Grassroots Tech Activists and Media Policy

The term grassroots tech groups (also called radical tech groups) refers to groups voluntarily providing alternative communication infrastructure to civil society activists and citizens and operating with collective organizing principles. They aim at counteracting commercial as well as state pressures on information content, media access, and media users' privacy. Grassroots tech groups usually offer website hosting, e-mail and mailing list services, chats, and other tools such as anonymous remailers and instant messaging; they also provide platforms to self-produce information. They enable movements for political change to get direct and participatory access to the web and media.

Based on an experimental do-it-yourself ethos, some were pioneers of Internet development in the early 1990s, and many have since then contributed to web innovations. Examples include the Spanish SinDominio (NoDomination), the Italian Autistici/Inventati, the German Nadir, the British Plentyfact, the North American http://riseup.net, and the open-publishing platforms of the Indymedia network.

A typical radical tech collective would consist of half a dozen volunteer activists often, but not necessarily, based in the same town. Some have weekly meetings for strategic discussions and decisions, some even operate a computer lab or an Internet café, but most communication takes place online. Daily tasks include managing webservers and listservs, and larger projects may include developing software tools, such as content [Page 218]management systems or encryption programs, which other civil society activists can use.

They become more visible when they step out of cyberspace. Radical tech groups have established media centers at major protest events such as those against G8 and G20. Indymedia UK, for example, have set up tents with computer equipment in the middle of actions and action camps to allow activists to write and upload reports directly from the street. The group Nadir once transformed a countryside barn in a remote north German village into a high-tech media hub that enabled thousands of environmental activists to send their reports on a protest against nuclear waste shipments to a global audience. The New York-based group May First/People's Link ran the communication infrastructure of the Social Forum of the Americas.