Janastu is a people oriented open-source collective working to enable community storytelling by the people, for the people.

Our mission is to build decentralized community owned networks to provision local connectivity in remote areas and to facilitate Internet, technology and crafts literacy.

We are developing audio annotation tools for community archiving and to help construct storytelling narratives to help in the inclusion of low-semi literates as first class internet citizens.

Quick Links

Janastu's pioneering initiatives redefine digital accessibility and community engagement through innovative projects. The Renarration Web, utilizing semantic web annotations, ensures internet content is accessible to low-literate users by creating alternative narratives. The Virtual Library and 3D reconstructions enrich online learning experiences, while the Follow the Sheep Project maps pastoralist migratory routes, emphasizing the significance of these paths. BaaApp empowers shepherds with an intuitive Android application for interactive tracking. Street Vendors Act booklet sheds light on legal protections, and Maaya enables AV presentations. SWeeTs and SWeeT Web offer a participatory Social Semantic Web experience, while Papad facilitates hypermedia annotations. COWMesh empowers rural connectivity and storytelling, embodying Janastu's vision for inclusive, community-driven digital landscapes.

Janastu, Medha, Development Alternatives, la Caixa, Work for Progress,

We are currently (2020-2021) working in several villages in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Janastu and Medha (Lucknow) were selected to deploy social innovation methodologies to reach young girls and open up new opportunities for them. "Work 4 Progress" (W4P) India Programme called to experiment with technology to overcome lack of connectivity, mobility and safety in workspaces faced by young rural women in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Value-driven technology represents a window to the future of work for young girls and their dreams and aspirations. Our project was to create a hyper-local mesh that would be inclusive of women and other low-literate people around the girls in their story narratives, and help develop a process for developing a hyper-media decentralised archive that helps navigate and discover skills in the area so they are collectively gig enabled.

The year 2020 made travel to the area impossible and we worked with out local partner Medha in developing and deploying ASPi: an aspiration device which is enabling young girls to connect with high-end technologies to record narratives and learn new skills in entrepreneurship and communication. The prototype technology is called ASPi (based on unleashing aspirations of young girls), that records audio and visual messages and transmits them over a wider network. The technology began with the idea to enable Medha and Janastu to listen to young girls, while facilitating conversations among them, as they went about their day.

As the girls became more comfortable with the technology, they began synchronising, annotating and sharing their recordings with each other. The initial stories of their daily routines, their families, childhood experiences and incidences evolved to significant topics with the girls speaking of their talent, aspirations and role models.

Mission

Problem Statement

How might we use information and communication technology (ICT) to create virtual co-working spaces for young women (18-25) in eastern Uttar Pradesh, thereby enhancing access to entrepreneurial work opportunities in a rapidly transforming economy?

As part of “la Caixa” Banking Foundation call Challenge Work4progress 2019, Janastu / Servelots in collaboration with Development Alternatives (DA) and Medha is working in the Mirzapur district, Uttar Pradesh state in India. With a larger objective to encourage rural women, students, young women in traditional labor and skill contexts, typically low literate and unconnected or unable to discover or publish useful content on the Internet, to find purposeful online communities to actively engage with for their collective needs of skill development and entrepreneurial aspirations.

Vision

• Gig empowering young women in the villages of Mirzapur

• Creating synergies between skills among the young women and their digitally connected cohorts.

• Nurturing backward linkages from the aspirations of outgoing students to a cohesive gig empowerment of their communities.

Solution

Aimed at creating synergies between gig empowered young women and digitally connected communities. Nurture an outlook for women to think beyond the convention towards new age income generation opportunities. A tech platform will help enable “self preneurs” engaging with local communities through freelancing opportunities to create a sustainable ecosystem.

Our exercise is to ensure Comfortive, Cohesive, Upskilling, Communicative, Freelancing spaces.

Implementation

Stages

• Dialogue

• Co-creation

• Prototype

• Acceleration

Process

A Visit to Mirzapur

8 members from Janastu team had planned to visit Mirzapur in march 2020, tickets were booked for both flights and trains. With the covid situation we had to cut short on people and finally Dinesh and Shalini went ahead with the visit.

