The HNs using the LTE sim routers to upload the narratives they collected during the week on Papad, while discussing and annotating in smaller groups. (Starting clockwise from the light blue woman on the left-hand side) Triveni, Jabeen Taj, Mangala, Chaya, Ramakka, Shilpa, Anitha, Mangalamma, Sarasvathamma, Rajeshwari, ZohraJabeen. (HNs not in the image): Saraswathi, Aasma.
In Channapatna, a town about 80 km southwest of Bangalore, Design Beku is engaging with a collective of women Health Navigators (HNs) trained and supported by MAYA to not only co-develop a local health knowledge archive but also to co-design and set up a stand-alone, decentralized digital infrastructure. This has taken the shape of a Community Owned Wireless Knowledge Infrastructure (COWKI) that enables communities to co-create local knowledge repositories and offer meaningful digital services.
COWKI is enabled by a Community Network offering low-cost Internet access consisting of a series of Wi-Fi access points, deployed on a Mesh-Mash network. Currently, the COWKI project has set up one Wi-Fi mesh network with 8 access points and 6 sim-routers offering wireless 4G internet access. The network gives access to a local server that hosts the Channapatna Health Library(CHL), a digital repository of voluntarily donated local lived-experiences of health & wellbeing collectively sourced and built by the HNs to empower their communities with relevant, meaningful health information enabled by Papad, a FOSS audio-video mark-up tool that we co-designed with Janastu and the HNs.
The project is funded by 2021 LocNet Community Networks Grants by Association for Progressive Communications (APC).