Mesh/04 July 2013

Welcome to the Oakland Mesh Meeting: Freedom Edition.

... liberating ourselves from the telecoms since January 2013!

Attendees

• Max B, Juul, Jenny, Jordan, Mitar, Adrian

Announcements

• Crowdfunding campaign is doing great with 26 days remaining: $2,053.00 (WePay), $56.92 (BitCoin)
• Juul has started putting together bylaws for 501c3 status! - https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/Bylaws
• International Community Wireless Summit in Berlin Oct. 2-4: http://2013.wirelesssummit.org/
  • Jenny submitted a workshop proposal and applied for travel funding

Report-backs

• Mitar from wlan-slovenia:

   ** Must be strategic and have many nodes
   ** Abundance of fiber / connectivity
   ** Major difficulty was getting beyond the techies and reaching the masses
   ** Primary selling point was to open wireless networks and choosing how much of one's bandwidth they can share, enabling connectivity across the whole city.
   ** Protected by connecting through a VPN tunnel to central servers.
   ** Get folks to deploy their own nodes - so they don't think of the mesh as a service provided, but rather a DIY endeavor
   ** Lead by example, the village / neighborhood will follow
   ** Point of centralization is the two guys with root access to the server who administer the nodes, firmware upgrades, etc (plz correct if incorrect)
   ** Focus on scalability
   ** Made a simple GUI for indicating router and getting an image instantly created for it

Notes

• Brainstorm on name for the mesh!
  • COM - Cutting Out the Middleman
  • OWN - Oakland Wireless Network
  • Mitar recommends hacing the name by unaffiliated with the hackerspace and non-geographically-specific
• Tax Status:

   ** 501(c)4 - non-tax-deductible
   ** 501(c)3 - can't do party politics (but can be political? - EFF is a 501(c)3!)

• Social pressure to allocate bandwidth to the mesh, sharing connectivity
• Adrian suggests, owning the first 100 nodes, with gradual replacement as the network grows to a full-on decentralized model
• Our model as a 501c3 is to serve as a facilitator for the mesh.

Old Action Items

• Add your potential node to the map! - http://meshmap.sudoroom.org (we now have 23 potential nodes. keep em comin!)
• Get batman-adv running at Hearth node, mesh with LiveLabs node
• Find some tall rooftops for Adrian to test TDMA point-to-multipoint links
• Research 501(c)x statuses: https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Tax_Structure_Research - Marc did.

New Action Items

• Reach out to the Berkeley folks to aim to reach the Internet Archive Richmond node (jenny)
• Blog post on our setup of the first two nodes and describing the hardware we received (jenny)
• Let's make a flier! Who can help? (jenny will start a thread on the list)
• Next reportback on an active mesh - Jenny on OTI/Commotion
• Research resilient ethernet cable (Adrian?)
  • Tune the OpenWRT settings on the new nodes for RTS / CTS and ACK timing
• Name brainstorm! Add to the "Naming" page here: https://sudoroom.org/wiki/Mesh/Naming
• Website (contingent on name)
• Splash page design