This visit marked new beginnings for us in UP and since then, we have gone from strength to strength.

Outcomes

We are currently working in several villages in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh where we are building a webinar device (based on raspberry pis) for collectives and groups of college-going girls who have not been able to continue their vocational education and schooling because of the ongoing pandemic. This is a substantial contribution to edu-tech as it seeks to address the problems of connectivity and schooling that are faced by about 75% of the households in the country. Through a low-cost and accessible setup, we are creating technology that is community-driven and for the use of groups, thereby working towards goal of self-directed learning as well. "While these webinar-pis can be used for educational seminars, online/recorded classes".

Key Activities Conducted

Reflections and Results

Reading Material

Relevant Blog Articles

Summary

We have been telling stories, re-telling stories and weaving incredibly complex network of stories. How can Internet standards, protocols and tools support this basic human need? How can a hyper-media Web of inter-linked stories become discoverable and navigable content for all - inclusive of low-literate people. How can Internet technologies help archive, reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent to assist the natural ways of storytelling and help capture oral histories and local knowledge directly by the people for the first time in human evolution?

We are working on Papad, a hypermedia annotation tool that can be used across devices and in regions with low internet connectivity and low-literate populations. Tools like papad have significant potential in creating and disseminating knowledge that is audio/video-based, and therefore accessible to populations with lower literacy levels. It can assist anyone in voicing their views on their community related topics. It would be a way to preserve and revive the knowledge for next generation. As a tool to share, learn and explore from other communities’ perspectives on art, culture, education, technology, tradition for health and farming.

Our research focus has been on web accessibility for Indian needs in the local context of culture, literacy, and socio-economic conditions. One can upload an audio recording to a local server, browse, listen to audio and tag the entire audio or relevant parts (fragments), annotate a image tag, which can later be used in making audio visual stories that is relevant for the communities. Papad aims to be the audio visual publishing platform for the low literates, without barriers of knowing to read and write.

Listening and making sense of conversations need annotation, discovery and navigation tools. To give a glimpse, over 500 million online meetings happen per day in 2022. Many of these are recorded by facilitators for sharing of the meeting proceeds and for sense-making activities. Typically, the recordings stay on a cloud provided by the meeting host and hardly many revisit them for review for lack of time and lack of decentralized collaboration tools. Followups post the meeting are particularly aggravated when the meetings are with rural participants. Participants will not have a locally available recording nor can bookmark audio fragments during recording for revisiting needs. Therefore coordinating review discussions require obtaining the recording, making notes on what was said when, scheduling review discussion with local groups and then sharing with the meeting facilitators for a walk through. This process is especially aggravating for the remote rural participants who typically, unlike the facilitators, are low-literate and not able to minute the meetings with reference timestamps.

We propose CnBox, a plug and play Community Networking cloud server with decentralized recording and marking tool as one of its services. These tools also provide a Web interface for media archiving, annotations and discovery of related media fragments. The recordings are addressed by content and can be referenced across the shared networks. Annotations can be collaboratively shared or made in private that are only available on local networks. The resulting hypermedia archives interconnect as a Web of linked data that is inclusive of the low-literate or the remote participant communities. These tools are browser based and open source, and can be hosted even on personal computers.

Audio conversations has been the main stay of human communications. As Internet reach for the rural and low-literate populations of the world is halting, interaction and interconnection support for audio based communications are a necessity to encourage utilitarian engagement. Collaborative media annotations can effectively contribute to decentralised hypermedia content networks. We have developed and deployed collaborative audio annotation tools in a number of community networks. These are in the contexts of listening sessions in rural contexts and mesh networks, community radio - curation and discovery, micro media and storytelling archives, ethnography and community health, and online learning in offline spaces during the COVID lockdown times. With this work, we ensure availability of packaged open source tools for self hosting in addition to devices that plugin to a participant network context for "sense-making as a service".

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This is a software design document that captures the system requirements and discusses the overall architecture of the system. The system in question is one designed for creating, publishing and consuming locative media. Locative media is media, text, audio, video, that has been geo-located. There are multiple types of locative media currently available, such as the KML files coming from the ‘Follow the sheep’ project.

