Building Communities of Commons in Greece

Financié le 06 / 01 / 2016
Cofinancé!
Accumulé
$ 7,225
Minimal
$ 6,706
Optimal
$ 9,410
88 Cofinanceurs
Channel
  • Pour $ 11

    e-card plus credit

    A thank you e-card illustrated with a picture, addressed to you personally + your name will be credited in the supporters' list on the website

    > 09 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 16

    e-card plus credit on the web and on the film

    A thank you e-card + your name will be credited in the supporters' list on the website and also in the final credits of the documentary

    > 14 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 22

    digital poster

    e-card + mention in the supporters' list on the website + digital poster in high resolution (for A3 print size)

    > 12 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 32

    original soundtrack digital files

    e-card + credits + digital poster + link to download the music score in high quality audio

    > 11 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 54

    Sarantaporo.gr t-shirt

    e-card + credits + digital poster + cd with the music score + a T-shirt with the Sarantaporo.gr logo, kind offer of the community. The T-shirts come in various colours and sizes (men/ladies/kids).

    > 08 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 108

    original soundtrack and the documentary DVD

    All the above plus the music score cd and the documentary DVD.
    Feel free to copy, share and organize screenings (just drop a word back to us, in that case, to include it on our news...)

    > 07 Cofinanceurs
  • Pour $ 324

    co-producer

    All the above + honorary mention with name, organisation name or logo featured in the credits of the documentary film as co-producer

    > 07 Cofinanceurs

À propos du projet

A documentary on mesh and community Networks in Sarantaporo area in Greece

Budget Tâche Minimal Optimal
Production phase:
it includes repérage, video and sound recording (interviews, locations, etc.)
$ 1,622
Post production:
video and sound editing of raw material and additional footage, supplementary research, subtitling, translations, etc.
$ 2,704
Soundtrack:
composition and recording of original musical score
$ 433
Dissemination material:
DVD, printing costs, additional printed material (info booklet)
$ 216
GOTEO costs:
necessary commission for the Goteo platform and paypal (4% and approximately 7% accordingly, of the amount raised)
$ 757
Budget Matériel Minimal Optimal
Travelling costs:
Though most of the team’s needs are covered by the hospitable community of sarantaporo.gr while there, the travelling costs amount to a considerable cost since the location is in an important distance from Athens.
$ 1,839
Cost of awards:
material and shipment
$ 433
Travelling costs:
The optimum sum would enable us to organize screening events and open talks in other locations in Greece.
$ 1,298
Budget Infrastructure Minimal Optimal
Website
Maintenance and consistent updating and enrichment (hosted on the website common-knowledge.eu)
$ 108
Total $ 6,706 $ 9,410
Indispensable
Optionnel

Informations générales

Greece is going through the 6th year of recession. Austerity policies imposed by IMF, ECB and the Greek political pro-memorandum regimes, foster an unprecedented crisis in economy, social life, politics and culture. In the previous two decades the enforcement of the neoliberal politics to the country resulted in the disintegration of the existed social networks, leaving society unprepared to face the upcoming situation. During the last years, while large parts of the social fabric are expelled from the state and private economy, through the social movements which emerge in the middle of the crisis, formations of physical and digital networks appear. They appear not only to official politic and finance circles, but also as grassroots forms of coexistence, solidarity and innovation. People come together, experiment in unconventional ways of collaboration and bundle their activities in different physical and digital networks.

In the documentary “Building Communities of Commons. A documentary on Networks in Sarantaporo area”, we explore in depth the journey of the community “Sarantaporo.gr”: its beginnings, its background, its aspirations and the diverse facets it can foster (aspects of social life, new technologies, bringing a little closer together young and old, locals among them but also with relatives of the diaspora as well as with other communities in Greece or abroad).

Caractéristiques principales

Sarantaporo area, situated at the North of Greece, is an agricultural and husbandry region, also hit by the crisis. But even prior to the crisis, state’s attention to the area was poor. Youths were migrating to big cities or abroad. There was no Internet connection, and locals were isolated and deprived of basic services, e.g. medical aid.

At 2010 a group of people forms a community wireless network aiming to connect the villages among them and with the rest of the world. They state:

“Our project is about creating a wireless networking infrastructure as a commons and building a community around it. It is not just about bringing the Internet to remote areas. Locals are already participating in and are offering their premises for infrastructure deployment, forming local support groups in which they organize their participation, acquiring knowledge, skills and expertise on deploying and maintaining this infrastructure. Through our experience, we aim to create a model not only for deploying, operating and expanding wireless community networks, but also for community building, tackling all relevant legal, organizational and financial issues.”

In time, and as the project matures, Sarantaporo.gr community aims even further. They want to be the catalyst so that the locals (re)organize cooperatives based on the wireless network, (re)enliven their economy, make it sustainable, more extrovert and independent of state and corporative control.
In doing so, they produce knowledge and build bridges between the hi-tech of a wireless network community and the real-life challenges of a rural community.

