Building Communities of Commons in Greece

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. 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.

Other villages expressed an interest in having their own wireless network, and the villages form a network.

The networks gave been built by volunteers, with equipment donated by ….

In October 2015, the media arts collective Personal Cinema which produced the documentary, in collaboration with the Sarantaporo.gr team, launched a crowdfunding campaign at the Spanish crowdfunding platform goteo.org and succeeded to collect an amount of money that facilitated the realization of the documentary.

The soundtrack can be found on bandcamp.

What this points to is the future, building networks of social enterprises, open coops, all cooperating with each other, contributing to the sharing economy, collaborative commons.

John McDonnell is talking of a post-Brexit future investing in green infrastructure, education, creation of investment banks. Some of this funding should go into establishing social enterprises.