The idea is to allow this media to be consumed in a player application which allows the viewing of media at particular geo-locations. This can be used to create interactive narratives and other forms of non-linear narratives that involves the user of the media moving through physical space to consume media.

Examples of narratives could be treasure hunts where users have to unlock clues at different locations that take them to other locations to find treasure. Interactive fiction where users move from point A to B to navigate the fiction, to take the story forward. Guided city tours are another possibility, where users are shown different media at different locations and they get to know or understand media taken or about a particular location.

History

Our work has revolved around building wifi mesh networks in rural regions and building technological solutions for indigenous communities and nomadic tribes. We have built tools for web re-narration and archiving stories of local communities.

Philosophy

Janastu works on building free and open source technologies for the global south, and builds tools for a truly inclusive web that can address the needs of low-literacy communities that remain unaccounted for in a text-based internet.

Tools for a truly inclusive Web need to consider that a large population of the world have low reading literacy, particularly indigenous communities and those experiencing systemic inequity and prejudice. We have built raspberry-pi based tools like mesh networks, radios, webinar devices that can meet the connectivity needs of rural regions in India.

Part of our work has also involved the creation of hypermedia archives and annotation tools that are accessible for low-literacy populations and support oral narratives and audio-visual forms of knowledge. Adapting to the circumstances at present, we are innovating with logical networks in order to connect devices.

Our hope is to build technological infrastructure that is decentralised, inclusive and collective.

Services

• One - to - one consulting

• Information management

• Online/offline Knowledge Platforms

• Websites/blogs

• News curation and filtering

• Migrate to Open source

• Localization and Indic language needs

• Location based Applications for policy makers

• Research and Development

ASPi is first a webinar device (based on raspberry pis) for collectives and groups - including college-going girls who have not been able to continue their vocational education and schooling because of the ongoing pandemic. This is could also be a substantial contribution to edu-tech as it seeks to address the problems of connectivity and schooling/learning that are faced by about 75% of the households in the country. Through a low-cost and accessible setup, we are creating technology that is community-driven and for the use of groups, thereby working towards goal of self-directed learning as well. While these webinar-pis can be used for educational seminars, online/recorded classes, they are build with hands-on workshops and inclusion of the people in the girls' neighborhood.

The primary objective is to build a Community Operated Wireless (COW) Mesh Network for Mirzapur girls' communities. The network will eventually be operated and sustained by their communities aiding livelihood generation, education and decentralized archiving for storytelling and "marketing" needs. COW Mesh for now is what we call "mesh-mash" as it uses internet as a backbone where linking nodes on a physical local mesh becomes difficult or unnatural even as during the COVID lockdown travel restrictions.

COWMesh (Community Owned and/or Operated Wireless Mesh) is a mechanism for communities to take ownership of local communications and reduce the cost of access to information while also demystifing the building blocks of Internet. COWMeshes use WiFI and other low cost deregulated media to share content locally, deploy services, for sub-communities who curate content for their needs and utilise a hyper-media archive architecture for their story telling, publishing and navigation needs or for online classes during the lockdown times of 2020.

Attempt to bring community ownership and delibrate on different technologies available over time started after 2004 Tsunami and has progressed every few years to a more viable state.

Community owned mesh networks and radios began with Namma School Radio where old phone booths were converted into radio nodes, powered by Raspberry Pi devices. The servers were powered by solar panels. It has now been setup with several nodes using Libre Routers and served a number of students attend online classes and facilitated some IT workers from the village to work from home!

We have worked regionally, nationally and internationally with a wide range of partners: with Mitan on renarration of Bio Cultural Protocols and the Follow Sheep project; with the Alternative Law Forum on renarration of the Minimum Wages Act; with Maraa on community radio policy technology application; with Development Alternatives on community radio audio-tagging and indigenous archives.

