Núcleo de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Digital
NPDD
/ Casa
de Cultura
Tainã
/
Rede
Mocambos
Brussels, January 31 2016
FOSDEM
There is an ongoing massacre/genocide of black people in Brazil (~ 100.000 killed/year)
Economic growth is eating all natural resources.
Quilombolas and indigenous people are facing a real war to protect natural environment, as well as preserving their communitarian way of life.
Baobáxia is a distributed communication network that works with or without internet
The initial Baobáxia application is a network of multimedia archives (audio, video, images and files)
The name refers to the baobab tree which lives thousands of years
The baobab tree is the symbol of African ancestrality
The baobab tree is also the symbol of the communities' shared memories
Baobáxia is the combination of Baobab and Galaxy
The galaxy of shared memories linked to the land
A mucua is the fruit of a baobab tree
Mucua is our word for the nodes of the Baobáxia network.
Each community belonging to Baobáxia has its own mucua, which is a computer with the Baobáxia system installed
Apart from the fixed mucuas there are also mobile mucuas based on pendrives, hard disks or laptops
Every community hosts its own mucua
The content is hosted locally, but may be copied by other communities
by internet, if there is internet..
If there is no internet, one person can be a messenger and bring content from one community to another using a local mucua (e.g. a laptop, pendrive or external hard disk)
Control over the digital
territory:
the content is distributed by the
communities and not by a commercial
server
autonomy
Technical software and infrastructure which link each community's files on a common network
When a mucua belonging to a community is synchronized with the network (over the internet or through another mucua), it receives the "catalogue" of updated media.
Parallelly, it will send the catalog of locally updated media to the network
The mucua can be online or on a local network
It's possible to see the catalog for the whole network, and individual content may be requested
If there are active requests for contents, a content item may be transferred to the desired location during synchronization
This transport can be over the internet or by a messenger, who will also carry the list of requests from other communities
The lists of users in each community is transferred to the other mucuas.
In this way, if you already have a login in your community, it is possible to use it in any other mucua
The possibility of expanding the system's functionality using tags.
Three levels of functionality:
- rules for distributing and routing contents
- different visualizations
- functionalities for new media types with certain caracteristics
Examples:
- if a content item has the tag "patrimônio" (cultural heritage) it will be distributed to mucuas with that profile
- if it has the tag "radio",
-> it will be distributed to radio mucuas
-> the list of contents can generate a URL creating
a playlist for streaming radio
- if a content item is tagged as "private", it will not leave the community and will not appear in the list of contents in other communities
Functional tags: a way of expanding functionality according to local needs
Preservation and diffusion of afroindigenous cultural heritage (with decentralized heritage certification process)
Educational and pedagogic material to empower local communities sharing common solution.
Backend - git, git-annex, json
Middleware - python, django, REST-API
Frontend - html5, javascript, underscore/dash.js, backbone.js
Have a look to our code repo and
check issues:
http://github.com/RedeMocambos/baobaxia
Bbx is based on a offline/eventually connected asyncronous paradigm that opens news fields for research
Bbx is a community based, non-profit project. We need financial support, get in contact if you can help funding