Mesh/21 October 2014

Visit from Ninux

They collaborate with fusolab. Have uplinks with two other ISPs. They give Ninux some IPv4 and bandwidth, They tell people to not think of them as their primary ISP, but maybe as a backup internet connection or a place to access services. Have been documenting more recently. wiki.ninux.org/Guide (their documentation) is divided into levels based on knowledge of user. They keep one document for theory and one for practice. Outreach across Italy presenting their project as wel as projects elsewhere (Freifunk, Slovenia, etc): Linux Days:

Participants, not users. "our network doesn't have users, it has participants" Their participants are mostly enthusiasts, hackers, hams, technologists, engineers, developers, philosophers Rome (many cities) -> Piza -> Southern Italy/Sicily -> Florence -> Bologna -> Venice

Cultural difference from north to south
Different communities have different cultures around eg sharing internet (Rome is more inclined to share)
Must be careful not to promise internet connectivity - people will expect customer service, no downtime, etc
In Ninux we dream of a culture where to connect to each other you just put up an antenna, and people are excited to use local services
- This idea more popular in Europe than the US
- People more distrusting in the US
ISPs donated bandwidth and IP addresses to the network
- First was an ISP that was originally part of Ninux, then forked - so the ISP was in some ways indebted :)
  - In turn, the ISP has a team of techies who can be hired to help on a freelance basis
- Another bigger ISP whose founder really believed in the project
Now 4 of the Ninux folks work full-time for the ISP that had Ninux testing their IPv6 network (Unidata)
Federico works for a small nonprofit that works with municipalities to set up free wifi
Many projects out of Google Summer of Code - only some continued to be maintained / relevant
Got some funding from CONFINE to do some specific stuff - paid a researcher (statistical analysis of network)

Use many diferent routing protocols - batman-adv, OLSR, BGP (to link the 'islands' together)

OpenWRT or AirOS
"Ground routing" inside the house - bridging devices
Linux boxes w/ pfsense, ubiquiti, high-power tp-links
Battle over using OpenWRT or stock, people concerned over the warrenty broken w/ installing OpenWRT
Hotspots w/ splash page explaining the project
Services served from home that can be reached from outside
- eg OwnCloud, Jabber

Advises that we just start making nodes and links, blog and go to events

Anarchistic IP address allocation tool
Looking for a more automatic solution

Unique aspects of sudomesh:

   * Create something that folks don't need to be tech-savvy to use
   * Create the whole package - documentation from organization to tutorials, social to technical
   * Want to address the issue of scale that seems to plague the other networks we've seen
   * Goals: For sharing internet connectivity, creating a local network, creating a highly-replicable package
   * Benefits: Provides an extra access point for your house, shares bandwidth with the entire network, 
   provides connectivity to the mesh and mesh services

Call for more communication and collaboration between the various mesh projects around the world. Athens:

   * Splash page telling you what you can do, some links, list of services including some proxies. Click on a proxy link and it tells you how to set it up in your browser or email client.
   * A bunch of different groups/factions

Guifi:

   * With Guifi, you would make a connection through one of the local ISPs, call and ask for a node and/or service.
   * Guifi is much less coordinated - lots of little groups that may meet up, but not everybody knows each other. The Guifi foundation pays some people to work on some stuff. One of their current projects is building a data center.
   * Is Guifi a community network or an ISP? They've found a sustainable model that allows them to grow and be successful. It's a very heterogeneous network that includes community and mesh networks.

Freifunk:

   * Focus on access, needs
   * Hippies with knowledge about how the network works (Leipzig)
   * Fragmented a bit a few years ago, but now many new groups are forming
   * Got some funding to work on municipal wifi
   * Lots of local groups that are pretty decentralized
   * Mario helped get a lot of GSoC grants

Funkfeuer:

   * Also got some funding - had problems w/ those who were paid and those who weren't

Common Spaces:

   * Battlemesh as community of communities
   * Community wireless as a movement

Resources:

   * Wireless Common Manifesto - http://wiki.ninux.org/WirelessCommonsManifesto
   * Pico Peering Agreement
   * DIYISP.org
   * CWN Summit list, Battlemesh list, hh