We have spoken with Ainhoa Lezama from the Aiaraldea Zainduz network, Jon Ruiz de Pinedo from the Salvatierra network, Aitziber Romero from the Batera network of Vitoria-Gasteiz and several members of the Casco Viejo network of Vitoria-Gasteiz. Every network has its own characteristics, but they coincide in a lot of things. The virtues, weaknesses and concerns that both have revealed have also been read in other networks of the Basque Country, such as Donostia and Casco Viejo de Bilbao.

In Agurain, the initiative emerged from the Youth Assembly of the Gaztetxe. “The first thing we did was spread a poster through social networks, offering our help, and giving the citizen the opportunity to tell him that he was willing to collaborate or that they needed,” explains Ruiz de Pinedo. In the Old Town of Vitoria-Gasteiz, after the closure of the schools, they began to exchange ideas between the different social networks of the neighborhood. At the beginning of the lockdown, they opened a proposal: “Create a port-based surveillance network,” said Irati Barriocano. The Batera Zaindu Gasteiz network was then made public. Charlaron and they decided to merge. The Casco Viejo network is part of Batera. The Vitoria-Gasteiz Transport Network began to weave before the state of emergency was declared. Romero says they were surprised by the answer: within 48 hours of being made public, Batera had 1,500 members and quickly decentralized. First by neighborhoods (22), then by smaller areas (50). In Aiaraldea, the networks have been set up in five municipalities in the region: Llodio, Okondo, Orozko, Ayala and Amurrio. “The goal was to organize itself into a giant auzolan,” Lezama said.

All these initiatives began to be presented through social networks, proposing adherence to the network to support and collect neighbors. They soon jumped out of the digital world to the physical portals. They prioritize receiving protection from the closest possible, because it is the most effective way to channel aid, the safest from a health point of view and the most powerful way to community. The Vitoria-Gasteiz network has prepared a home delivery note to enter below the city’s gates. This is a way of ensuring that messages reach the neighbours who are not in a position to go to the portal. WathsApp is, in any case, the basis of the network to inform, solicit and offer help. In the Casco Viejo de Vitoria-Gasteiz a virtual map has been created with all the neighbors and neighbors who have pointed to the network: portal by portal who is willing or not to receive help, and for what purpose. A database has been created in Aiaraldea detailing the name of each member, his telephone number, the place of residence and the state of the person. All networks have also completed protocols of assistance and safe delivery.

The influence of feminism is evident and structural in the messages of the networks, in the ways of doing, in the values that are claimed or in the choice of the lines in which they work. The most commonly used concept is care, which often repeats the need to put life at the center. "The priority is to bring lives to the center, you have to think about how you can collectively sustain life. In this restructuring, Batera is a small step. In this situation we have to put on the table the need and recognition of the surveillance work", says, for example, Romero.

Mass and various initiatives

In the Casco Viejo the diversity has been greater, but in general the young have been the drivers of the initiatives. Those who have previously exercised some kind of militancy. But networks have been successful, they've been joined by a lot of people in general. In Salvatierra/Agurain there are about 40 people, in Aiaraldea 200, in the whole of Vitoria-Gasteiz around 2,300 and in the Casco Viejo 300. The profile of the members is therefore very varied.

This diversity is lived as a treasure: popular construction is reaching beyond the usual areas and there is a desire not to lose it, as in the words of our interlocutors, in the messages and forms of networks. On the other hand, sometimes it becomes difficult to talk to people who have no habit of organizing, there are people who associate themselves out of curiosity or simply to be informed, and there are people who do not understand or respect the function of the WathsApp groups and the established rules – personal comments come, supposedly humorous videos, political messages of agents… In Bateran the administrators of the groups have a message model to repeatedly read them, In the Casco Viejo, they decided to turn the group into a channel, which allowed the messages only to be transmitted by the administrators.

A thousand ways to help

What are citizens doing by helping each other through surveillance networks? Lezama and Ruiz de Pinedo highlight the purchases. That's the most repeated thing. In addition, Barriocanal refers to the bedrooms that are held in the health center of the city. Get rid of the trash or just talk, Romero.

