*36C3 preproll music*
Herald Angel: Welcome everybody for our next talk 'Infrastructures in a horizontal
farmers community'. I guess one thing that all of us have in common is, that we all
are in special communities. We want to build better communities. We want to build
better infrastructure. And we want to build better technology, be it in a little
hackerspace in Sweden or in a theater group in France or in an NGO in Germany.
That is something that unites us all. And our next speaker, Andrea, she is giving us
some insights into their farming community in Italy, because she has 15 years of
experience with that. So I think we can all learn quite a lot. And Andrea is a
self-taught web developer. She graduated in communication sciences. She is also a
cook and she is part of a group of radical farmers. I would say she's a little bit of
everything, a jack of all trades. So, she's the best person to give us some
insights. So, please welcome Andrea with a big, warm round of applause and enjoy this
talk. Thank you very much.
Andrea: Well, thanks to you too, everyone, to stay here. It will be difficult to fit
in a 30 minute to explain the experience and to explain the interaction between a
lot of different communities, not only these experiencing Bologna, but okay. I
will speak about Campi Aperti. Campi Aperti means open field in Italian. And I
come from Bologna. OK, Bologna, if you imagine that this is Italy, it's here,
Bologna. I'm speaking about the growing vegetable, growing organic food. This is a
community of a farmers. It's a community of people that reclaim the rights to grow
our food and decide how the territories, the land, the countryside is transformed.
And so it is direct action. There are there are some reclaims to change some
law. But we are not wait that these law in Italy are changed. But we do directly this
stuff. This stuff is a survival for farmers, because the problem is that there
exists only law in Italy that are for the transformed, the food, make pizza, bread,
beer and this stuff and only are made for industrial production. So, the production
of unmade, of the farmer is, that there are no law for these. You can't do sell.
You can't do direct sell. But this group of farmers do this is stuff. And so they
have a political action really, in the street, in the square. And then they must,
the more visible stuff that they do, is do these organic markets. But is not only
this. Is political stuff. And these food, their background and their roots in
radical anti capitalist group and from the global movement in the 90s. So, where?
Where are these stuff happen? Happen in places that are free. Because you can't
ask at the beginning. Fifteen years ago you can talk. But also now, probably is
more difficult. You can't ask the municipality to start that these kinds of
markets. And they found a good ground in squat in square in the street, in places
that are managed by human agreement, not the law. And so Campi Aperti was born in
2003 in XM24 in Bolognina. That is on a shared, is occupied, public shared space,
self-managed by our community. Is not a service, is a place where the needs of the
community and the answer to these needs, find an answer and a solution. This place
is under the threat of eviction and we support a lot this place. Really, really
important for our life. So I told you where and I want also told you how. Not
how, only how after. When. The time. The time, it's important stuff. The time, for
capitalism, is thinking in hours and money. But, and it's fast, but this, is
shaped on you, on an egocentric idea. But this is not the only way to think the
time. For farmers is really easy. Think of the time cyclical, not egocentric, not
human centred way. And so there are habits to plan the stuff and to take a seasonal
agreement or seasonal planning. And so, the first stuff to rethink our life and
our community is, take our time. Our time of to grow relationship and our time to
think how to do this stuff. And our time when we buy something. Our time to think
where it came from. The stuff that we buy and the stuff that we eat. In which how
are developed and where it comes from. Where from, from what the community and
from what territories. OK. This is a gift that you will find in the slide. If you go
to check after these talk, you can see also a video in Creative Commons for sure.
And but the now I have not the time to show our action in video. I want to
explain a bit the infrastructure. The infrastructure is based on the human
agreement and the group of Campi Aperti started with five people in an occupied
space, public space and they started with a small market. After and after they grew.
