Festival2012/Submit/connectingdots

• Title of session: Mapping Communities, Hacking the road!
• Your name and affiliation: Renata Avila, Creative Commons Guatemala, Global Voices, Librebus

• Session format: Hackitavate Learning

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

My activity will be a space for others to come up with ideas on how to build routes, projects and activities bridging different communities together. While the Librebusand Librebus Cono Sur were examples of communities around Free Culture and Free Software getting together, the model can inspire others to create a space and a come up with a collaborative plan not only to get together but to invite people in their locality, in their community, to learn more of the work they do, across geographies and disciplines. It will be a moment to start planning our 2013 and how activities like the Mozilla Summer Code Party or other upcoming events can be the inspiration to connect people, places and communities and do things together.

The LibreBus was an attempt to educate people about what the Internet is, and how important freedom of content, freedom to code and freedom of expression are for everybody and how it may be beneficial to their lives. It travel to several towns and cities across Central and South America. The same model was followed by the Hackerbus in Europe and the Hacker Transparency Bus in Brazil.

How do you see that working?

The Annual Mozilla calendar of activities can be the starting point for you to plan your route. The session will aim to inspire Mozilla community to think beyond the internet space and explore ¨excuses¨ like a Festival or a Code Party that can bring people, sponsors, private sector, public sector, kids and adults from different, interconnected locations together on a route to explore what they have in common and what can they learn from each other.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

The session will split in small groups from different regions and disciplines, they will be given a calendar, pens and maps to think how and why they could bring people together and trace a route – not only physical but rather organizational – on how much can achieved by visiting communities usually unreached and seeing how things work locally instead of just bringing one or two members of a community to a conference.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

Right after the session people will be inspired by examples and able to start themselves connecting the dots. A how to Wiki will be created.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

I see a lot of action happening. Examples such as Librebus are the perfect excuse to bring people together and turn endless discussions into action.