AnthillHacks 2025: ReCommons - Imagining Commons
Date: 15th - 28th Dec 2025
Place: Janastu Base Camp, Halekote, Tumkuru - 572140
AnthillHacks 2025 brings together communities, technologists, artists, environmentalists, thinkers along with the villagers to explore a shared vision: reclaiming and rebuilding the commons. Janastu has been involved in empowering low-literate and marginalized communities by creating decentralized alternatives in technology and livelihoods. Through community-owned wireless mesh networks, Community knowledge archiving platforms and community-led art and craft spaces, Janastu works to ensure that knowledge, tools, and resources remain in the hands of the people. This year’s theme, ReCommons - Imagining Commons, invites us to envision a future where collaboration replaces competition, and where communities shape their own social, technological, and ecological environments.
Technology - Reclaiming the Digital Commons
Digital culture once thrived on openness and collective contribution, with platforms like Wikipedia, Wikimedia, open access journals, Creative Commons, Open Street Map (OSM) and the Free and Open Source Software movement demonstrating what shared digital ownership looks like. Over time, however, centralized corporations have taken control of digital spaces, concentrating power through data ownership, algorithms, and Proprietary (Closed) systems. Many communities - especially women and low-literate rural groups find themselves excluded from meaningful digital participation. At AnthillHacks 2025, technology is reimagined as shared digital commons where tools are open, knowledge is free, networks and infrastructure are community-owned and community-operated, and people are active co-creators rather than passive consumers. The gathering explores how rural communities can shape technological futures that genuinely belong to them.
Environment - Defending the Natural Commons
India’s natural commons like lakes, forests, wetlands, grasslands, and rivers - are being rapidly degraded as industries exploit land and water for profit. Lakes are emptied, polluted or privatized, forests are cut down for extractive projects, and air and water quality continue to deteriorate. These ecosystems, once held in collective ownership (Commons), are shrinking under the pressures of development that benefits a few while harming many. AnthillHacks 2025 creates space for imagining how communities can reclaim their role as caretakers of land and water. It encourages discussions on ecological governance that is participatory, decentralized, and rooted in local realities, drawing from traditional knowledge and regenerative practices that have supported life for generations.
Art & Crafts - Reclaiming Cultural Knowledge
Traditional art and craft practices have been as shared cultural heritage within rural and indigenous communities. These skills, however, are increasingly privatized by industries that extract designs, techniques, and aesthetics for profit while offering little recognition or compensation to the communities of origin. Knowledge that once lived collectively is now turned into commodities detached from their cultural roots. Janastu’s engagement with rural women artisans aims to restore these practices as cultural commons, where creativity and livelihood go hand in hand. At AnthillHacks 2025, participants explore how community-led craft ecosystems can thrive through shared ownership of skills, materials, and designs, ensuring that artisans retain control over their knowledge and benefit from their creativity.
To learn more about AnthillHacks and its vision, visit our website.
We invite session proposals that align with our theme, ReCommons - Imagining Commons - particularly in the areas of art, crafts, and technology. Sessions could include workshops, discussions, or hands-on projects that challenge existing paradigms and explore sustainable, inclusive alternatives. AnthillHacks is a 10-day event that takes place during the last 10 days of the year, with build-days of 5 days prior to the main event. The venue is iruWay farm, Durgadahalli, Karnataka.
Support us by sponsoring the event. Cash support - sponsorship, donations. It will help to support some unavoidable cash payments. Material support - tents, beds, blankets, winter essentials (jackets, shawls, etc), umbrellas, stall tents, carpets, tarpaulins, lights, etc. Food essentials - groceries, vegetables, people with cooking interests, etc. Sports equipments Cycles Travel support Volunteers during the build days and event days.
Click here to know about sessions and schedules
Website : anthillhacks.in
Contact: Dinesh - 9449118175, 9731666663 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)
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Shashi - 9482922194, 8722020780 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)