Last Preparations for the Freifunk Wireless Community Weekend 2008 in Berlin

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

Freifunk Application for Google Summer of Code

Some fantastic work was done during the last days working with some great folks to get an application for freifunk networks for the Google Summer of Code out. Our goal is to get new students excited about the idea of free networks and to join us in the development process and contribute code. We have formed an international group to get this application done. Besides talking to our developers in Germany I have been busily speaking to ninux.org from Italy, guifi.net from Spain and France Wireless in order to recruit our most talented and active developers as mentors for the programme. Not everyone was able to give me a "yes" yet, but we have formed a great team to start off and we are happy to welcome even more prospective mentors from other free wireless networks from around the world.

Our starting team of mentors is:

  • Sven-Ola Tücke (http://ff-firmware.sf.net, Freifunk Firmware)
  • Alexander Morlang (Alx, p2p in freifunk networks, Fraunhofer, Germany)
  • Thomas Hirsch (freimap, Fraunhofer, Germany)
  • Felix Fietkau (OpenWRT, Europe)
  • Frithjof Hammer (Freifunk BNO, Germany)
  • Harald Schioeberg (t-labs, Germany)
  • Ramon Navarro Bosch (Guifi.net, Spain, former GSoC Plone student)
  • Xavi Martinez (Guifi.net, Spain)
  • Aaron Kaplan (OLSR.org, Austria)
  • Francesco Saverio Proto (ninux.org, Italy)
  • Mikolas Bingemer (Freifunk-Hannover.de, Germany, head of Software development of medium sized enterprise)
  • Jo-Philipp Wich (leipzig.freifunk.net, Freifunk Leipzig Firmware, Germany)
  • Andrea Detti is full researcher and adjoined Professor at the School of Telecommunications Engineering of the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" (Italy)

The backup organization administrator is Mario Behling (me), (Freifunkblog, perspektive89.com, Germany)

My idea is that we would have mentors for students who would maybe even be able to meet them locally. As we find already more than 170 free wireless communities worldwide on the global freifunk newswire, there is a chance we could do this in a lot of cases.

Freifunk serves as an umbrella for all the local projects here. We use the Freifunk-Wiki for our coordination. We started to collect ideas for possible student projects here already as well. Currently there are:

  • Multimedia Streaming in Mesh Networks / Porting Obamp to C++
  • Passive + Active Measurement in Mesh Networks / Porting OpenIMP probes to OpenWRT
  • Traffic Flow Visualization / IPFIX DataSource for freimap
  • Mesh Node Status Monitoring / SNMP DataSource for freimap
  • Service Discovery in Mesh Networks / Avahi DataSource for freimap
  • Service Control Module for freimap
  • Topology visualization / B.A.T.M.A.N and olsrd routing decision recovery for freimap
  • Database output for freimap
  • Antenna placement information elements in freifunk map data
  • Search in Wireless Mesh Networks – Yacy
  • Search in Wireless Mesh Networks – Nutch/Lucene
  • Peer-to-peer file sharing applications in Wireless Mesh Networks
  • Developing a Freifunk Theme for CMS
  • VoIP phoning in Freifunk Mesh Networks
  • Porting Freifunk to EeePC
  • Freifunk Webinterface for OpenWrt Kamikaze
  • more ideas are welcome…

After the application of Freifunk is accepted, prospective students have two weeks to apply at the summer of code programme. We hope our application will be accepted and we will soon see new
students contributing to the code base of our projects. We are looking forward to have students participating on an ongoing basis in the free wireless freifunk
networks all over the world.