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### Joe Chasinga

I'm an interaction designer self-taught in computer programming. I have always been an artist until after college when I found peace in technology and communication. I came from Thailand, a country undergoing political changes and struggling to understand her own ground. My interests are computer network, internet of things, physical computing and writing. I'm also actively developing an open source library for arduino in Python for educational purpose.

## Presenting

### Democracy through Grassroot Local Networks

I want to outline democracy in general and how people's voice and communication among groups can leverage people's information against draconian and ever-sniffing authorities. Then I want to give some examples, for instance, my home country, Thailand, which is under military dictatorship which is censoring and controlling public media as well as prosecuting artists, academicians, writers and students who voice against it and in a common workplace where employers have the right to sniff everything their employees do on the internet. The enemy of a true democratic community is a network of bureaucratic bodies, from the company one work for all the way to the head of state.

Then, I will talk about an idea of local networks and, like local radios in the heydays, can empower grassroots to form factions, exchange information and communicate with lower risk of getting detected or intercepted by the big brothers. The idea is to deploy a cheap, portable device (i.e. Raspberry Pi or a phone) as a home-grown local server serving a chat application in which a group of members can form an encrypted conversation around it with all the files saved to the device which an appointed leader can carry, backup, delete and destroy at will.