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.