Freifunkblog

The OpenWrt team (Cph) has announced a new version of its Linux distribution for embedded wireless devices named "OpenWrt Kamikaze 808 Release". I talked to Felix Fietkau already at the WCW. Unfortunately we did not have the time to do an interview at the end. But Cyrus from freifunk Halle gave a short showcase of his interface (in German). The OpenWrt team was also impressed by it and they now announce the enclosure of the Luci interface officially. Congratulations Cyrus!

It has been quite a while since OpenWrt had a new Kamikaze release. The developer team has decided that it is time to get things straight and focus on a new release. This release have the official name: OpenWrt Kamikaze 808 Release.

The schedule will look like this:
*Last day in July - final release candidate: 808 RC-1 808 RC-1 will be a feature freeze, and all changes after this point will be bug fixes.
*Last day in August - final release: OpenWrt Kamikaze 808 Release.

OpenWrt Kamikaze 808 Release will focus on bringing the following:
- Firewall rewrite
- Broadcom 47xx running reliably with the new Kernel, not including wifi
- IMQ and Traffic shaping tested with newer kernels, especially 2.6.25
- Sysupgrade for more platforms (x86 is tested again)
- The new web interface (LuCI, Lua Configuration Interface)
- Attention towards the integration of security updates
- Package maintaining and updates between releases
- Testing, testing and lots of testing...

The 808 Release will also include support for several new platforms/targets. (http://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=69873 )

The Journal "Community informatics" has published a special about Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest. Authors include Michael Gurstein, Alison Powell, Sascha D. Meinrath, Marco Adria, Hanna Hye-Na Cho, Laura Forlano, Andrea H Tapia, Julio Angel Ortiz, Kim Dara, Seán Ó Siochrú, Vidyut Samanta, Chase Laurelle Alexandria Knowles, Jeff Burke, Fabian Wagmister, Deborah Estrin, Ermanno Pietrosemoli, Andrew Clement, Amelia Potter,  Alisha Bhagat.

This special issue documents the state of the art in research on community wireless applications, and presents assessments of community wireless projects in a variety of local contexts: from large urban centers in North America to rural locations in Asia and Latin America. Together, the papers and field notes in this special issue reflect on a community-centric approach to communications infrastructure development. These works describe the challenges – both practical and theoretical – that face community wireless networking, as well as the implications many of these projects have to support social and economic justice around the globe.

The papers in this special issue demonstrate that community-based approaches to Wifi development are part of a broader integration of technology, organizational capacity, and local culture. Social goals are part of most community Wifi projects, and integrating these goals and the technical structures of Wifi networks is part of what makes many community Wifi projects successful. Both full papers and field notes explore this integration and focus on various facets of the community wireless networking movement.

The papers included in this issue explore different theoretical approaches that help situate community wireless networking as social and technical phenomena. Adria provides a meta-theoretical discussion of how Wifi networks reconfigure space and time -- using the medium theory of McLuhan and Virilio to suggest that Wifi networks have the potential to integrate local geographical and temporal experiences.

The other papers use empirical approaches to assess the social aspects of community wireless networking. Tapia and Ortiz explore the claims made by operators of municipal-community networks that these projects are addressing the digital divide. Using a textual analysis of claims made in documents including “press releases, requests for proposals, letters of intent, and other official policy documents,” as well as interviews with key informants in US municipal-community projects, they interrogate the extent to which networks facilitate meaningful digital inclusion.

Both Cho and Forlano explore the social aspects of community wireless networking in more detail: Cho focusing on the development of networks and Forlano on their use. Cho reveals how the development of community wireless networks (CWNs) builds social capital for the participants. She develops the concept of “place-peer community” to explain how Wifi projects define “community.” Cho also describes how contributions to community wireless networks help to develop ‘civic bandwidth’ among their contributors. Like Tapia and Oritz, she identifies CWNs as developing a discourse that connects the development of digital information and communication technologies with efforts to improve communities.