As low-literates are now becoming the new Internet users, we need to be able to connect to the traditional practices - which have evolved to address in terms of accessibility - so as to foresee the needs of the emerging internet users with a large diversity in literacy and culture. We looked at the web accessibility guidelines, and all of them expect you to be similarly educated–even if you are blind. If you have eyes but cannot read, there is no web accessibility standard that can be used as a guide. Then the focus on localization (translation), but accessibility needs to go beyond that.

For us, accessibility means something different. It means a social semantic web. So if it’s a text-heavy document, how do you make it accessible to people who can’t read? We call this _Renarration (Sweet Web), where a SWeeT is a semantci web "tweet". That’s how we started this work – can I take a text document from your blog, take it to my village and make it a visual story for them? What are the actions that I need to take? What do I highlight? So we work with the Web annotation framework. Annotations are another layer over the web. We don’t assume anything is automatic in this process. But this doesn’t take a lot of time. it doesn’t need to be an all or nothing task - typically, it’s more likely that someone provides an alternative narrative that is suitable for the person they want to share the document with.

A number of demos that consider diverse scenarios of use have been encouraging:

We intend to work with the Ragi Gudda Slum in Bangalore, which became a vertical housing settlement project for state rehabilitation of slum dwellers in 2011-2012. People lack access to formal credit, job mobility, education and healthcare. Our vision is to create an open-source eco-system of connectivity for them that makes their needs accessible. We will begin by setting up a wifi mesh network in the area. Several households have been enthusiastic about working towards such connectivity infrastructure. The problems of connectivity, although present long before the pandemic, were amplified because of it. Education and work that was available before cannot be accessed anymore because of the lack of networks and devices. Through this project, we hope to build a resilient connectivity infrastructure for the communities in the Ragi Gudda slums using mesh routers and community radio facilities.

Through this project, we would also like to work on a holistic approach to learning, capacity building and community cultural interventions. We have been working with youth and women in the area and introducing WiFi mesh operations, local repository of their content, open box devices and open source technology by starting tech-circles. Our objective is to see such a culturally compex community succeed in innovating and customising infrasture based on their evolving needs.

Mission

We work with the Raagi Gudda Slum in Bengaluru - a high-rise housing settlement project for state rehabilitation of slum dwellers built in 2011-2012. The people lack access to formal credit, job mobility, education and healthcare. Our vision is to create an open-source eco-system of connectivity for them that makes their needs accessible.

Vision

We will begin by setting up a wifi mesh network in the region. Several households have been enthusiastic about working towards such connectivity infrastructure. The problems of connectivity, although present long before the pandemic, were amplified because of it. Education and work that was available before cannot be accessed anymore because of the lack of networks and devices. Through this project, we hope to build a resilient connectivity infrastructure for the communities in the Raagi Gudda slums using mesh routers and community radio facilities.

Solution

Through this project, we would also like to work on training the women and youth in the region in open source technology by starting tech-circles and GLUGs (GNU/Linux User Groups) so that the communities are not only able to maintain open-source infrastructure themselves, but also succeed in innovating and customising this open-source infrastructure based on their evolving needs.

Implementation

Stages

Process

Outcomes

Key Activities Conducted

Reflections and Results

Reading Material

This project has direct relevance to the ongoing field work being conducted under the rubric of Janastu. We are targeting two types of impact from the current project on the objective of Janastu to empower local communities in finding local cooperative social solutions.

The transformative potential of indigenous knowledge production, archiving and storytelling in a decentralized wifi-mesh context is likely going to lead to alternate possibilities of development for low-literate and remote communities.

Our interest is to look at both archival architectures and how they connect to the offline as well as the process of data creation, interpretation and analysis as an essentially offline activity. It reflects on data creation for an archive and the interpretative and organisational logics that determines inclusion. It also comments on institutional structures and procedures as essential drivers of the life of a digital archive with resources and institutional politics playing an important role in the nature, use and access of the archive.

Once the archive comes into being various elements in the architecture of the archive itself enable a selective engagement with the offline propelled by the archive’s politics. This can manifest in metadata derivation, access, dissemination, assigned user roles and hierarchies and the archive’s approach to validation and annotation.