In addition to the support for the person, the citizens have implemented other more general aids through the social networks of the following initiatives: cultural actions to better pass the confinement, kitchen proposals or exercise sessions, or telephone numbers for people needing to speak. One by one, Aiaraldea Zainduz is contacting the small producers who sold their products on the Llodio market to think about how they can help when the market has been cancelled. General requests have also been opened. Having access to the Internet has become a necessity to be able to be communicated or to be students in the new educational model. But not every citizen has access to the Internet, the consequences of the digital divide have been unraveled of all time. The Laudio surveillance network has sent a message to the public to open the wifi of their home and is about to broadcast a video. The children of the Old Town of Vitoria-Gasteiz have made the same request to the neighbors:

Finally, the surveillance networks have created their own material to help citizens or to propose how to collaborate, on many occasions of high quality: written protocols of help or help, clarifications on the measures that have been taken by governments, short videos of professionals to avoid contagion or bring the lockdown as best as possible psychologically, criteria for walking dogs, protocol against macho aggressions on the initiative's own social networks, against domestic aggressions...

Relationship with the institutions

The relations that each surveillance network has maintained with institutions or public services are different. Salvatierra hasn't looked for any of that. All the networks in Aiaraldea have contacted their respective municipalities, and the relationship that has been generated in each of them is different. Lezama knows Laudio better, as it is from the village: “We contacted social services. We have placed on the portals two phones for those who need help, ours and the social services of the City Hall, depending on the type of help. They send us several calls that they receive.” In the Casco Viejo de Vitoria-Gasteiz, from the beginning they were related to social services and the health center of the neighborhood, quite naturally, through people and agents who had previously woven popular activity. At the level of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the Batera network requested a meeting to the City Hall which runs the jeltzale Gorka Uraran, proposing coordination and collaboration. The highest representative of the public, Josu Erkoreka, has rejected the meeting of the parliamentary committee. It has moved to the network that welcomes this initiative, but has recommended to the network of volunteers organised by the Basque Government that "if something needs". For Batasuna, however, it is a bureaucratic, slow and caring institutional framework that has denied any responsibility.

What should be the relationship between surveillance networks and institutions? Should we try to ensure that citizens' networks meet all the needs of citizens? Or in some areas, such as health care, food and housing, does it have to have its role to demand from the institutions? Does everyone have to work on their own? Should we create spaces for collaboration and/or coordination? “We know what needs we can meet among ourselves, and what the responsibilities of the institutions are. We are not going to do the jobs that have to be paid, so we are working with the institutions to also control which ones they don’t do and denounce,” says Barriocano. “The Basque Government cannot delegate basic care tasks to volunteers alone. We want to make it clear that we have no will to represent anyone’s work, we believe that what we are doing is the responsibility of public services. What public employees paid with a living wage should do”, Romero.

Ease of supply; difficulty of application

The types of aid being processed from surveillance networks have already been listed. But all our partners have pointed to the same weak point: there are many citizens who have been put to work, there are few requests for help that have come. The imbalance is large.

Some of the reasons are negative. Among them, the most repeated are the difficulties we have to show the vulnerability. Everyone thinks that we have more facility to offer help than to ask for it. Asking makes us see weakness in a situation in which we have great resistance. Among other things, because neoliberalism has split in each of us, and once responsibilities have been individualized, the need for help has a stain of personal failure. “We have a hard time recognizing that we are vulnerable. The system wants us to believe that we don’t need anyone else to survive,” says Romero. This dimension of vulnerability is probably confused with simple shame or reluctance. We are timid in asking for help, especially if we have to ask for it from someone we do not know personally.

Arantza Basagoiti is a member of the Casco Viejo network in the capital of Alavesa. He has formed a group together with other members. In the Old Town there are many neighbors alone, many of them old. Aware of this, the group has offered to neighbors who need to speak "no more", with the necessary frequency and with the idea of always speaking with the same person. No one approached them in the first two weeks, now they are in contact with four people. “It’s very difficult to reach a person who has that need, if in general you have plenty of sun,” Basagoiti said. Despite maturity there is the problem mentioned above: “It’s very difficult for him to be vulnerable.” Basagoiti knows very well what this is about. He lives in a wheelchair and has experienced this conflict in his skin: “The stereotype I transmit is that of the person who needs help. I receive a lot of offers of help. I thank him very much, but learning has been hard. In our society, autonomy is religion.”