Forlano explores the new social relationships created through the everyday use of community-based Wifi networks, examining the gap between media representations of Wifi as an “anytime, anywhere” solution and the socio-cultural practices of people using free Wifi hotspots in New York City. As she discovers, freelance workers use Wifi hotspots to create temporary working environments that eliminate some of the isolation of working without a fixed office, while providing a basic infrastructure including network connectivity and electrical power. These Wifi hotspots support communities of mobile, flexible workers who establish relationships with a particular place and its people. Together with Cho’s insights about the social capital mobilized through the process of developing community Wifi networks, this suggests that Wifi hotspots may have a unique role to play in redefining the experiences of community in urban areas.

The field notes in this issue offer a window into the realities of local experiments with Wifi technology. The impacts of the projects they document depend on the local political context (Clement), the community’s capacity (Dara, Dimanche, and O Siochru; Bhagat), the potential for community and industry partnerships to create new ways for community members to gather data and to aggregate it (Samanta), and how changing our assumptions about the role of wireless infrastructure can open up new opportunities for affordable broadband (Pietrosemoli).

These notes highlight how local contexts influence what is considered the “public interest” and how community wireless projects can best serve the general public. For example, Clement criticizes the Toronto Hydro Wireless project, considered a technical success, because its governance structure forces the network to be operated for-profit rather than as a public service. Samanta provides an outline of some potential social uses for an experimental wireless network that could aggregate data from numerous wireless devices. Some suggested uses of this network include collecting ambient audio data that, when mapped, could provide quality of life indicators.

In the global South, the public interest is served by the communication and applications made possible by wireless networks established in previously un-served areas. In these contexts as well, important challenges also emerge. Bhagat assesses the results of a mesh network built in Mahavilachchiya village where a local entrepreneur developed a wireless network as an extension of a computer school where local children learned ICT skills. This Wifi connectivity project extended internet access to homes, and encouraged more local residents to use the internet. However, Bhagat also notes that connecting the village to the internet may have negative impacts as well: introducing new forms of media and new social expectations to the village and disrupting historical cultural norms.

Dara, Dimanche and O Siochru explore how local political and social contexts impact the design and deployment phase of one local wireless network. From the challenging context of Cambodia, they report on the first phase of the I-REACH project, a distributed mesh network providing internet connectivity and local media using solar-powered devices. The project’s challenges in obtaining permission from local government, sourcing material, and recruiting qualified local staff and contractors underscores the notion that community-based infrastructure implementation is a social (and an institutional) as well as a technical endeavor.

Ermanno Pietrosemoli and his international team of Wifi researchers have deployed wireless links spanning hundreds of kilometers. By proofing out a methodology for creating low-cost, long-distance Wifi, Pietrosemoli forces us to question the notion that Wifi is just for local networking. As a potential backhaul solution, Wifi may offer an exceptional value for communities and constituencies that would not otherwise be able to afford broadband connectivity.

Across these paper and notes, a common thread linking the articles is the importance of establishing local strategies for leveraging wireless technologies in the public interest. (Alison Powell, Sascha D. Meinrath, Introduction to the Special Issue: Wireless Networking for Communities, Citizens and the Public Interest, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2008, http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/490/389)

Saverio from the Italian Ninux community has now published a video interview Daniel Paufler and I conducted with them at the Wireless Community Weekend in Berlin. Thank you very much for the great montaggio! It is real fun to watch!

Direct Link: http://www.vimeo.com/1052320

In Berlin, at C-Base, people from wireless communities all around Europe meet to share ideas and experiences. See this interview by Mario Behling with free networks activists from Ninux.org and Freifunk.net

Thee free wireless community is growing and for some time I tried to keep a list of communities on the Global Newswire Site at http://global.freifunk.net/free_global_wireless_community. The bigger the community gets the more difficult it becomes. Instead of maintaining a seperate list of freifunk communities I will join the maintainers of a list of communities in the English Wikipedia, who have created a wiki page here: List of wireless community networks by region.

