Radical Techies Go To Camp

By Aliza Dichter, AlterNet. Posted August 9, 2002.

Editor's Note: This article was commissioned, in part, by John Sellers, Executive Director of the Ruckus Society. Aliza Dichter attended the camp as a facilitator.

"Change your passwords when you leave here," warned Cindy Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "I can't say it enough."

"Here" was a 350-acre wildlife preserve in the Northern California hills, buzzing with more than 60 networked computers, a multimedia production studio and wireless broadband subnets connecting laptops across the woods and fields. This was the p>

href="www.ruckus.org">Ruckus Society's nine-day Tech ToolBox Action Camp and there was a pretty good chance the Feds were listening in on all the digital noise coming from this temporary community of open-source programmers, corporate-accountability activists, community organizers, network administrators, Web producers, microradio broadcasters, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, anti-capitalists, videographers and culture-jammers.

More than a few of these campers are regularly detained at airports, arrested at protests and put on FBI lists by a U.S. government that increasingly redefines dissent as terrorism.

Cohn was leading a workshop on "Internet Activism and the Law," one of more than 50 planned workshops on topics from surveillance to setting up a Linux mail server. Groups sat in the grass to look over walkie-talkies and radio scanners or learned skills for consensus procedure; they gathered in barns to write Web programs, and discussed ways to transform advertisements or tapes of network news shows into counter-propaganda.

At this electronic wilderness camp, where the signs at the Porto-potties reminded you to wash your hands in the buckets and hand-pumps, you could attend a training on secure collaboration led by facilitators in Israel, broadcast live into the computer lab over an indymedia.org website.

Yet, despite the heady schedule, this was first and foremost a social event. Known mostly for training activists to form blockades, hang banners from buildings and non-violently deal with very unhappy police officers, the Ruckus organizers understand that the strength and success of their camps is in what happens in between the scheduled sessions. According to camp coordinator Allen Gunn, the driving vision for this project was to create gathering space for passionate political people, geeks and non-geeks, to lay the groundwork for collaborations and solidarity by connecting faces with email addresses and chat-room tags. "We pitched it as a party, knowing full well that massive knowledge transfer would be an unavoidable by-product."

The time to sit together under the trees helped launch and advance powerful working relationships throughout the week. A few examples: organizers from Canada, the U.S. and Latin America met to strategize against the FTAA/ALCA (the "Free Trade Area of the Americas," an international business treaty); media democracy and labor activists plotted a multi-tiered campaign against radio and advertising behemoth Clear Channel; independent media producers teamed up to launch a resource-sharing and content-distribution group; and a core of technical infrastructure organizations formed the seeds of an international Tech Federation.

Said Gunn, "The most important hardware resources we provided were 4'x8' whiteboards built from shower stall siding. Those were the blank canvasses on which folks painted pictures of learning, exchange and radical activism."

Gunn and those who worked with him wanted to provide blank canvasses, not textbooks. Ruckus brought in 25-30 volunteers to take care of the nearly 200 participants. But while the logistical bases were well covered, the 55 invited facilitators, including myself, discovered a conspicuous lack of structure, including many sessions with no designated trainer, and schedules and locations determined at the last minute.

Written on a giant whiteboard outside the room known as Mission Control, the schedule was in constant flux as workshops were redefined or cancelled. For more than a third of the camp time there were no planned workshops, but rather open time for people to share skills, strategies or stories. This was conference-planning by chaos theory.

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