This piece advocates for Webinar Pi, a Raspberry Pi video-conferencing tool for low-literate rural communities. The argument centres on why mainstream webinar and video-conferencing tools fail these communities, and what a purpose-built, low-cost, locally maintainable alternative could look like.
The proposal draws on Janastu’s years of fieldwork with community networks in rural Karnataka, where we observed first-hand how the gap between available tools and community needs keeps widening. Webinar Pi is an attempt to bridge that gap from the community’s side rather than the platform’s.