 Do you know what kind of monkeys those are? Don't be annoying, I don't know. But don't be close to them. No, they're not friendly. No, they're not friendly. That's what I'm trying to say. They get scared. I was going to be impressed if you could get this car through that opening. The Commotion Wireless Project is an open-source software platform that allows routers, Android phones, and Linux laptops to all speak the same language and communicate using a mesh network. This network allows communities or neighborhoods or individuals to build their own networks out of these devices, either connected to the internet and sharing resources or disconnected from the internet and sharing only local resources. So far we've taken the Commotion Wireless Project of three different locations, Detroit, Red Hook Brooklyn, and Dharamshala, India. This allows us to experiment with it and share it with users so we can get feedback. In Detroit, we have long-standing relationships and a lot of trust there, and that allowed us to go in and work in areas that maybe don't have as many resources, but have people that have a very can-do attitude, where they're able to just take something and run with it. We were working with a community organization in Red Hook Brooklyn when Hurricane Sandy hit and we found the need to have a technological resource for disaster recovery. In Dharamshala, India, we were able to harness the knowledge and the skills of over a dozen community organizers and technologists with a lot of experience in how wireless networking works in those areas. Detroit was an obvious choice to begin the Digital Stewards Program because we had such long-standing connections to the communities there. We've worked for many years with Allied Media Projects and the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition, and so there's already a framework and a relationship there for us to build from. The Digital Stewards Program helped to really make it understandable, simplistic, easy. What I would previously have looked at like, oh no, I now look at like, I know how to take that computer apart and I know what the parts are inside, so when I try to ask my husband, can we throw away like four old CPUs that we have, I can go in and I can take out the memory form because he goes, no I gotta pull and save this stuff, but I've learned in Digital Stewards that I can just take off the small pieces, I can store it in like an envelope and still be able to retrieve and recover it and we can then get rid of that bulky hardware that I wanted to get rid of, so increasing my technical knowledge and being able to build a network, having the recent experience at Wayne State and putting up a network and really seeing how the mesh works and just experimenting with the different nodes, that part has been really exciting to me in building and infrastructure. People really know how to do things for themselves and there's a spirit of can do in Detroit that really creates a rich environment for innovation. So Detroit's a great place to look for innovators for people who are engaged and want to change their communities, want to transform, they really want to transform the narrative about Detroit. So New York is a very rich city in comparison to Detroit, New York's doing fine, however there still are pockets of low broadband adoption, there are plenty of places where people don't have access to the things that we take for granted and one of those places happens to be in this area of Brooklyn called Red Hook which is a little bit isolated from the rest of the city. So the Red Hook initiative was a pretty natural partner for us and you know since they already run trainings and they already work very closely with a number of different kinds of groups in the neighborhood. Nice, you guys get it up there? Yeah, it took me about 20 minutes to install one of them things but at first I was confused you know he was giving me a battle and I was doing it. Now hold on, who was helping here and who was hurting? He was helping, I was hurting. Then it got back and forth. We had the first few nodes up in Brooklyn when Hurricane Sandy hit in the fall of 2012 and in fact those commotion nodes became the basis for some of the FEMA activity in the area so FEMA actually ended up coming to us to the Red Hook initiative and to OTI and building off of the network that we had started in order to provide first response right after the hurricane. The Red Hook digital stewards stepped in a little bit after that happened when the City of New York recognized that this commotion wireless network had provided a really amazing service in the case of an emergency and actually went to the Red Hook initiative and said how can we support what you're doing. We recently had a project in Dharmashala, India. We have a relationship with an ISP, an internet service provider in Dharmashala called Air Jaldi and we had been in discussions with them for a while about doing a workshop on mesh networking and commotion to bring some of those skills to India and because we'd heard a number of times that people in that area were interested about learning more about it so we worked with Air Jaldi to host a workshop in Dharmashala. We were in small groups and we started looking at what might be an interesting way we can use the commotion technology in our needs and since we work with shepherds we were talking about how we could use commotion like technology for a mobile group of shepherds so that they can communicate among each other but also intermittently update the other shepherds, their families and one of the things that we discussed was how the battery charging might be an issue because it is an issue where the shepherds walk around there's no electricity and how they can possibly synchronize when they get good data signal and while all along being able to communicate in the small groups because there are normally three or four up to like eight people who go around but every day they're distributed with their small set of sheep and the evening they come together so there are lots of possibilities on how this can help us. Digital stewards are people that either have some technological skills maybe they're a little computer savvy or they like to tinker and fix things or maybe they just really like to suss out problems with people or they're handy people, they can, they're carpenters or welders or something like that or they're community organizers, they're people that already have deep social ties to others in their neighborhoods or communities and can extract out the resources and skills that already exist in those areas.