And now there are more than 150 farmers. And with thousands of people that come at
the market and are co-producer of the products. And so we manage ourself by
assemblies and we do this stuff for consensus method. So the topic are food
autonomy, be independent with the food. Safeguard the territories, practice
agroecology and we shared, we have a shared warranty. So the group of farmer
not to take, not upset, decentralize the warranty about organic food by the state,
but they practice our shared warranty. Means that everyone, everyone of the
producer at the market, take care of the product, also of the orders and and the
care of the relationship . But this also means, that if you break the trust, one
with the other, you go out from the community. And this looks like difficult
to decide, but is not so difficult, because when you are local, and you know
the products that you grow and the how are organic, it's easy to to decide this
stuff. Is a look like that, for explain some technical people, is like if you not
trust the certification authority, but you are based on a web of trust. And so we
include also in our relationship, in our work, the sense of the limit and the
mutualism. So we plan to not grow too much but to grow only locally. And we divided
the assembly. There are assembly for every market, that are 8 every month. There are
assembly globally all together, every two months. And the assembly every two months
locally for our valley, are based on formal consensus method. This means that
we trained us to stay in the consensus area. We know that the agreement are based
in balance between a relationship and knowledge. We come all from a different
knowledge, because we are specialized in different stuff and that we have to grow
together our relationship, so we can, we try to stay in this area of consensus
knowing that we are different knowledge, but I trust. We don't want to stay in
ananomity. We don't want stay always agree all together, because there are a lot of
risk in that area. You can, in this area, you grow the diversity. In that area, you
are doing echo chambers and you are doing, you can do easily mistake in the unanimity
place. In the other, you find the low trust and different knowledge. So you are
in dissent normally and you have of low relationship, so low trust. But a full
agreement of what do you want for the future? The only stuff that you can do is
take a technical agreement together. So write really specific law. But we don't
want law, so we want the agreement and the guideline. The other stuff are done by
trust, one with the other. So, told you that we use formal consensus method, means
that in these distributed meeting, we have shared agreements. We start with a base
ground that is that every assembly is reported. So at the beginning of every
assembly, we choose a rapporteur, or more than one, because sometimes there are
global assembly, that start at the morning and finish in the evening. And so, we have
a time, a keeper for the speaker. And we decide to put in our agreement that the
right to listen and to be listened and that no meta conversation of the topic,
only everyone talk speak for herself. Okay, we need that to communicate. And
when we started to think about the communication, we speak with another
community that know better this stuff about communication than us and we found,
and we know, because we share that same the same political idea, with hackmeeting.
Hackmeeting is a community in Italy that is anti fascist, anti racist and anti
sexist, and was born in the 90s also, that the community and every year they meet in
different space, occupied space in Italy. They are for the freedom in the
communication, and with a critical view about technologies. So, we ask asked and
we discover a lot of self managed server, and for first tools that we implemented in
the 2004, was our website.Yeah. And we started with a lot of mailing list. The
first tool was mailing list and after, to communicate outside in the group, we
started with this website hosted autistici/inventati. That is one of the
older self managed server in Italy near us, with a strong view about anonymity and
the privacy oriented for the user. The communication are really, really
important. In group that live in the countryside you live in different farm,
far from one from the other. And so happened, that to use the mailing list,
all people need the connectivity. So, what happened that if you based your
connectivity on a commercial companies and your are in countryside, you discovered
that you are told: No, you are still far from the city and we don't earn too much
enough to bring to you connectivity. And so, we started to explore how to resolve
this problem. And we discovered that exists yet a community that have thought
to this stuff and that yet existed a Pico peer (Peer to Peer) agreement. And in Italy, we
meet ninux, ninux community that are based, that shared us and teach us how set
mesh network. And so I show you a bit of photograph. Our infrastructure is a small
and grow really slowly, and is based, our hardware are 15 people that want stay
connected, one with the other, and understood that the broadcasting
connection is nice, is really lighter, use 5Ghz point to point antenna, to do point
to point connection and so the cost to stay, to learn and to do maintain that
network is an effort that they can do. And we found also for people more technician
that help, is like help to install Linux, but here we install OpenWrt. And after
that people know how maintain and take care, they in freedom their PC. And in
this case, antenna. We use all super proprietary hardware that we change the
firmware and we use tp-link ubiquity but we are switching to an open hardware
project that is LibreRouter, and as software we use LibraMesh, libremesh.org.
