hydrarchist writes For a backgrounder on Hacklabs, please see the this earlier interview with LOA Hacklab Milan.

El Primero de Enero "Escuela Secondaria Rebelde Autonomo Zapatista" (ESRAZ www.escuelaparachiapas.org, www.schoolforchiapas.org) is the first autonomous secondary school in Chiapas. It is located in the educational and cultural center of the Zapatista movement in Oventic, the second Aguascalientes.

150 students and 25 promoters are studying and working there. Although there are no telephones nor connection to the Internet, the school has some computers stocked, and this will be our starting point..

Aims of the project


First of all we are going to meet a community. We're going to learn the way they build and live their autonomous cultural and social spaces. We go there to bring the help they've required, too. We're going to install Linux on the PCs piled in the lab, and we're going to teach them how to install it and use it, so that they will be able to do the same and spread the knowledge.

To be autonomous is to be independent from the knowledge monopolies.


We're going to realize a local network (LAN), and install some basic internet services (like web server, mail server, ...), sharing the knowledge of how to do that with them. We'll teach them how to build a web site.

All of the working phases will follow the workshop guidelines, being inspired to the "learn by doing" methodology, which is one of the possible instances of the zapatista slogan "to walk by demanding"

A step-by-step project

The project will not end with this first expedition. We'll work so that further cooperations will be possible, estabilishing other objectives further in time. Each expedition will be an opportunity to work together with the Oventic community to select a new tool among those ranked as the most useful and build it.

One of this future objectives, according to the community leaders, as well, is the connection to the Internet. We'll try to contact groups working on solidarity (?) projects with the Chiapas communities, in order to connect them to the Internet.

As a first step, a laptop configured as a mail server will do the job.

The computer could be brougth to S. Cristobal and connected to the Internet, sending and receiving the mail messages for the students and promoters of the schoool.

An encounter between communities

We hope this to be the kick-off of a broader relationship between the Italian community revolving around the organization of the annual hackmeeting (www.hackmeeting.org) and the communities of the Aguascalientes in Chiapas.

The project does not exclude other participants, but we think that the attitude the hackers community has to build and share tools and knowledge avoiding to get power out of it, is well suited with that of the zapatistas to fight for their autonomy and choose their destiny.

For more info:http://www.oventhack.org/""