Access to the archive then invites questions of use and performance. Who chooses to see what in what context? How does the access that the archive enable direct this performance? Communally annotated archives reflect social processes that may be independent of the original archival impulse and generate new data and open new archival pathways.

Media Monitoring is a necessary activity for all research organisations. Newsrack.in is a flexible news aggregator and news categoriser based on user defined concepts and user indicated news srouces (RSS feeds). Media Monitoring application is an adapation of Newsrack for institute wide archival, communications and research needs. A Curation Board pull new feeds and monitoring team can curate the feeds to send out the days interesting media to their group while also archiving them on institutions server.

Note, as newsrack needs to be revamped, this media monitoring has be rendered disfunctional! Newsrack was developed over 10 years ago by Subbu as an open source and free service and its now looking for a rebuild.

IIHS Dashboard

The Curation Board is an application to pull new feeds and curate the feeds to send out the Media Monitor. The application allows a user to add feeds from various news sources in the rss format to the user dashboard.

Features:

• Curator who is a admin will be allowed to create and manage groups and users.

• All the registered users will be part of a default group.

• The Curator can Bookmark a feed to read later.

• The Curator can Delete the feed from his board.The curator can also delete the board itself.

• Feeds are filtered based on date,feeds can be sorted according to latest and oldest feeds.

• Feeds can be organised in four different views like (Article,Card,Magazine,title)

• The Curator can create a board and add feeds to the board.And can send out the board with its feeds as Media Monitor.

IVR (interactive voice response) box is a Raspberry Pi based shoe box that can be carried around or shipped to a certain region. It can enable calling and receiving calls based on SIM cards inserted. IVR questions can be configured and responses collated. This box was built for Reseau Billital Maroobe of Niger for BCP dialog initiation with their shepherding communities.

13 Ways is a "Storytelling from Archives" of NCBS conceived by Venkat Srinivasan for its 25th anniversary.

"Built around multiple ways to reflect upon and assemble the history of the institution, the exhibit brings to light a tangled history and unlikely journey, weaved by over 70 story tellers, over 600 photographs, official records, letters, and the occasional lab note. Where does meaning reside in an archival document? And how can we better engage with archival repositories to form stories? The exhibit is an attempt to answer these questions through the history of an institution. It is the first phase of a digital experiment in archiving, journalism and storytelling."

COMPOST is a magazine about the digital commons, telling stories about people building the web as a shared resource. But it is also a process to metabolize and renew relationships with the Web, to imagine and build interdependent, equitable, and solidarity-based systems of communication and knowledge sharing. COMPOST is published to the web and DWeb using the Distributed Press API. This debut issue of COMPOST magazine features writing and art about technologies, protocols, and communities that enable authentic and trustful connections. Shafali and Micah have lead two articles for the first issue.

The theme of the first issue is fertile grounds. "As large swathes of the Web decay, we want to explore how its remains can help new networks flourish. What are the raw materials we can work with? What tools can we employ? What worlds can we shape together?" Until the COWs come home. https://one.compost.digital/until-the-cows-come-home/ Rural ecosystems are losing their voice. They are treated as passive recipients of emerging developments with their data environments fractured by infrastructural problems. The textually prolific internet doesn’t account for other common forms of knowledge. There is a dire need to envision an inclusive platform that accommodates creation, discovery, and navigation of alternate worldviews that don’t fit into Western categorisations.

In a Craft Cluster, nearby craft centers are assisted by a central makerspace which serves as a tool making, design and communications skilling for the local women and youth.

The CrafterSpace, our first center, engages in research and technology development to make sustainable connections between local people, locally available materials and tools, and the required techniques and technology. A community knowledge archive, community radio and digital storytelling activities are also part of the space. It encourages renewal of craft skills so women and youth in rural areas are able to collaboratively handle design communication, end-to-end orders, production, distribution, marketing and supply chain management. It aspires to augment area economies with craft, tech and media capacities in addition to enhancing local cultural economic spaces. CrafterSpace is based in the foothills of Devarayanadurga at Halekote of Durgadahalli is collaboratively developed by Mitan and Janastu, and funded by Rotary Dist. 3190 through a Rotary International Global Grant. The center intends to bring an ideology of craftsmanship that can be applied in a positive, real-world way by aspiring craftspersons and convey a user-oriented understanding of contemporary technologies that can make craft livelihoods more productive and better able to find markets. It has been a research and resource center for creative crafts and product prototyping using locally and naturally available material such as Bull Rush grass, Areca leaves, Coconuts produce, banana fibre, sheep wool, etc.