Eine Idee, die auch in freien Netzen genutzt werden kann: Bereits 2004 haben Peter K. Ibach, Tobias Hübner und Martin Schweigert von der HU Berlin auf dem Chaos Communication Congress 2004 ein Paper über kooperative Positionsbestimmung mit Hilfe von WLAN veröffentlicht. Auf dem Gründerkongress in Berlin stellten die Entwickler die neueste Version der Software vor, die aus dieser Idee entstanden ist: MagicMap

Mit Hilfe der "Karte des Rumtreibers" konnte Harry Potter die Positionen aller Personen in und um Schloss Hogwarts überblicken. Wir haben eine solche "magische Karte" zur Positionsbestimmung mobiler Systeme basierend auf WLAN-Signalstärke-Auswertung entwickelt. MagicMap ist eine reine Softwarelösung, die bei den mobilen Systemen außer einer konventionellen WLAN-Ausstattung keine weitere Hardware erfordert. Die WLAN Access Points können beliebig verteilt sein und es sind weder Eingriffe an der AP-Hardware noch an der Software nötig. Unsere Versuche am Uni-Campus Berlin-Adlershof zeigen in typischen Büroumgebungen eine Positionierungsgenauigkeit im einstelligen Meter-Bereich. Die eigene Sichtbarkeit unterliegt dabei der vollen Kontrolle der Peer-Knoten, die den Zugriff auf ihre Positionsinformation individuell festlegen können. Die Software steht zum freien Download zur Verfügung und kann für Experimente oder Anwendungen genutzt werden. (1. Mai 2008, http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/rok/MagicMap/)

Das Projekt wird am Lehrstuhl Rechnerorganisation und Kommunikation des Instituts für Informatik der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin umgesetzt. Die Software steht unter der GNU General Public License (GPL) und ist bei Sourceforge für Windows und Linux verfügbar. Das Wiki mit vielen weiteren Infos ist hier: http://wiki.informatik.hu-berlin.de/nomads/index.php/MagicMap

Mit der Idee lassen sich Locations Based Services umsetzen. Auch in Räumen, wo die Positionsbestimmung von Personen und Gegenständen sinnvoll ist, kann die Software hilfreich sein, z.B. in Kraftwerken, auf Schiffen oder möglicherweise auf einer Mondbasis :-).

The countdown for the Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 conference is running and cven is haevily working on the final preparation.

As of now we have 48 people who have put their name on the participants list on the wiki at http://wiki.freifunk.net/WCW08:participants and many more who have confirmed their participation to us directly. People are joining us in the upcoming days from Freifunk communities from all over Germany and from communities in other countries. Our friends from Italy will be represented by the two well known free wireless evangelists Nino and Saverio from ninux.org and we expect Jesper Svarre from Denmark with a group of 25 people from the Association of Computer Professionals.

The WCW is a self organized conference and community gathering. We will have a community track with communities presenting themselves, e.g. from Bastian from the Weimar Freifunkers and from Keks from the community in Berlin North-East.

On the other side there will be technical talks from developers of OpenWRT, the B.A.T.M.A.N. routing protocol developers Marek Lindner and Simon Wunderlich; Thomas Hirsch - the developer of the freimap and a presentation of sven-ola - the main developer of the Freifunk Firmware,

Further panels cover subjects like Web 2.0 in the Freifunk Universe (by me, Mario Behling) or Open Networks and the current law by Dr. Reto Mantz, who has recently published a book on "Offene Netze und Recht",

Many opportunities to meet with some of the most exciting people in the international freifunk sphere! Open Mesh advocat Electra will take part in the WCW and after returning from the Open Tech Summit in Taiwan Juergen Neumann will present the latest advancements on Open Wireless Hardware. 

Last but not least we are happy to welcome participants from the academic scene coming from the TU Berlin and the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute.

