Sanchari.local in Hara - Early explorations of a traveling Raspberry Pi library

Sanchari.local in Hara - Early explorations of a traveling Raspberry Pi library

A story goes..

A Sanchari is a storyteller, a bearded man carrying a cross body sling bag with items that he uses are props, objects and characters to narrate stories. He travels the world telling stories about his hometown. He tells them about the disappearing lake, the magic ring around the village that protects it, the mud road in the forest that devours and the extra growth in the king's deaf ear that could not be cured by any medicine.

People in golden crowns, velvet clothes and satin dhotis from all over the world reward him with grains and rice. A few even give him clothes to take back home for him and his people. "We must visit this magical land of yours" they say "We will bring gifts and clothes for everyone when we come". They seldom do.

A few others do not like his stories. They tell him that he has been telling the same story for centuries, "Times have changed now" they say. Upon his return back home, children gather around him to hear about the worlds he visited. He brings them toys to play with, songs to sing and stories about the world. He tells them about the wealthy merchant that wants to go to a new planet, the apple tree that grows orange apples and the robots that are writing poems and love letters.

His stories are an extension of him, he; an embodiment of his place.
He is the internet, an internet, an infrastructure, aware of the place, lives in the places, gets stories from all over the world, to the place.

A sanchari.local Pi

sanchari.local is imagined to be a travelling library. While a library is a medium, the underlying idea is to build a non centralised place aware internet.

We have been working in Hara, a tribal hamlet in Kundapura to build a community mesh network. The cellular network and internet coverage in the area is very poor and hence we wanted to experiment with co imagining possibilities of a local area MESH and an offline internet before we figured out the logistics of getting an internet fiber line in the place.

A phone hung outside a house in Hara as it is the only place they get mobile network to receive calls

One of the very first experiments we did for a local offline internet was the sanchari.local Pi. The current vision of the sanchari.local came into being as a result of our engagement in Hara. In its current version, the sanchari.local is a Raspberry Pi device that hosts multiple offline repositories, information and libraries on it. Our larger imaginations with the sanchari.local is that people of a place, in this case Hara, not on only interact with existing repositories on a local MESH internet but create and contribute repositories of their own. I am using the word repository in this context rather loosely to cover all things a server can serve - images, videos, maps, websites, text etc. The Pi becomes a rich embodiment of the place, people in both its consumption and production. This becomes their internet and becomes a way to challenge that binary of 'builders' and 'users' of the internet. The base idea of challenging this binary comes from the work of Melanie Hoff who tells that "Everyone who interacts with computers has—in important ways—always already been programming them". Source to her arguments can be found

It if often these builders and programmers disconnected from certain user bases that develop algorithms, patterns and rules for data, its usage, privacy etc. A hyper local internet could enable users to become builders creating a visible interdependence. Our imaginations with these network of Pis and the larger community network is to enable users of the internet to make their internet in some sense.

The network will have access points within the community and the sanchari pi becomes a form factor that makes this version of the internet more mobile.

First version of sanchari.local

sanchari.local Pi powered by a power bank with its wifi hotspot login details and local URLs

sanchari.local first came about when we wanted to demonstrate the idea of a network and locally hosted services on it. The very first version had the following capabilities -

  1. A hotspot from the pi that multiple devices can connect to. This hotspot serves only local services and not access to the internet.
  2. Stories from Hara - A offline story map of our experiences and anecdotes from Hara in English and Kannada
  3. Jellyfin Media server - An offline media server to stream 1 movie and a few songs.
  4. The whole setup can be powered by a power bank, so it can truly serve content anywhere

We took this device to Hara and encouraged the children and residents to connect to it on their devices and access the stories from Hara website and even Jellyfin. From our visits we understood that the form factor might work in the given environment but we still failed in our efforts to communicate the idea of a network and the possibilities of locally served media and repositories on the MESH. A response we got from one of the residents was "How is this different from downloading things on to a pen drive". The main challenge in the place remained lack of network coverage and this in no way improved that. We understood that we need to populate the sanchari with repositories further and also varied interfaces to interact with so distinguish its capabilities from that of a static archive.

Children of Hara looking at 'Stories from Hara'

Building and adding repositories to sanchari

Before our next visit, the main objective for us was to add as many offline repositories of as many kinds possible to the sanchari local. We started off 3 branches - Arvind Gupta Toys, Kiwix for offline browsing and Kavita for E Reading. The reason for choosing this was that in Hara we mainly interacted and did engagements with the children there. There are around 21 houses in Hara and around 10 to 13 children. The conversation with residents of Hara were also around how the children would use it. The children were always excited to see something, use and make with us.

Dashboard for sanchari.local

A Searchable Arvind Gupta Toys Repository

Arvind Gupta Toys repository homepage

One of the main things that I wanted to include in the sanchari was the searchable version of the Arvind Gupta Toys repository. Arvind Gupta Toys is a collection of videos that have tutorials on how to make toys/experiments that explain basic science and maths concepts from found items often considered as trash. Currently the repository containing over 8000 videos is on Youtube and its not really tagged or searchable as a repository in itself. Containing over thousands of videos in multiple languages, this repository sits amidst hyperlinks and plain html at arvindguptatoys.com. In an interview of his, Mr Arvind Gupta said that all his work is licensed under the creative commons, so I downloaded the videos with Kannada audio onto the Pi and built an interface to view and search this repository. I further want to tag the repo based on materials used and concepts explained using NLP models to make this database more comprehensive and the website more interactive and intuitive. I plan to write a detailed article on this once this done, documenting my process.

Screenshot of the materials used in a video tutorial

Kiwix - An offline browser

While researching the possibilities with the Pi, Archit came across Kiwix. Using Kiwix, we downloaded an offline Wikipedia in Kannda, Ted videos and PHET simulations on it. These we all available and functioning fully offline.

Pratham Books on Kavita

We came across Story weaver by Pratham Books and decided that these books would be a rich addition to our repository. We downloaded a few books on to the Pi and setup Kavita, an E reader platform to serve the EPUBs and PDFs. These were stories that were mostly in Kannada and covered the age group of middle school children.

Bookshelf page in Kavita
A sample book on Kavita

This updated sanchari was taken back to Hara to engage with the children. The children had a great time exploring the repositories with us. We did read along sessions of books, watched a couple of videos they found interesting as there wasn't a physical space to make and even played around with PHET simulations.

Seeing a video from the Arvind Gupta Toys repo with the children of Hara

Going Forward

We seem to be getting a technical direction of where the community network in Hara is headed but the things we are yet to figure out is the setting up of the infrastructure. Where will these access points go? Hara is a tight knit hamlet of 20 to 21 houses with no public infrastructure/ buildings etc. except the Daiva Sthanas. We are also yet to gain consensus and a sense of ownership from the community to maintain infrastructure in our absence. We plan on conducting sessions where we co-imagine the infrastructure. Speaking outside of Hara in specific to the sanchari pi as a product. We aim to package the repositories as a Github repo with all docker composes to make it public. Further we aim to write a detailed technical documentation of all the configurations for someone to be able to replicate it. Additionally, we are yet to figure out how to build a network of these PIs and enable syncing when we start building repositories with the communities.