Naarm Solarpunk Meetup + Merri-bek.Tech AGM

Merri-bek Tech, a group in the inner northern suburbs of Naarm (Melbourne), invites everyone involved interested in tinkering with grass-roots technologies in support of a Sustainable, Resilient and Just future to join us for the Naarm Solarpunk Meetup.

This month we have special guest speaker, Anastasia Beasley, with the presentation, 'Land shapes the internet'.

Land shapes the internet

Margo Ngawa Neale calls songlines "corridors of knowledge", and Internet infrastructure follows those same paths through Country to transport information through cable-sized corridors. The Internet is made of Country - even the fibre optic cables in the NBN are made of Queensland sand - but its protocols are very different to those that govern knowledge sharing in Indigenous systems. I am an ally with settler heritage, and I have no authority to speak about traditional knowledge, but I'd like to share some context about the Internet's history in so-called Australia and recommend some readings by Indigenous computer scientists.

Anastasia is a research fellow at auDA, the Australian not-for-profit organisation responsible for administering the .au domain.

After the presentation, at the end of the Meetup we will be running the Merri-bek.tech Annual General Meeting (AGM), presenting the annual report and nominating and confirming the committee members for the next year. This is a great opportunity to get further involved with the organisation; to become a member, or as a member to nominate as, or vote for committee members. If you do none of these things is a a good chance to see how a grass-roots organisation can be organised and run.

About the Naarm Solarpunk group
Some of us are technologists, and will be showing off software or hardware projects, and others are more interested in community organizing, responding to the climate crisis, or building local resilience. Whatever your area of interest, or your level of skill, you're absolutely welcome to dive in.

At the meetups we'll have a show-and-tell time for any projects that you're working on, as well as occasional short presentations. The space will be hosted by volunteers, and we'll actively work towards inclusion through applying a code of conduct.

Merri-bek Tech has some projects that you might be interested in updates from, including our attempt to build P2P mesh network based community hosting on Raspberry Pis, and our project to run a local fediverse social network.

We aspire to keep this meetup Solarpunk as fuck. We support the hackers, tinkerers and makers and misfits. There are plenty of other spaces for big corporate green tech, so bring your hobby project, not your day job, unless that job is firmly rooted in the solidarity economy.

We are not value neutral. We'll start with Merri-bek Tech's values and principles, and build from there together. In particular, in the context of ongoing genocide, we will ask you to leave if you're associated in any way with the weapons industry.

This meetup will be hosted on the stolen, unceeded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.