Join us at the Freifunki Wireless Community Weekend in Berlin from May 2-4! Check out the latest updates on http://wiki.freifunk.net/Wireless_Community_Weekend_2008

Freifunker Rene (ursprünglich aus Rostock) ist schon seit einer Weile in Indien unterwegs. Nun hat er ein Interview mit "The Hindu" gegeben und berichtet über seine "Free Wireless"-Aktivitäten und die Idee hinter Freifunk.

“The idea is to network neighbourhoods wirelessly using consumer equipment and share broadband Internet over it. This ‘infrastructure idea’ has great potential in the world’s rural and semi-urban areas where broadband Internet has not caught up,” explains René.

(Mission Connectivity, The Hindu, 15.3.2008, Vishnu Menom M, http://www.hindu.com/mp/2008/03/15/stories/2008031552030200.htm)

Und er selbst zeigt sich auch ganz erfreut darüber, was herausgekommen ist bei dem Interview.

Großartig, und diesmal wirklich und ehrlich, war mein letzter Presse-Auftritt. Kam neulich ne email mit ner anfrage ob ich nich ein Interview für die Wochenendbeilage von ‘Hindu’ geben kann. Wenn sich Pressefritzen melden werd ich natürlich skeptisch, aber die Zeitung ist gut, wohl die brauchbarste Tageszeitung hier, also zugesagt. Dann mit Vishnu getroffen der von Gopal - den ich neulich in Delhi getroffen hatte - über mich erfahren hatte. Netzwerke. Funktionieren. Und, Vishnu ist ein angenehmer Zeitgenosse. Er studiert Elektro-Engineering und schreibt nebenbei für die Zeitung, um später mal nachweisen zu können das er mehr als Elektrobasteln kann. Und gut hat er das gemacht, wow. Okok, ein paar kleine Details kommen nicht hin, aber was solls. Und wieso hab ich eigentlich ne skurrile Brille? (http://blog.absorb.it/2008/03/15/mission-connectivity/)

[via Daniel P.]

At the CeBIT I had the chance to talk to some fantastic folks of direct open embedded systems, a new Latvian company that is producing WLAN devices based on the GNU/Linux distributions like OpenWRT, OpenEmbedded and FlashSYS Linux.

Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1295574371890938537

In the video they present their devices and some show cases as well as FlashSYS, their own web based firmware for small router computers.

FlashSYS environment is a cross-operating system clent-server environment that allows developers to use existing web development skills (HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, Flash, SQLite, and Lua) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for an embedded system with a very small footprint. (http://openrb.com)

Most of the free and open source companies presented their products in hall 5, which was packed with crowds of people. You can get an idea when you hear the background noise in the video. The interest in free and open source technologies is amazing and ever increasing.

Morgen, am 27. Dezember beginnt der 24. Chaos Communication Congress (24c3) im Berliner Congress Center am Alexanderplatz unter dem Motto Volldampf voraus!

Der Kongress dauert bis zum 30. Dezember. Die Freifunk-Community trifft sich hier unter anderem in der Embedded Corner auf der Ebene C im ersten Stock neben der Treppe. Im Wiki haben sich bereits Freifunker aus Bern, Hamburg, Leipzig, Rostock sowie der Berliner Initiativen aus der City, vom Kiezfunk und aus Berlin Nordost angekündigt. Themen werden die aktuelle Firmware, die Erfahrungen mit dem neuen Routingprotokoll B.A.T.M.A.N. und die Idee der Open Hardware Prism sein.

Wir freuen uns auch auf interessante Zusammentreffen mit "wireless groups from all over", Gnu Radio, Decentral applications/protocols, Openembedded, Opemmoko, Settopfoo und vielen anderen.

Freifunker sitzen nicht nur vor dem Computer und basteln Antennen. Echte Freifunker klettern auch schon mal auf Dächer und Türme. Ein Video von Julian Percy (Kamera) und cyper (Schnitt) von Visual Berlin zeigen uns das jetzt sehr anschaulich.

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpO7LEBud1o