[wsfii-discuss] Further notes on London meeting

Sun Oct 1 20:10:49 UTC 2006

Last Wednesday in London, Ramon (guifi.net), James (boundless/consume), Alexei 
(raylab/hive), Ian (greennet) and myself met up to introduce and talk. What 
follows is some recollections.

on guifi.net:

Ramon gave an intriguing introduction to guifi.net

The structure of the wireless network services offered together with their 
standard codified licence (combining conditions of use & terms of service, 
not too dissimilar to original viral concepts behind PPA or 'Network GPL') is 
quite different to many other initiatives.

Offering no internet access by default, guifi.net is a shared network transit 
service, a true network commons, documented and semi-automatically configured 
and monitored by an impressively comprehensive database and web front end 
tools accessible by participants with relatively little training required.

Not only are network components documented but also participants are 
encouraged to add services they wish to offer publically.

on documentation of services:

A discussion arose from this concerning the manual effort required to maintain 
such information as it scales.The WOS discussion and CML/CNML was mentioned, 
as were automatic service discovery techniques, especially zeroconf.

on differences, similarities, and history repeating:

As mentioned in a previous post, there were discussions about collisions 
between CWN style initiatives and over zealous commerical projects who have 
used aggressive opt-out approaches to listing regions covered by open 
networks as part of their greater 'branded' service. It's happened quite a 
few times over the last five years or so, and may well again. James and 
myself recounted one of a few meetings of community wireless network 
representatives around the world in Seattle some years back, as well as a 
semi-secretive "invite only" list, meta, that was formed in part to 
coordinate across different groups globally (including ways of reacting to 
such zealotry).

more communication:

Ramon underlined quite a few times the need for further shared learning, as 
each group grapples similar if not identical issues time and again.

And he's right.

shine brightly,

.tyranosaurus vortex