P2P Lab is announcing the launch of “Co-create with Tzoumakers: Open source agriculture workshop”, celebrating the gathering of designers, makers and farmers who are adapting to the digitised world. The workshop will be hosted at the rural makerspace “Tzoumakers”, which is located in NW Greece.

The workshop will take place in June 2019 (exact dates to be confirmed)

1. Introduction and background
The P2P Lab is a not-for-profit organisation based in Ioannina, Greece. It is dedicated to research around peer-to-peer dynamics in technology, society and economy. It works for the development and maintenance of a global knowledge commons, encompassing a global community of researchers and activists.

Currently, the P2P Lab aims to create awareness and promote an emerging collaborative productive model of agriculture, based on the conjunction of commons-based peer production with desktop manufacturing. <strong>Agriculture</strong> is a key activity in the peripheral and less-developed regions of the EU and a crucial productive sector. It is a field in which ready-to-apply open source hardware and software solutions have already been produced and, thus, can be implemented and improved. Considering the fragmentation of the existing abundant ?open source projects in relation to agriculture, the replication, sharing and improvement of solutions is hindered.

To facilitate interaction and create ?feedback loops among makers, designers and farmers, the P2P Lab is organising a 5-day workshop in Ioannina (NW Greece). The workshop will build upon our experience gained from the previous year, when makers around Europe gathered at a local makerspace for asylum seekers in Ioannina and co-created solutions with a local refugee community. The workshop will now take place at Tzoumakers, a rural makerspace situated in a small mountainous village called Kalentzi. The latter is part of the village cluster of Tzoumerka in Ioannina, a place abundant in cultural and natural wealth but scarce in the economic means of welfare.

The main aim of the workshop is to familiarise the local community with open source technologies developed within the EU and, ideally, connect hubs (e.g. Fab Labs) that provide technical infrastructures for development. This may create a network of open source software/hardware communities and local farmers that overcome barriers through knowledge diffusion and collaboration for their mutual benefit.