In many communities in Mexico, communications science, radio, and digital technologies have vastly changed over the past 15 years. 

When Carlos Baca first entered the local telecommunications sector, he was helping people mainly with advocacy and regulatory issues they were facing. He has been working with rural, remote, and Indigenous communities developing telecommunications and community communication projects through the WACC partner organizations Redes A.C. and Rhizomatica.

Baca wished to acknowledge the collective work carried out by the organizations involved together with the communities themselves, which have ultimately been the driving force behind this process. 

He shared some real-life examples from his experience.

Over the years, Baca has followed a methodology that involves the community. The decision of what actions organizations should take is based on the real needs within that community. 

“We started to work with connectivity, so we got involved in this process that we now call a community network,” Baca said. “We developed a community network together with the communities in Oaxaca.”

An evolving network 

Baca explained that the network in Oaxaca is a mobile community network. He and his team developed the entire system, including an economic model as well as the regulatory aspects that allow the network to exist. “This is a network that has been evolving over the years,” said Baca.

“There are now 17 communities in Oaxaca who have their own infrastructure to operate a network, and they have now 4G networks in these communities,” he explained. “My background and my dream is to work with the communities in the capacity-building aspect to understand technologies and to make decisions based on this knowledge about technologies.”

Baca noted that the initiative, which began in 2013, is the result of a long, complex journey involving regulatory changes, capacity-building efforts, technological appropriation processes within communities, and many other lessons learned along the way. 

“Today it stands as an internationally recognized reference, as there is no other network of this nature operating at a comparable scale anywhere else in the world,” he said. 

For approximately the last five years, the organization has consolidated itself as a mobile virtual network operator. 

“Through Mexico’s shared network model, it is able to operate nationally while ensuring that the value generated is redistributed back to the participating communities through a different and more community-oriented model,” said Baca.

That’s why it’s important for people to address and understand AI – what it really is and its real implication in people’s lives.

The moral voice needs to come from the grassroots, he said.

“I am really sure that these discussions about technology are happening on the ground,” he added. 

Involve the people  

Baca said that, at times, high-level discussions on technology keep us from seeing how people solve their communications challenges on the ground. 

“We are talking about mobilizing; we are talking about the need for regulation. There is this urge to just make sure things just don’t get out of hand. But if the right conditions are created in the local communities, wonderful things happen,” he said.

Baca offered an example from Oaxaca that occurred when a community tried to move from 2G to 4G networks. 

“The simple answer is always that, of course, we want to have internet, but the people in this community know about the network itself, and how it works,” he said. “They say that the main characteristic of the network is the communication, so it needs to be always available.”

Community members believed that, if they had internet and all the people wanted to go to YouTube to see funny videos, the internet would get saturated and they would not be able to use it for communication. 

“So, they said, we need to ban YouTube,” said Baca. “But someone said, no, no, this is not the only thing that we have in YouTube. We also have, for example, videos to repair my truck.”

Ultimately, he added, it’s really a collective decision in the community to make the rules based on the understanding of the technology itself.

“When these things happen, people have to have enough knowledge to know the technologies, and to know the real needs that they can solve with it,” said Baca. “And then they have the space to decide about these resources. They can do different things that we cannot imagine.”

Adapted from a blog post by the World Council of Churches. Used with permission.