In the talk we will be mostly sharing stories from our experiences while connecting the unconnected in remote rural India - especially about our ongoing efforts in building a community owned network in few adivasi villages in Odisha.

FOSS aspects of our talk:

• Why connectivity infrastructure as commons is essential in reducing digital divide and how FOSS plays a major role in this
• Significance of building offline-first federated networks
• Significance of Open Hardware and Open Software in remote rural India
• Role of OpenWRT based routers in building our network
• Usability of existing FOSS solutions in these regions
• Calling on FOSS community to contribute to our efforts

About Us

COWDeNet – Community Owned Decentralized Networks. COWDe, phonetically similar to Kaudi, which is a traditional quilt made by stitching together smaller pieces of used fabrics. Through COWDeNet, we envision a coming together of various community networks that we are involved with, to form a larger fabric of internet, or dWeb.

Our WIP (Work In Progress) website - https://cowde.net/