The Techies do rule the world!!

The Media Centre at the Athens ESF is a bustling hive of activity enabling activists, professional media and anyone who wishes to communicate the ESF to a wider world to do so. So how does the Media Centre work?

Everyone volunteers their experience and expertise to help get things off the ground and running smoothly. Two groups involved in setting up and running the support for the Media Centre are Hellug and AWMN. Each was approached a month before the forum to provide the hardware and internet access through their network.

So why did they get involved with the ESF?

'It's fun, it's what we do, we learn something and it's a challenge!' says Mick Flemm (not his real name!).'It's a huge challenge, we've had up to 120 laptops, the media centre computers connected onto a backup system we weren't sure would work!' Cirrus, who finshed his service in the Greek army just 3 months ago, describes how it's the biggest single project they've been involved with. When asked about problems all eyes go up to heaven with lots of gesticulating and pooh pooh sounds. 'Problems?' he asks, 'we found chaos! We had to cable the entire network and phone lines and only got access to the main server two days ago!' Mick Flemm adds ' we didn't know if the bandwidth and access points we set up would have enough capacity for everyone, if we had enough coverage. Now it's great, OTE has set up their network and we can now do video streaming which we weren't able to do before'.

Richard, a retired school teacher originally from Connecticut described some of Hel.LU.G.'s imput.
They basically provided the computers, repaired them and set them up at the Media Centre at the Old Airport where the ESF is based. Hel.L.U.G. are involved in a project to distribute older computors, after they've maintained them, to groups and organisations like schools. It was set up in Greece in 1998 (www.hellug.gr)as a forum for Linux user sand developers providing a minority past time with support both moral and technical. DJ Art is one of longest member of the Greek Linux community, having joined when he was a mere 17 year old. 'Linux is an operating system for computors enabling
hardware and software to interact,' he says.'It is free and works on the older computors which were made available for the ESF. Otherwise it would have cost a small fortune to have set up

The Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network were responsible for the internet access at the forum. OTE, the public telecom service, were to provide the main broadband service which wasn't up and running until 11am of the second day. Fortunately, they had developed a plan B, relying on their own network which they've been developing for over the past four years.