Rhizomática
Imagine you are in the middle of the Amazon rain forest. There is no mobile coverage or internet access. The long distances and rugged landscapes make communication highly challenging. These communities are precisely the ones Rhizomatica aims to support when building new technologies that connect people.
During the Day 3 workshop “Innovative Approaches to Connecting Underserved Areas”, moderator Sebastian Bellagamba stressed that "the cost of not being connected keeps increasing for people," noting the link between internet access and socioeconomic development.
Thanks to support through an APC subgrant, Rhizomatica was able to support a number of emerging initiatives in Brazil and Colombia regarding community cellular networks. These are basically community-based networks that use 2G cellular technology as a way to facilitate communication between people.
Between October 2016 and May 2017, the first edition of the Diploma Course for Community Promoters in Telecommunications and Broadcasting was held in Mexico. The course was attended by community communication organisations from six Mexican states, and a total of 36 participants.
The HERMES (High-frequency Emergency and Rural Multimedia Exchange System) project by Rhizomatica is the winner of the Mozilla NSF-WINS grand prize in the Off-the-Grid Internet Challenge.
Indigenous Community Telecommunications has withstood an important legal battle for the right of indigenous communities to establish and manage their own community networks of mobile phones and internet.
How do you connect the unconnected? Mozilla and the National Science Foundation posed this question to find innovative wireless technologies that connect people to the internet and to each other.
“So Long, Phone Companies. Mexico’s Indigenous Groups Are Getting Their Own Telecoms” proclaims the headline of a Global Voices report on the work of Rhizomatica, an organisation that supports communities, local entrepreneurs and popular movements that wish to use telecommunications technology to advance their autonomy. APC has followed Rhizomatica’s work for years, and was pleased to w...
