[wsfii-discuss] Some thoughts about tonight meeting in London

Thu Sep 28 00:00:21 UTC 2006

I'm in the train back to Reading after having a meeting with a few 
people from London (free2air.net, spontaneous networking, consume...). I 
don't mention names just because I don't remember some of them! :(

That was a heavy and interesting discussion for me, with people who are 
almost dinosaurs (in the good sense, I mean, since the origins of the 
wireless comms paradigm) in the activism for the free networks.I just 
want a share my thoughts trying to obtain a summary emphasizing the 
relevant points we have talk about before falling to sleep.

-To make somewhat global happens, a lots of things must occur 
simultaneously in many areas, starting from people, knowledge, 
resources, etc. That's not a short term task. Also not affordable to 
anyone individually and even for a Local Community. But still makes 
sense and could happens. Maybe not as fast as we would like, but steps 
forward are being done.

-WSFII is right now the place to share globally thoughts (like this) and 
also projects/ideas/experiences. If we miss a place to get in touch, we 
do simply does not exist as a global initiative, and it fits perfectly 
in the WSFII spirit. If the list gets too much traffic maybe then will 
makes sense to fork between other lists, i.e. for technical development, 
users, politics, whatever which makes sense, but not before this becomes 
necessary, don't care: very likely will happens spontaneously if really 
becomes a need.

-After Dharmsala event, could be nice to have one in Europe. Lots of us 
will miss Dharmsala because of the logistics that Dharmsala implies. 
Barcelona area could be a good place: We already run annually a local 
event for Catalonia (we cal it SAX), we can just "upgrade" it to be a 
WSFII event. Spain also might be a good place to plan a travel for many 
Europeans if we do schedule it for the early next summer.

-Trust relationships and honest unfortunately are still very basic. 
Things like WSFII events, Wizards of WOS, Summer Camps etc. helps a lot 
but the story doesn't have to end there. Open discussions are another 
key. Lastly but not last, free/neutral networking concept might have a 
few variations, but still makes sense to get some consensus of which are 
the basics, PPA and WCL might no be very friendly but helps on that 
direction, without such things, we are always in danger to be spoiled by 
somebody with some lack of ethics and happy to bring confusion into the 
field. There are already a few examples of that which I don't like to 
mention just to avoid to bring them more free into the crawlers for 
free. Those are just distinct stories.

-Sharing mechanisms, publishing information and solutions, self 
discovery of services, etc have been the most discussed topics. Those 
things are critical to make free networks a exists, survive and scale, 
which means gain momentum and build success. We have to be always hungry 
in those directions, never happy enough. They are key since we will 
never have enough resources, so it's important to be inspired while 
administrating them. That also means although we can discuss many ideas 
and visions, we can't never miss the real world and be somewhat 
pragmatic. Execution counts a lot, everybody executes what they like or 
is motivated for, as long as we are able to share every single/small 
execution, either for sharing as a common brick, or to make it reusable 
elsewhere, that will help us in building the big thing.

And some of the bricks could be:
-Standards for network description in some universal interfaces, 
regardless of language/cultural barriers. That could be done in various 
ways, like XML. Before today I was referring to this concept by 
"nodexchange", Alexei pointed that might be better understood if we call 
it "CML" (Community Markup Language), which means the ability to 
describe a whole networks with all its contents.
-Global mapping resources.
-Services which might be self announced into the network without having 
to be provisioned by any application.

Ok. The train got into Reading. It's 00:10am already, not that bad given 
that stopped for a while (I though that British Railways where near to 
perfect, maybe I was not lucky today and I've got the exception). Now 
it's time to go to sleep, I'll have a hard job tomorrow... but lets post 
this, and feel free to reply either to better summarize concepts or 
point anything that I might missed. I'm just going a send this as soon 
as I get connected at the Hotel, so expect a few typos/missed points here.

Ramon.-