That is a project, that is a bundle of configuration open over OpenWrt. And that
use a different protocol like babeld and batman adv. But yeah, the topic of them is
make easier this stuff for the user, and they do. So, we have a blog
antennine.noblogs.org. That where we take the documentation of this stuff. We think
a lot about technology. Also think, why we are adopt technology. And so we started to
deploy a feminist view about technologies. Means, that we thinks that every
technologies is an effort. When someone told to you, that this technology is
smarter, sometime is because is not the considering the entire cycle of life of
that technologies. And so looking a lot in the technologies that everyone this moment
is doing advertisement about technologies: hey use this, is easy. We think: ok no,
stop. Stop. Is better wait and think what do we are doing. So we think that it's
important not to do the things alone, because you became the point of failure of
your of your community. To be resistant you need to do this stuff with more
people, not start if you are alone, and mix proficient people with newbie.
Contemplated the possibility of making mistake and so, build the testing
environment before put the stuff in production. Document everything to explain
the choice that you took, and that give the time to yourself and to the other to
study, and not to be too much specialized. Specialized brings people too easily to go
to burnout. It's better, if you trust yourself in more than one topic and share
knowledge with the other. Not to go too much in deep in one topic, because you
lost the entire view, and why you are doing something. You are not pay for to do
this stuff for community, is a need for community and is a richness of for
everyone of your community, in our view, in our way that we do this stuff. So, we
start from our needs. We started to speak about our digital data in 2016. This is a
meeting of a Genuino Clandestino. That is the bigger network of self organized
farmers in Italy. And there are a lot of different small communities that do, that
to grow vegetable and do direct sell in shared public space. And we started to
speak about our digital data and we decided, that we don't want to put in
Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple space. We are anti GAFAM. And because
we are against the big distribution of the food and also big distribution of the
data, we think that in this moment is really important to take care of our
intimacies and our data. So we decided to put in server and to run ourself these
services. And we spend a one hour, one year to find a virtual private server.
Someone that host our digital place that shared with us our policy, and we found in
France, in Toulouse, the tetaneutral.net. That is inside of a bigger network that is
federated france data network and are really important for us, because they, I
thinks that they do a good work, because of they are for the neutrality, for
freedom of choice to the internet and with budget based on donation of the community.
We've passed a lot of time to find, inside our community of farmers, sysadmin and we
found, and we started to use the Nextcloud as a free software to where host our data.
And we decide to start, we started in March of this year, and we decided to
start to use only for administrative work. So, only for 10 people of the group. And
after deciding if these are tool is OK for our needs or not. If is not we will see
and we are just in time to go back and not use. But at the moment, the stuff are
running good, and we are store in this cloud the cards about our farmers. Because
we make everyone to enter in Campi Aperti needs to be visited by another farmer, and
that to know the, how they grow vegetable and the how they do organic stuff. And so,
we write dossier of ourself, and it's why the website was not more enough. We need
private place where store this stuff, also to decentralize the task that we have to
do. To distribute the task. And so, after this one year of testing, we are planning
how to grow, okay. If all the stuff are going good, we decide how to grow. And so
again, we decide to not to do this stuff alone. We look around in a community near
to us and we decide again to adopt something that is yet to use the body
(???) of community that is anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-sexist. That is
Autistici/Inventati. They change the infrastructure this year and they moved
container infrastructure to have divided the configuration, the specific
configuration, the configuration that you can share with other and the software. All
this free stuff are managed by minimalistic orchestrator container. And
that is called the FLOAT. And we find this solution interesting, also because we
started with the other possibility of a solution, and we saw that in this moment
there are huge software also open source, that can resolve this problem. But
developed and used by huge open source company that not really feed our needs. So, we
are interesting in this software, because give static service allocation, like some
of these feature looks like not real, are non feature for the needs of the
companies. But for us are, because we have our community, so we have different needs.
