Mesh/MeshApps
What sort of services would we like to integrate with the network? See also about local server choices.
Services
The network should provide secure communication services (email, contacts, calendar, phone) to create more incentive to be on the network. The services can be integrated into a user account distributed database with master-master replication and low latency (ex. Cassandra). The services will use existing open source projects.
- Radicale - a CalDAV (calendar) and CardDAV (contacts) server. (python)
- Village Telco - is an initiative to build low-cost community telephone network hardware and software that can be set up in minutes anywhere in the world. No mobile phone towers or land lines are required.
Ideas to consider:
- MaidSafe - a secure communications platform (charges money)
- OpenMAMA - a high performance middleware agnostic messaging API that interfaces with a variety of message oriented middleware systems
- an encrypted asynchronous messaging system to replace email
- a module to have collaborative documents, voting, and groups (or sub-groups)
- a module for peer to peer file sharing.
- a module for object-orientated tagging, shareable feeds.
- a module for feeds and posts, such as Trsst.
Utilities and Misc.
- Bulletin Board / Hyperlocal Craigslist
- General Local Map (eg; http://tidepools.co)
- Food Mapping (eg; http://ediblecities.org/)
- Community Asset Mapping (eg; Mycelia)
- Local Wiki (eg; http://oaklandwiki.org)
- Communication (eg; chat room, decentralized Twitter)
- Sensor Data (eg; Temperature, Seismic activity, air pollution)
- Location-aware social network (eg; http://dev.wlan-si.net/wiki/PiplMesh)
- Neocities for free user sites (eg; https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web)
- Use avahi to broadcast member-run local services, such as on a home laptop server.
- Turns out that Avahi works with windows: https://github.com/Byzantium/Byzantium/blob/master/porteus/avahi/etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf
- Crabgrass - a project out of riseup labs, a ruby rails application for community organizing. It's not the easiest to run your own instance, but very easy to sign up to their server (we.riseup.net)
- Anarchist Redmine
- Groundstation - twitter clone for n3rdz
- Git base
- QwebIRC is the webclient used by freenode
- How about Frontline SMS!
- Docker - an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application.
Databases and Servers
- CouchDB - I can tell you that it quickly becomes complicated to write multi-user app with CouchDB. Decent access control means that you need a database per user and likely a few extra databases. You then have to set all of these databases up to synchronize between each other which is further complicated by the limitations on what information is available by the limitations on how synchronization rules and filters can be written. There seem to be no good tools for managing/visualizing these complex relationships so you end up having to roll your own.
- PouchDB - a javascript based couchDB.
- Scuttlebutt - a data synchronization protocol, or a peer-to-peer replicatable data structure.
- TahoeLAFS - a decentralized database.
- Cassandra - a decentralized database that has benchmarked with the lowest latencies and has master-master replication.
- LevelDB - a fast and lightweight key/value database library.
- MongoDB - an open-source document database, a NoSQL database. Written in C++.
- Node.js - an HTTP server written in javascript.
Mapping
Personas
- Curator [ Individual who cares about data being right and available for the community ]
- Analyzer [ Wants to visualize data in context, overlays of data, how data changes ]
- Organizer/Activist [ wants to organize people around an issue, actionable outputs ]
- Consumer [ gets info from the system, but doesn’t give back ]
- Broadcaster/Reporter [ radio, streams, news, users/organizations who push into the system a lot ]
Use Cases
Leisure, Treasure Hunt, Animal Spotting, History / Science Plotting , Art/Design/Drawing, Mapping Secret/Weird stuff, Expression, Emotion
- Jordan is a 36-year old scientist and queer activist. Occasionally, he travels north to a 'radical fairy' retreat center on over 80 acres of land. He's undertaking a project to map out the diverse and undocumented biology and wildlife in this sacred area. For this, he would like a tool that would enable him to automatically map the coordinates, attach a picture, and include a comment about what it is, as well as the ability to add to social media (Facebook & Twitter).
Bulletin Board / Local Information sharing (jobs, events, etc) (people to people)
- Martin is a 35-year old Latino man who runs a website for displaying new job postings and opportunities for diverse, underserved populations in Oakland (eg; youth, veterans, and formerly incarcerated). Martin would like to easily transpose this data onto a searchable map that he could populate daily with new opportunities and programs.
Sensors: hardware-based [inputs & outputs]
- Naomi is a Midweatern 30-year old environmental activist concerned about the impact of fracking on the quality of water in her county. She's organizing a campaign to encourage fellow concerned homeowners to monitor changes and contaminants in air and water quality, seismic activity, radiation, and other potential environmental impacts of fracking.
Evidence Based Citizenship (crowdsourced data/reporting for an institution to solve, neighborhood to be aware of) (people to institutions)
- Alyssa is a 35-year old African-American woman working for the city government. Passionate about diversifying and expanding civic participation, she's been participating with Open Oakland to make civic data more accessible. She's working on an educational campaign for creating short videos explaining civic issues and how local government works.
Political Crisis Readiness (people to people, against institutions)
Contexts
Community Asset Mapping / Archiving
- Kiara is a 34-year-old African-American community organizer and activist interested in mapping the various organizations addressing digital divide issues, as well as available resources such as public computers, free training and education, and free wifi spots.
- Molly is a 26 year old community organizer working on Oakland Wiki, a website editable by anyone and dedicated to everything Oakland. She recently announced the launch of an oral history project, the end product of which would ideally be mapped onto specific areas and landmarks.
Community Hub (communications / sensors / input + output APIs )
- Ali is a 28-year old Iraqi-American and works to catalyze community organizations in the Middle East. He is currently collecting stories from hackerspaces in the form of comics, as well as a 'Sister Spaces' project to partner hackerspaces for sharing insights and infrastructure challenges.
- Luke is a 33-year-old Australian data and open government geek. Among the mappable projects he's working on with Open Oakland are storm drains (the Adopt-A-Drain project), crime data, vacant and blighted properties, and organizations and resources addressing the digital divide.
Organizing Tool (activists, security matters)
- Mateo is a 32-year old Latino father living in the San Antonio neighborhood in Oakland, CA. He is interested in the capabilities of a mesh network for streaming Creative Commons-licensed content to his neighbors (possibly using an Asterisk server) and providing a means for connecting the community both digitally and physically through an online neighborhood bulletin board. He has a strong interest in reaching out to local businesses with an 'everybody wins' model of free wifi through a mesh, with a map-based splash page for communicating with others in the network.
Crisis Readiness
- Jen is a 30-year-old Asian-American technologist and community organizer in East Oakland. Passionate about DIY education and grassroots community-building, she's interested in mapping DIY communities as well as available resources for crisis readiness (such as relief centers, tools, food, water and shelter).
- Alexis is a 29-year old African-American technologist interested in the potential for mesh networking to expand internet access in underserved areas and creating a resilient communications network for crisis readiness. She is especially passionate about issues surrounding access to technology, and would like to see underserved communities participating in putting themselves on the map.