Follow the Sheep project involves following shepherds and their (mostly black) sheep, in the Deccan areas of Karnataka and Andra Pradesh of India. Shepherds are low-literate in general and the nomadic shepherds travel about 400 kms over a range of 6 to 8 months with their herds. They are in small groups of 3-8 family members. Every few days they migrate to another location that can help feed their sheep. When in a location, they are often in a farmer’s land after having negotiated feed for sheep in return of sheep manure (night droppings). During the day they can graze part of the farm (as per negotiation) and take the sheep to other grazing areas which are often common property reserves (CPRs), and to areas where there is a water body.

This work comprises of BaaApp app (janastu.org/apps/baaapp) which allows to track, record waypoints interactively on the map with photo, text-note or voice recordings. Then can then be uploaded to a common server where they can be studied by researchers/NGOs who can help negotiate for CPR and nomadic mobility rights including BCP formulation and land range observations. IIIT Hyderabad Socionity project has also used it to study app utilisation and to help develop complimentary applications. We use OSM data and OSMtracker app to configure/develop this app and related services.

Street Vendors Act

Audio visual version of the Street Vendors Act comic made by Alternative Law Forum in English.

Minimum Wages Act

The idea of the Re-narration Web is to provide a person visiting a Web page, a comfortable narrative of the page content based on the visitor profile and contributions of alternative narratives made available by the community who engages with it. Imagine, an illiterate grandma gets a link on her Android phone and an HTML5 rendition of the page will play a video of the page with audio narration she can understand. See http://a11y.in Designing for Inclusion” is the slogan that captures theworld-wide effort to make the web a valuable resource for all seven billion humans, ”whatever of their abilities, age, eco-nomic situation, education, geographic location, languageetc.” (WAI).

The issue of accessibility and inclusion has been a concern in the design of the web and will continue to remain so for a long time. In the early days of the web, for those on the other side of the digital divide, one of the issues was of physical access to the capable device but now we have "smartphones". Among the challenges is making content delivered to such devices truly accessible.

• Community radios and inclusion, nbu, cowmesh and gender

• The below video shows how re-narration helps a community to understand the policies or laws of a government.

To map routes (for LL) - for the Covid study, as well as for the Atlas on Indian pastoralism. This collaborative project, undertaken by the Janastu Team in partnership with the Center for Pastoralism (CfP), meticulously maps the migratory routes of pastoralists across diverse states in India, including Gujarat, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Leh. The interdisciplinary approach involves data compilation from various sources, geolocation, and mapping using tools like Mapbox and Google My Maps, resulting in an insightful representation of the intricate paths taken by different communities, emphasizing the importance of these routes in the context of the pandemic and the nation's pastoral landscape.

Shalini is associated with a number of community activities working as part of the Janastu and Servelots core team. She handles team issues, organisational reporting needs, and the systems and server admin tasks, and maintains and manages free software repositories and web software systems such as Wikis and WordPress on dedicated Linux Docker servers.

Email: shalini@servelots.com

Wearer of many hats at Janastu - Application developer, user feedback specialist, bug fixer, mentor, product manager, Product Development, Engineering Lead and documenter (which explains why his nickname is Scribe) and recently he’s exploring his love for teaching in the form of workshop facilations and trainings.

Tradition of recording genealogy with story-teling.

3D Scanning, Reconstruction for Immersive experience

• Faro Scanner for scanning Monuments and Physical space.