Another reason for the low demand for assistance is that these networks of access to unprotected and excluded people seem to be the current limits of these networks, but we will address it in the next subsection. In any case, all these difficulties have not surprised the members of the networks in general. These tendencies and weaknesses understand that being transformed step by step is one of the struggles of these networks. The imbalance between supply and demand remains significant, although over the previous three weeks aid applications have gradually increased.

The positive reasons also explain the inadequacy of aid applications. On the one hand, networks have prioritized the organization and dimension of the portal by portal, as mentioned above. Therefore, once communication has been generated between the portal's neighbors and mutual assistance has been practiced, this reality is outside the management of the network and knowledge. In this sense, the size of the needs that are being covered or channelled through networks cannot be known. On the other hand, this collaboration from portal to portal has already been activated by many citizens before formal surveillance networks. In other words, fortunately, although they are increasingly solitary and increasingly individualized relationships, networks of relationships with minimal community sense are maintained on a daily basis. From these more invisible informal networks, mutual assistance is naturally practiced, without the need to create a specific structure, without being promoted by an agent. In the same sense, the shops of Salvatierra/Agurain have been organized on their own to bring the shopping to their neighbors, or the small supermarket of the Casco Viejo de Vitoria-Gasteiz does the same with the neighbors.

This is of great value and must be taken into account when analysing reality. If we did not, we would have a narrow and narrow picture of mutual care and community practices. We could think, for example, that if in some small towns a formal care network has not been created, it is because of the lack of community sense of citizenship. However, in many cases it may be the opposite. In Murgia or in Kuartango, for example, a network has not been created, and the same explanation has been given to each of its inhabitants: the neighbours know the needs that already exist or the situations of certain people and respond to their needs without creating their own structure. In other Alavesas localities, the networks emerge from the collaboration between the city council and the citizenry. It seems that size has to do with this – in addition to the sensitivity of political representatives and their parties –. It is often said that City Councils are the institutions closest to citizenship, and it may be true, but the quantity and quality of the relationship between citizenship and the City Hall in a small town or in a city is not the same. In Zalduondo, for example, the town hall and the neighbours work hand in hand in the surveillance network. The networks have also been created in the two main towns of Treviño, La Puebla de La Puebla de Arganzón and Treviño. “In 50% of the Puebla de Arganzón, the city council and 50% the neighbors and neighbors,” explains Algiers Ibon Txopitea.

The most marginalized out of networks?

Asked about the limitations of solidarity networks to reach the most disadvantaged people and sectors, the interlocutors say yes. They say that there is concern in their networks about this lack. The most disadvantaged sectors may be, on the one hand, the elderly or migrants who do not have a social, neighborhood or family support network. And, of course, the socio-economic excluded. In Salvatierra and Llodio they came to the conclusion that communicating through the social networks and the usual channels of the promoters was not the best way to make the way with the most vulnerable. “That was the concern that, using our regular channels of communication, we reach those who need it most. The portal has been very welcome, we have reached people who usually do not arrive,” says Lezama.

Iñaki Luzuriaga is a street educator in the Casco Viejo de Vitoria-Gasteiz, but she is participating as a neighbor and militant of the surveillance network of the area. He says that injustices and differences are reproduced and deepened during confinement: “To those of us who have legal status, labor resources and resources give us criteria that protect us, but what is excluded is completely disconnected, it always has to lose.” In the Casco Viejo the situations of poverty and exclusion are higher than in the rest of the neighborhoods of Vitoria-Gasteiz, but the situations described are occurring in many places: “Many people in poverty do not have their house rented, but their rooms. Many have mobiles, but no data. This means that today he is isolated from the information, from friends, from the school [that is why neighbors are asked to leave the wifi open]. They are in the windows, they almost catch the wifi of a bar or society.” In many of these houses, children do not have a single game and are used to spending many hours on the street, without the necessary equipment to perform school tasks. From the surveillance network, games or paintings have been brought to different homes: “At this time, a parcheesy or a goose can be a contribution of Christ in a house. We have also distributed posters and paintings to paint from the inside. What a welcome!” For Luzuriaga, this type of initiative, in addition to the material, meets other needs: “The real need was the relationship. Feeling that there is someone, neighborhood, a kind of community, and that I am in your head.”