So, how its work, quickly. Because yeah, we are at the CCC, I have to show you
something of technical. So, we have a specific genetic configuration, that we
versioning with GIT. We use Ansibel to versioning our configuration and the
software, so the generic part, is builded by the continuous integration that we have
on our decision Autistici/Inventati. That is builded in a... we have a Docker
registry and build the Docker image. And so, FLOAT deployed, running our Ansible
playbook, deploy the different Docker image on the different machine. So, why
it's good for us? Because we can versioning all the stuff, so we can also
do mistake but go back and we can deploy on virtual machine, where we can do
testing and on the real production on the real machine. This is, I thinks why we
thinks to adopt. Also, because we want not use, we don't want to stay on a virtual
machine, we would like move on bare metal and we trust to the group, these
orchestrator is only 1000 line of Python code, and is written like, is Ansibl
plugin and we can use the double factor authentication, universal two factor
authentication. That is good for us, because if you have for the stuff that
your security is base, could be based on how to do a token. So you have a security
in something of local, that you have to keep. And in some integrated monitoring,
like Prometeus and Graphader (???). And this feature, or non- feature is, that the
services go down when something fail. And this is, for us, this is important. We are
not a company that have to stay 24 hour up. We are a community that they want to
know, if something goes wrong with your machine and if someone put physically the
hands on your machine. Yeah, this is, now is the time of the question. Slow please,
the question, because I don't speak really well English *Andrea laughs* you see now?
But also I don't understand really well. And these is the long list of thanks and
all the community that I speak about. There is also EclecticTechCarnival, that
is a feminist community, that pushed a lot to me to arrive here to explain this stuff
to you. And thanks.
*applause*
Herald Angel: Thank you very much for the great talk. It was very, very interesting.
We still have 10 minutes for questions and answers. If you have questions, just move
to the three microphones in the room, and then we're going to have you ask your
questions. So, we start with microphone number two. Very slow in English, please.
Andrea: Yes. Mic 2: Thank you very much for the talk. I
have a question. The customers, do they pay in advance for a year or do they pay
at the market? Andrea: Ok. In Bologna, in Campi Aperti
experience is direct sell in the market. So the co-producer, the consumer pay at
the moment. But we know that that is not the perfect model and there are other
other experiment the city, in which Campi Aperti and this group of farmer is
involved. And so, there is also Arvaia, that is another group that the customer
pay in advance. And have a place, and also work in fields, and take boxes every week.
And there is also another project, that is Camilla and is based on... you are
associated and you have to work three hours every month in a market. And there
is this market open for all the association, all the people associated to
these. So, it is a city that is experimented. But yes, for Campi Aperti,
you not pay in advance it. Only for, in other projects.
Mic2: Is it okay if I ask something else? Herald Angel: If it's... Well, I would
first take microphone number three. But if you just stay there, I feel like there
would be still time for another question. So, microphone number three, please.
Mic3: Yes. I have a question about consensus. You mentioned that some level
of disagreement is not only acceptable, but maybe good, because if everyone
agrees, then there is no discussion, development and less trust. But what level
of disagreement is acceptable? Have you tried different models, like how you
achieve this consensus? Andrea: Yeah, we think that disagreement
is important to not hide problems. So also, we put attention to not to say at
the end of a conversation we are all agree, but for example, if someone of more
doubt and we have a formal way of a consensus. So, to be sure that we are all
agree, we do an orientation, we call it, and that means that you can divide the
group in three position. Active consent, consensus with doubts but that you think
that trust is enough, so you are agree, but you will be not active to do this
stuff. And the active dissensus, that means, that the decision that are you
taking is against the principle and if you put yourself in that position, you have to
explain to all the others and you have to do again an orientation. But if you are
more than 20% of the people that stay in active dissent, you have to re-discuss
all. So, became block, blocked. Herald Angel: Great, thanks for the
explanation. That was very interesting. Microphone number two, again.