• 3D Mapping

Gameplay and Demo videos

• FarmCraft: Unity Engine Mode

• FarmCraft: Walk-through with Story Narrative - video annotation

• FarmCraft: Reconstruction and Audio annotation

• FarmCraft: Character Interaction

• Virtual Library (ESG Library - find a book - the process)

• State Library

• Virtual Reality Story of Devarayana Durga Hills

• Map indoor spaces

Overview of links to the projects

• 1> ITB
• 2> State Central Library Centennary

3> VLIB: Interactive libraries. Explore real libraries through 360 panoramas. Access id: admin 3354

• 3a> State Library demo
• 3b> Esg Library demo
• 3c> Interactive physics panoramas
• 3d> Book on table
• 3e> Myra library
• 3f> Office panorama
• 3h> Photogrammetry, 3d reconstruction
• 3i> Scan2cad , panorama overlap
• 3j> Canvas output
• 4> Anthill walkthrough

For the last few years, Sanketh’s work has involved using his background in engineering for sustainable and environment-friendly solutions for programmes for rural livelihood generation. Working with Gram Seva Sangh (rural producers collective) and Mitan (handicrafts) introduced him to the world of handicrafts and the culture and philosophy of hand-making. Through his work with Janastu, he has tried to focus on setting up spaces for handicraft and for artisans, rural youth, and urban designer-engineers to come, collaborate and co-create. He has worked on several projects that have tried to integrate elements of DIY-culture and self-directed learning with local and indigenous culture and knowledge.

I am an anti-disciplinary designer/artist/researcher exploring our relationship with emergent media technology, both as its users and makers; The future they might bring, and how they can become more accessible & equitable.

My work and research looks at technology as a tool for both control and liberation. In my practice as a designer-maker I use creative-technology and Interactive media to Inquire how to use technology to express, create and create new tools. As an Artist and researcher I critically examine the issues with distribution of technology, power structures and its socio-political impact, through speculative & academic writings. I have been trained in Exhibition Design and Interactive Media Design. I have not been trained in cooking but I can be found in the kitchen quite often.

@ Janastu

I mostly look at miscellaneous design task with focus on human centered design and workflows. I can be found a lot in kitchen experimenting with wine,bread and cheese making. I babysit Chilli sometimes but dont always enjoy it.

You can find my work @

Arun Kumar is interested in games and game design and is trained and has over 20 years of experience as a software developer. He is interested in building tools to tell locative, interactive media stories and is building a platform for this. He has worked in various fields from corporate gigs, consulting in the Silicon Valley, to developing open-source solutions for NGOs and governmental projects.

arun@servelots.com

Emery is a software developer with an interest in operating systems, archiving, and overlay networks. Originally from rural Iowa, currently in the Netherlands, and sometimes operating in Bengaluru.

athitya@servelots.com

Athithya, a Front-end Developer and a free software enthusiast. Loves contributing to Wikipedia and Wikisource. Athithya has also been interested in localisation in Tamil. And passionate about gardening.

micah@servelots.com

I'm an gardener-in-training, learning to be nurturing to beings, things, spaces, dreams and collectives. I enjoy tinkering with ideas and tools and enjoy ideas that lead to tools and tools that lead to ideas. Learning to explore ways of making, living, being and caring.

I illustrate, write, connect and organize, mostly at the same time. I'd like to be present, learning and active everywhere I can. I research care, collectives, alternate futures, hope, liberation, dissent, anti-cynicing and new ways of being.

Email: shashi@servelots.com

Shashi is from Sathagatta, near Urdigere and Kolala. He has been part of Namma Halli Radio - the COWMesh Community Radio activity. He has been a journalist at TV9 and now he heads the media center for COWMesh.

Shafali is graduating in new media design. Her work involves creating links across the fields of art, science, culture, technology to create new definitions and explore new horizons. As part of the Janastu Collective, she is engaged in Milli work, enabling archives for a diversity of stories and with young women in rural areas to help gig enable them, by inculcating a culture of media making.

shafali@servelots.com

Upasana is an interdisciplinary researcher working on digital labour and cyberculture. She holds a Masters in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. At Janastu, she helps with writing and research. When not sitting in front of screens, she enjoys making a mess in the kitchen, figuring out what does not work more often than figuring out what does.

upasana@servelots.com

If you have any query write a short note to us at