This coming Monday 23rd January we will again meet up with Creeknet friends to continue some great conversations and push on with DIY network research. Our host for the last few Mazi Mondays has been the Hoy Kitchen on Creek Road at the Deptford and Greenwich border by Creek Bridge. We have been starting with teas/lunch at noon and drifting on in discussion till 4pm.

Claire is the proprietor of Hoy and grew up in the Hoy Inn as it was previously known. Her family moved into the area from Belfast in the 70’s at a time when SE8 was comparatively naked, few street lights, road signs and empty buildings in a very industrial maritime landscape. The pub was a notorious social hub and she has many stories about these earlier times to tell!  Her great familiarity with local history, society and current wave of transformation is proving most entertaining and illuminating.

SPC continues to test and press for greater experimentation and adoption of locally hosted network services. Our current favorite is the Sandstorm collaborative suite which offers a huge range of secure communication tools and will run locally on a low power PC. It’s very easy to install and operate and will run ok on legacy hardware so give it a go!

The MAZI toolkit will also offer a unique combination of options to support the ‘collective awareness platforms for sustainability’ motives. The latest custom version for the Raspberry Pi offers a selection of network, collaboration sensor and democracy tools.

Please join us in February when we will meet-up at Stephen Lawrence Centre for a further three weeks of more practical workshops At these events we will work with low-cost technologies to host and promote a range of DIY neighbourhood publishing tools, discover more about the options for OWN mesh access meet its resident groups and friends from that area of the river by Brookmill Park.

Over a year ago, James and Adnan attended Transmediale media arts festival in Berlin to meet up with old friends living in the city and introduce them to members of the Mazi project attending for the first time. One of the first panels Global Ports still resonates as we edge forward with Creeknet pilot in Deptford. Much like in Port of Hamburg, the PLA (Port of London Authority) conforms a hydrachy of power, governing access to the waterways of the city, monitoring shipping and controlling all but the the weather and tides.

For those who are dependent on the Thames and it’s tributaries for transport,  trade and residence, there are very few resources available to guide use and track changing conditions.  It’s the knowledge of the boating community and their interpretation of PLA bylaws that hold sway here. Resistance, skulks the waters edge, using forgotten inlets, overgrown steps and derelict locks, to retain river access and uphold liberties. Mooring rights and tidal rituals, ebb and flow along the river wall, entangled in mooring chains, revealed as the river bed is drained by tides.

The Thames river wall all the way into Deptford Creek is part of the UK coastline, it’s beaches are monitored and rubbish cleared. Material on the shore clusters much where it was dropped into the water so great collections of red brick, clay pipes, animal bones, oyster shells and drift wood colour the shorelines in alignment to forgotten industry. Warehouses and wharves are fast being replaced by multi-story condos, only a very few remain out of the grasp of developers such as the abandoned squatted restaurant on Odessa Street up river in Rotherhithe, where recent Minesweeper fundraiser was such a success.

The burning of the Minsweeper and subsequent loss of mooring access at Brookmarsh Yard in Greenwich, point to an inevitability that will end occupation of these reaches by  the many barges and boats currently resident. Lengthy negotiations and legal actions by boaters to retain land access and not often ended well.

Adnan installs the MAZI box on the roof of Quintessence. So far we had been running the MAZI zone from our living room (inside the LEGO box). Now it goes out of the lego box into a weather proof casing.

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

Installation boattr antenna

This research project on the boat looks into the development of the boattr prototype in collaboration with MAZI (for “together” in Greek), a Horizon2020 research project. Boattr connects narrow boats to the ‘Internet-of-Things’ and allows for open wireless mesh-networking within the narrow boat community, by using affordable microcomputers. The main goal of this project is to provide technology and knowledge that aims to 1) empower those narrow boats who are in physical proximity, to shape their hybrid urban space, together, according to the specificities of the respective local environment, and 2) foster participation, conviviality, and location-based collective awareness of the canals. The boattr prototype will build on the MAZI toolkit and the capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – that allow small communities or individuals to deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighbourhood (e.g., the Commotion Construction Kit used at the RedHook WiFi initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net, awmn.net, freifunk.net), and in the case of boattr the UK canal network.
Interactive Dissemination over the MAZI webportal will offer a chance for personal interaction in academic, socio-economic (and possibly selected commercial) conferences, EU organised events and conferences and trade fairs and exhibitions, and most importantly with policy bodies, regulatory and funding bodies that decide on research and innovation in water and waste between EU countries. The interactive channel of dissemination is intended for target groups with a high level of information need and involvement and it therefore provides information tailored to highly targeted audiences (in the case of the boattr project the ‘narrow boat’ community). The interactive channel is expected to be the most efficient means for community building and have the highest impact on dissemination and exploitation.

MAZI is a confirmed (accepted) Horizon2020 research project with which Coventry University could potentially partner up by supporting the boattr research project. MAZI will run until 2019, allowing for future development and deployment of the boattr prototype (once established by the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017). Having acquired a partner status with the MAZI project will allow for boattr to disseminate and promote its activities, via the partners’ networks of databases, if applicable to some partners in their countries including accessing networks in other international regions. The MAZI consortium members have considerable experience in marketing such events and projects both directly and through leading international events, disseminating information to targeted audiences through both online and off-line channels, and recruiting qualified participants to the brainstorming, networking workshops and international conferences. In summary: 1) Roadmap and Recommendations, White Paper and Continuity Plan, Brainstorming reports, results of the clustering activities and the documentation presented in events will all be made available through the MAZI portal. 2) MAZI partners will use their databases for targeted mail-shots to inform EU researchers about project activities and workshops, events and conferences; 3) Articles, email announcements and electronic newsletters will be carried out to maximise visibility of the boattr objectives, results and developments.

The boattr DIY infrastructures offer a unique rich set of special characteristics and affordances for offering local services to the narrow boat community, outside the public Internet: the ownership and control of the whole design process that promotes independence and grassroots innovation rather than loss of control and fear of data shadows; the de facto physical proximity of those connected without the need for disclosing private location information, such as GPS coordinates, to third parties; the easy and inclusive access through the use of a local captive portal launched automatically when one joins the network; the option for anonymous interactions; and the materiality of the network itself. The prototype will integrate existing FLOSS software, from very simple applications to sophisticated distributed solutions (like those under development by the P2Pvalue project, mobile sensing devices, and recent developments in open data and open hardware), allowing it to be appropriated by different non-expert users according to their respective context and use case; it will offer a wide unique variety of customization options.

The boattr project already receives in kind contributions from Deckspace medialab in form of access to the medialab’s server farm (on root level); from the MAZI project in the form of access to the MAZI toolkit, databases & network; and privately in the form of access to two narrow boats as case study for the boattr prototype. Other funding opportunities to be pursued are Horizon2020 (CAPS), Leverhulme Trust, as well as the Heritage Lottery Fund. Ideally the boattr/MAZI project would partner up with the Canal and River Trust, a charity, which is entrusted to care for 2,000 miles of waterways in England and Wales, which are often over 200 years old (an enormous network of bridges, embankments, towpaths, aqueducts, docks and reservoirs and more). The waterways provide an unfenced, ‘no turnstiles’ opportunity to interact with history and nature next to soothing water.