Mic2: Thank you for your talk. I wanted to ask whether you have any mechanism to help
people that want to become farmers, especially to acquire new land.
Andrea: Hmm. Existed a project and now is not the more active. We are sad, because
it's not more active and because this project started from people that had these
need. And after they found the land and say: ok, we have not more the time. And we
have, we not find again who put the time in that project. And so, there is not a
real... process in which we help people to became farmer. But, for example, the
mailing list is open. Everyone that participated to the market can be says can
join the mailing list and also the assembly and the meeting and so happen a
lot of time and that the people asked for space in countryside so find information.
And the other stuff, that really change, make the change is, that a lot of people
come in Campi Aperti asking us to do transformation, to transform only the food
and this fact is not acceptable in Campi Aperti. The people are not can only
transformate the food. We are, we do practice for be independent from
capitalism for our food. And so you can't ask only to transforme. So they... we ask
to these people to start a project to grow vegetables and became a farmer. And so...
or started an active collaboration with a group of farmer yet exist. And so in this
way started more people to live in countryside.
Herald Angel: Thank you very much. Next up, we have a question from the Internet.
Signal Angel: You seem to have gone really far in doing a lot of things yourself. Do
you still rely on a lot of mainstream technologies? Or did you re-implement
everything yourself? Andrea: Do you...?
Herald Angel: Is everything self-made? Or do you still rely on some mainstream
technologies? Is there something that you use, that is mainstream capitalist, that
everybody else uses too? Like, you mentioned that you don't use Google or
Facebook or something like that. Apart from that, is that something mainstream
that you still use that you rely on? Andrea: Yeah. We are not monopolistic.
Like, we have the basic communication independant infrastructure, but yes, some
of them are, we are not the direct running Autistici. We are based that on self-
managed servers. So, same community that the shared with us a political topic, but
in that way we are not running the service. We are not running the service.
To communicate that we use the Website and the mailing list, so we have our
independent communication, but there is not... we not avoid people of us that use
also commercial instrument or commercial such network. All this stuff is only that
we don't trust that too much, that way of communication will be really useful when
when we need. Or... Herald Angel: All right. Another question
from microphone number two, please. Mic2: Hi. Thank you for your presentation.
In your presentation, you mention dossier written by farmers about the other
farmers, and farmers visiting other farmers. I wanted to ask, these dossier,
what kind of information do they collect and how are they used? I mean, what's the
purpose of the dossier and what information do they collect?
Andrea: Okay. Is the protocol of shared warranty. And so, a person that want enter
in Campi Aperti from the website, can ask to be visit and starter to fill a form and
fill dossier, these cards. And after, these cards go to the people, assembly of
that valley, the valley where this farmer come from and decide when do the visit. So
this visit is reported to the next assembly. And who did the the visit say,
what this person wrote in the card is a true or not true. And so, also here you
have a, you have the weight of trust, of the whole much trust of the words of a
person that asked to enter, and we store this card, this dossier and we
print. We print and we put physically on the desk when people do the market.
Because it's really important that people that come to buy the stuff, know where and
if we want to go also to visit the producer. And also, because I told you
that the some of that organic stuff are organic, but not that with the
certification by the state. And also a lot of the stuff that are transformed are
inside of the campaign Genuino Clandestino. That means that are
transformed, handmade, but the out of the law. And so you need that, that people are
well-informed, who buy this stuff. Mic2: Ok, so...
Herald Angel: Sorry. Sorry. I'm very sorry. But we don't have time for a back
up questions. Also, I'm very sorry, I would have loved to have the person who
ask the first question also have like, asked the last question, but we ran out of
time. But I'm sure that you can still catch Andrea after the talk and ask
whatever questions were not answered. So, first of all, thanks for all of your very
interesting and clever questions and also thank you very much, Andrea, for the great
presentation. Please give another big, warm round of applause for Andrea. Thank
you very much. Andrea: Thanks, see you.
*applause*
*postroll music*
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