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In 2015, Hungary abruptly closed its border with Croatia, causing thousands of migrants to become stranded in temporary encampments. The internet in these camps became overwhelmed, unstable, and unusable. Volunteers put donated technology into bags and gave the bags to volunteers to walk around with, creating mobile Wi-Fi hotspots.

After Cyclone Komen struck Myanmar, it caused flooding and landslides in the west, making many regions inaccessible by road. So the World Health Organization and local community volunteers converted boats into mobile clinics. With locals’ navigation knowledge, they floated through to deliver essential medical care to remote communities.

Due to a migration crisis in Greece, thousands of life jackets were discarded. So some migrants and volunteers upcycled them into different products, such as bags. The funds generated went directly towards essential community needs. It also inspired people to create other items out of the life jackets, like mattresses.

FIOTIM is a mobile museum in a trailer that brings art to underserved Brazilian communities, democratizing cultural access. FIOTIM has inspired artists to create similar projects like the Museu da Imagem Itinerante de Maré, a portable museum of photographs that reclaim the favelas’ story through the eyes of their residents.

In California’s impoverished Coachella Valley, where students lack internet access, the innovative “Wi-Fi on Wheels” program transformed school buses into mobile connectivity hubs. This initiative spread nationwide, especially during the pandemic, bringing essential internet access to homeless shelters, rural communities, and underserved areas, turning isolation into learning and networking opportunities.

The Bike Arte Festival is a mobile, street-level celebration that merges cycling culture and community building through art, education, and collective action. It happens every year in different low-income neighborhoods, offering residents hands-on workshops and cultural activities centered around bikes, highlighting a sustainable way of moving around and creativity.

With conventional construction materials scarce and expensive for millions worldwide, marginalized communities have transformed plastic water bottles into viable building materials. Plastic water bottles offer a durable, extremely low-cost alternative that simultaneously addresses housing crises and diverts non-biodegradable waste that would otherwise pollute the environment.

Encoded Textiles is a collaborative art project between Guillermo Bert and Mapuche weavers by integrating functional QR codes into traditional textiles. Scanning these woven codes unlocks curated content about Mapuche culture, empowering the community to reclaim their narrative through a powerful fusion of ancestral craft and digital technology.

The project WikiMapa mobilized young residents of the Complexo do Alemão, known as wiki-reporters, to map their community using their phones and GPS. This allowed the once invisible to digital platforms like Google Maps to be visible and navigable in detail on a shared app.

Nuvem is a rural hack-lab that helps different local communities with their issues, such as a community not having proper access to Wi-Fi. At the same time, it teaches workshops to the residents to create and use technology to better their communities.