AnthillHacks 2026: ReVoice - Recognizing Voices, Celebrating Stories

Date: December 2026, Dates TBA

Place: Janastu Base Camp, Halekote, Tumkuru - 572140

ReVoice

To create a world that works for all, everyone’s experiences, needs, knowledge, and perspectives must be valued. Yet, mainstream narratives overlook the many perspectives that make up our world.

ReVoice is about recognizing these excluded voices and acknowledging the knowledge and value they carry. It is about listening to people whose experiences and perspectives are often neglected, celebrating their stories, and creating spaces where they can be heard.

Introduction

Janastu has been working with rural and marginalized communities to create decentralized alternatives in technology, knowledge sharing, and livelihoods. Through community-owned wireless mesh networks, community storytelling and knowledge archiving platforms, and community-led art and crafts, Janastu seeks to ensure that people have the means to shape their own futures and preserve their knowledge and cultures.

Over the years, AnthillHacks has brought together communities, technologists, artists, environmentalists, researchers, and thinkers to explore alternative ways of living, creating, and building together. It is a space where people from different backgrounds – rural and urban alike – come together, share knowledge, experiment, and learn from each other.

This year, AnthillHacks 2026 takes up the theme ReVoice. Many people in rural communities have rich experiences, valuable knowledge, and unique ways of understanding the world. Yet, they are often overlooked or dismissed. ReVoice invites us to question whose voices are heard. It asks us to listen more carefully, recognize different ways of knowing, and create spaces and platforms for these voices to emerge.

Threads of ReVoice

We have identified four interconnected threads of ReVoice that we intend to explore at Anthillhacks 2026.

Thread 1: Recognising Lived Experience and Knowledge

Rural landscapes hold layers of cultural and historical knowledge that are undocumented and unrecognized. Rural people’s understanding of the land, nature, agriculture, materials, and everyday life comes from lived experience.

Some carry a wealth of knowledge about traditional tales of hills and forests, ancient temples, and historical sites. Others possess intimate familiarity with local ecosystems and the ways in which their communities have lived with their natural surroundings. Older people have knowledge of making traditional tools and utilities from local materials. These skills and practices represent generations of experimentation, adaptation, and learning.

At AnthillHacks 2026, we would like to explore ways of documenting and preserving this knowledge through community archives, local-language documentation, audio and video recordings, and other creative forms.

Thread 2: Celebrating Stories and Oral Histories

Every community has people with stories to tell. Some are about everyday life or unusual experiences, and others carry memories of places, people, and traditions. Often, they offer unique ways of looking at the world.

ReVoice is about recognizing such storytellers and creating opportunities for their stories to emerge. It is about listening without prejudice and valuing different forms of expression.

We would like to make space for people to share and document these stories in different ways during AnthillHacks 2026. This could include oral history recordings, audio and video storytelling, conversations, and other creative forms of expression. We are interested in exploring ways to preserve these stories without losing the context in which they are told or the voices and perspectives of the people telling them.

Thread 3: Recognizing Women’s Voices and Lived Experiences

Women in rural communities often face multiple forms of marginalization. Their voices and perspectives are overlooked not only because they belong to rural communities, but also because of their gender. They have limited opportunities to share their experiences or participate in decisions that affect their lives. Even when they speak, their experiences may be dismissed, normalized, or silenced.

ReVoice is also about creating safe spaces and platforms where rural women can voice their views and lived experiences. When women hear others speak about experiences similar to their own, it can help them recognize that they are not alone, build solidarity, challenge prevailing ideas and attitudes about women, and inspire collective action.

We are working with PLASMA, our safe storytelling platform, to explore how women can record and share their stories while retaining control over how their identities and experiences are represented. Features such as voice anonymization can help women speak about issues they might otherwise find difficult or unsafe to discuss openly.

At AnthillHacks 2026, we would like to explore this area further with experts working on women’s rights, community-led storytelling, digital safety, psychosocial support, and collective action. We are interested in ideas and activities that can help us think about the relationship between safe storytelling, community solidarity, and social change.

Thread 4: Technology, Ecology and the Commons

ReVoice also invites us to think about the technologies, infrastructures, and environments that shape whose voices are heard and whose knowledge is accessible.

How can technology support communities in documenting, preserving, accessing, and sharing their knowledge? What kinds of digital infrastructures can communities own and manage themselves? We would like to explore the possibilities of community-owned communication networks, including wireless mesh networks, and how they can support local communication, knowledge sharing, and community archives.

We are also interested in emerging technologies such as small language models and their potential for working with local languages and knowledge systems. Can these technologies make information and knowledge more accessible to communities? What are the possibilities and limitations? How do we ensure that communities retain control over their knowledge and how it is used?

Another area we would like to explore is the relationship between technology and ecology. What can we learn from the intersection of blockchain, crypto technologies, and environmental sustainability? More broadly, we would like to bring together people working in ecology and environmental conservation to explore our relationship with local landscapes, ecosystems, and the natural commons.

These are some possible directions, but we are open to other interpretations and explorations. We would like to bring together people from different fields to question, experiment, and imagine alternatives that are more accessible, decentralized, community-owned, and ecologically sustainable.

Shaping AnthillHacks Together

These are the broad areas we would like to explore at AnthillHacks 2026, and we hope to learn from and collaborate with people working in community archiving, oral histories, technology, women’s rights, digital safety, community psychology, ecology and related fields.

Call for Proposals for Workshops, Activities, Demos, etc.

We invite you to think about what ReVoice means from the perspective of your own work. What voices, stories, and forms of knowledge do you think need greater recognition? What approaches have you explored in your work? Are there activities, workshops, discussions, demonstrations, or collaborative projects that you would like to bring to AnthillHacks? Are there questions or ideas that you think we should be exploring? We invite you to help shape the activities, direction and character of this year’s AnthillHacks. We hope that through this process, we can create a gathering that reflects the interests and contributions of everyone involved, and provides space for experimentation, learning, and collaboration.

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.

Website: anthillhacks.in

Contact: Dinesh - 9449118175, 9731666663 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)
Shalini - 9986971886 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)
Noor - 8903040308 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)
Bhyresh - 94801 34986 (WhatsApp, Telegram)
Jayant - 9360498481 (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)