Household tasks to choose from before

The network of the Casco Viejo de Vitoria-Gasteiz seems to be closer to the situation and to the knowledge of the most vulnerable people and their presence in the surveillance network. “We’ve created our network of mutual care around what we’ve created in everyday life,” says Barriocano, giving it the essential key. That day by day it consists of many networks, in some of them people from different socioeconomic situations are mixed and there is work from years ago: parents of the school, association Goian, Sareen Josten, Auzo Bizi.... They are intertwined with each other at the same time, among them and with other movements: Gasteiz Txiki Auzo Elkartea, Gaztetxe de Gasteiz, Talka gune okupatu feminist...

Similarly, we can interpret what Lezama told us. Regarding this deficiency, a “nice” exception stands out. “In Laudio and Amurrio there was an indefinite strike and in the context of the general strike a close relationship emerged in the strike committees.” It is a precarious and feminized working space, with a large number of migrants. “Now, they have contacted the network to help them with their shopping to reduce the risk of contamination.”

Reaching out to the most disadvantaged sectors is not something that can be achieved overnight. In daily life we socialize according to the groups that share more or less socioeconomic level, in layers that hardly touch or intersect with each other. The members of the organized militant sectors are not, in general, the most disadvantaged sectors in our country, and these networks of clear relations are also reproduced there. The composition greatly influences and limits the agendas, preferences, responsibilities or sensitivities of each movement. It is true that in recent years there has been a growing number of reflections on these shortcomings and, more importantly, the struggle to reshape the citizens. The times we are living, and those that come, have increased the need and possibilities of these alliances and mixtures.

Barriocano has raised the concern shared by several members of the social network over the past few days. It believes that the aid is being raised in an excessively dichotomous way: giving or receiving. On the one hand, it is considered a distortion of reality: “We can all give and receive help in one way or another, and in some moments we will have more to give, in others more to receive.” Or, as Romero says, "we all have the need to be cared for at some point in our lives, and also the responsibility to take care of them". On the other hand, he believes that he can involuntarily feed paternalistic or assistential logics: Members of the network "able to help" are those who, in some way, protect "vulnerable people who need help."

Tools to address times from communitarianism

Citizen surveillance networks in Álava – and throughout the Basque Country – have been created to respond to the care needs that have generated or increased confinements and emergency situations. These needs will be accentuated as the confinement situation continues, according to our partners. “Some of us are in more comfortable homes and situations, others are worse. Fears and communication needs will be deepened, the best and the worst of us will come out. People will try to meet those needs through formal and informal networks,” says Basagoiti.

Lockdown ends, but needs don't. The authorities will try to reload the consequences of the crisis on the backs of the citizens, increasing injustices and suffering. Our partners see the experience of surveillance networks as a network or any other way of responding to this scenario. The networks then face a great challenge. Confinement is a very appropriate context to make visible the need of the community and develop sensitivity. But it sets unsurpassed limits for structuring and giving solidity to the community – horizontally, interacting and building the basis of participation.

Luzuriaga is not optimistic, says the system will take advantage of the coronavirus crisis to rebalance itself, as it did in 2008. However, it believes that surveillance networks or the transformative social economy have an opportunity. “We’re talking more than ever among neighbors, as you see that whoever’s willing to help you is not in which office, but in your portal. I think that will leave a beautiful base,” says Barriocanal from the Old Town of Vitoria-Gasteiz; “I think we will learn from this. The initiative departed from the Gazte Asanblada but other people have met. I believe that once the COVID-19 crisis has passed, the network can be maintained in another way”, Ruiz de Pinedo from Salvatierra; “that’s what we haven’t talked about and I don’t think the network will be maintained as it is, but we will be served by new links and bridges that are emerging”, Lezama from Aiaraldea; “maybe in the future we will leave a different shape, but I’m sure the work done these days. The Union will have a lot to say and do” of the network of Vitoria Romero.