable or DBS satellite broadcasts, he predicted that companies like AOL Time Warner would be trying to move virtually all television programming onto the Net in the near future. Halleck warned of attacks on the public access channel systems as cable franchise agreements come due for renewal over the next few years. Both called for a mass mobilization similar to the anti-globalization movement to focus on media access issues.
Sessions were also held to begin hammering out a "civil society" presence to represent grassroots interests at the UN World Summit on the Information Society, scheduled for December 2003 in Geneva. Members of the Global Community Networking Partnership will discuss strategies at an October conference in Montreal.
