[wsfii-discuss] [Fwd: Re: Introduction]

Fri Oct 14 08:30:10 UTC 2005

Meraka institute is another group we've had contact with through our APC 
project cooperation recently.
I think sebastian knows some people from there.

cheers

/tomas

Juergen Neumann wrote:

>Very interesting for WSFII Afrika!
>
>-------- Weitergeleitete Nachricht --------
>  
>
>>Von: Sven-Ola Tuecke <sven-ola at gmx.de>
>>An: Yusuf Kaka <ykaka at csir.co.za>
>>Kopie: onelektra <onelektra at gmx.net>, Juergen Neumann
>><j.neumann at xorxe.net>, sebastian at less.dk
>>Betreff: Re: Introduction
>>Datum: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:56:01 +0200
>>Yusuf,
>> 
>>sounds great! Don't have the time today to socialize even more on this topic. Followup events with non-local importance (past and future) are not difficult to find. Heres a small list:
>> 
>>- What-the-Hack Wireless Village (this summer) was a hacker meeting, where we have seen a lot of important people for the technical advance (OpenWRT, MadWifi...). Refer to http://wiki.whatthehack.org/index.php/Wireless_Village http://wiki.whatthehack.org/index.php/Wireless_Village
>> 
>>- This meeting in london / Start-of-October has seen more non-technical participants discussing free content and free info interchange: http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/programme.html http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/programme.html
>> 
>>- Theres a global meeting planned next year/autumn in GOA (India), details may be thrown in by Juergen, Sebastian or Elektra (Addrs attached as CC: to this mail).
>> 
>>Future contributions to the firmware are welcome, but should be coordinated to ensure it's translated to the different languages and needs. To be discussed...
>> 
>>LG, Sven-Ola
>>----- Original Message -----
>>From:
>>mailto:ykaka at csir.co.za Yusuf Kaka
>>To:
>>mailto:sven-ola at gmx.de sven-ola at gmx.de
>>Sent:
>>Thursday, October 13, 2005 10:57 AM
>>Subject:
>>Introduction
>>Goodday Sven,
>> 
>>My name is Yusuf Kaka and I am a Software Engineer/ Researcher at a newly formed research organsiation called the Meraka Institute in South Africa (See http://www.meraka.org.za www.meraka.org.za
>>and http://www.csir.co.za www.csir.co.za
>>). The focus of our research is on using ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to solve developing world and more specifically, South African problems like bridging the Digital Divide. A major problem in SA is that the rural communites ( around 50% of the total population) do not have access to communication infrastructure and there is no will by the current Telecom monopoly to provide this infrastructure. Furthermore, the monopoly also controls all the international Internet bandwidth and as a result Internet access is ridiculously expensive and unaffordable to even middle-class urban citizens. 
>> 
>>We, at the Meraka institute are investigating whether community owned networks, like the freifunk berlin network can be used in our context to provide infrastructure in rural areas and help with high internet costs by making possible for people in urban areas to share bandwidth, even thought the legality thereof is not yet fully determined. We have setup 3 test networks; An indoor, 50 node mesh test-bed, an outdoor urban mesh network in Pretoria and a rural mesh network in a village in Mpumulanga. Both the urban and rural networks consist of WRT54G nodes running the Freifunk firmware. A colleague of mine is doing research into the various routing protocols, including OLSR, AODV etc. I will be concentrating on services runnning ontop of mesh networks, particularly voice communication. We are quite inspired by the work done by you and your colleagues and would like to have the opportunity to exchange information and perhaps contribute to your work on Freifunk.
>> 
>>Furthermore, I am also part of a community mesh network in Johannesburg, (JAWUG, Johannesburg Areas Wireless User Group, http://jawug.za.net http://jawug.za.net
>>) and have managed to setup a sub-mesh in my communty called wild_west_mesh with about 15 members, also using Freifunk and WRT54G's.
>> 
>>I came accross an advert for the freifunk summer convention 2004 on your website, are there any follow-up events planned?
>> 
>>Thanks,
>> 
>> 
>>Regards,
>>Yusuf Kaka
>> 
>>________________________________________________________________________________
>> 
>>Mobile Platforms Engineer
>> 
>>CSIR - Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for ICT)
>> 
>>Tel. +27 12 841 2810        Cel. +27 72 373 1847        Fax +27 12 842 7719
>> 
>>Postal Address: CSIR - Meraka, Building 43, PO Box 395, Pretoria 0001, South Africa
>>Physical Address: CSIR - Meraka, Building 43, Meiring Naude Street, Scientia, Pretoria, South Africa
>> 
>>Web Address: http://www.csir.co.za www.csir.co.za
>>or http://www.meraka.co.za www.meraka.co.za
>>________________________________________________________________________________
>> 
>> 
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