What are these challenges? How can a community be born and how are the existing ones transformed or affected during this course? What are the real-life stories of the people involved, one way or another, into this process? How can an effort in a small rural population in a remote part of crisis-ridden Greece relate to an ICT project in Catalonia University and -in a broader context- to the efforts to construct a new common ground for peoples in Europe?
These are some of the inquiries we explore in the documentary.

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Pourquoi est-ce important

In countries that still remain “untouched” by the austerity politics, criticism on realms as DIY culture, media culture, networking organization is -with few exceptions- institutionalized, residing into theory fields.

In contrast, in southern European countries like Greece (or Spain), the lack of institutions, or the unwillingness to collaborate with them, the omnipresence of direct state oppression and above all the emergency of taking direct action into the social, gives birth to other perspectives and approaches. Will that create an enriched new field of theory-in-practice in the continent? Will that foster a new political ground?

In Greece, where unemployment reaches 30% in all ages and genders, and among the youth overpasses 50%, immediate solution for the “social issue” is more than urgent. Communities that produce cognitive and cultural commons combine them -or try to- with production of common material goods, spring up in different regions. They seek answers to problems caused by the crisis, but they are also concerned about issues due to the new technical composition of the world. In doing so, they produce and share knowledge.

One such example is the community of Sarantaporo.gr. As Achilles (a member of the community) said in an interview for the documentary:

“Growing could mean reaching the neighboring prefecture. This is one of our projects and a challenging goal for us: to be able to reach out to another social fabric, which operates differently than ours. … The potential, not only of the wireless network but also of the human network, is to expand to other productive networks of the productive economy in the region. It could be a cooperative, and I don't mean that this network itself will create the cooperative rather that it would help through the dissemination of information and of know-how, as to how such a cooperative could best be set up so that the people of the region form new groups… What is at stake here is for people to go to the next stage where not everything is organised by a central structure. Instead, the citizens themselves start taking matters into their own hands and be able to play an active role in such activities.”

We first met with some members of Sarantaporo.gr during the making of the previous documentary film (Knowledge as a common good; Communities of production and sharing in Greece), and soon after again in the 2nd CommonsFest, held in Heraclion, Crete. That was when we realized the significance of their project and the influential role it can play, the multifarious impact it can have onto a wide range of diverse -but interweaved- social and economical aspects of peoples’ lives. Not only the immediate impact on local level, but also on the general situation/environment in our times; times when these rising new paradigms need all the visibility and support civic society can provide.

For us, raising awareness on the commons, giving prominence to this great initiative and giving voice to the people that take action -despite the difficulties, in a truly hostile (one could say without exaggerating) environment- tackling issues, empowering, (re)discovering and creating new social fabrics/networks among people is of grave importance.

Our journey and commitment into realizing this documentary film, has already begun.
The emerging community of the project Sarantaporo.gr needs the documentary, and we need you and your support to realize it and spread the story of this vision-put-in-practice to peoples everywhere.

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Objectifs de la campagne de crowdfunding

The production phase -and later on some of the disseminations activities- takes place in Sarantaporo area, Elassona, Larisa and Athens. Though most of the team’s needs are covered by the hospitable community of Sarantaporo.gr while there, the traveling costs amount to a considerable sum since the location is remote and several trips need to be done during this and the dissemination phase.

Post production: video and sound editing of raw material and additional footage, subtitling, translations, musical score (ost), etc.

The sum raised by your support will enable us to cover the basic expenses to realize the documentary.

The optimum sum would enable us to organize screening events and open talks to raise awareness on commons, community networks, peer-to-peer and solidarity-based cooperative models, etc.
Also, it will enable consistently updating of the documentation of the ongoing journey of the community that is Sarantaporo.gr, and continuous dissemination of its progress on a -dedicated for that purpose- page on the website http://common-knowledge.eu/ (created and maintained by our own means).

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Expérience antérieure et équipe

Personal Cinema is a network active in the field of media arts. It plans and organizes projects and activities that encourage the critical stance towards the new forms of production, presentation and distribution of audiovisual products; the forms that at the very end, define the kind of social, cultural and political conditions, which in their turn, connect the multitude to the power structures.

Personal Cinema anticipates cooperation with social and artistic networks, groups and individuals that take a similar stance and consider necessary the creation of a visible space of debate. The collective connects people who are engaged in constant inventions to render explicit and clear the 'signal' from 'noise', that is to say, the two unequal parts that compose the current pseudo-dialectic of information.

Personal Cinema collective is active in social movements in Greece and Europe, participates in several projects that promote or have to do with the Commons, like Self-managed Theatre Embros or the CommonsFest.

It is a collective active since the year 2000 in the field of media activism, by producing multimedia works and organizing events and lectures on topics as the Balkans, web.02, migration flows and their connections to digital networks.

The past two years, they are active in research and dissemination of cultural projects such as audiovisual documentation and interconnections of collectives that produce and share knowledge as a commons in Greece and, recently, on the privatization of harbor infrastructures of Piraeus.

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Engagement social