devlog

While attending the MDCN mobile/locative arts meetup in Montreal, i was glad to be able to spend time with Mike Lenczner, of the local community wireless network ile sans fil, and some of the people he’s galvanised around him. (Montreal is apparently an island, much in the way that Portsmouth is; unnoticeably.)

I was hugely impressed with what ile sans fil have done with WifiDog, the authenticating captive portal they wrote because NoCatSplash didn’t cut it at the time; it still lacks auth, though wifidog lacks an open mode, which it needs if only for a failsafe for them. We share philosophies of other peoples’ data-providing web services, joined with RSS. They have some nice presence-oriented pieces in their captive portal, a real multivalent benefit of requiring people to log in.

But what impressed me somehow more, was the social connectivity in their network, the enthusiasm of local small businesses for what they are doing. Most of their 35 hotspots are on locally owned and run commercial premises. The potential for a data source like OpenGuides could really open up the appearance of value to businesses and to people. Even the local exchange trading systems seem to be connectable, plausible.

These past few days Saul has been on a factfinding mission to Denmark to meet the people from freifunk, Berlin’s flourishing and hacker-oriented wireless network. They have a mesh of about 100 nodes covering the centre of Berlin, and are now releasing an easy-to-use, flashable version of their OLSR mesh routing software based on OpenWRT, the linksys linux distribution.

They also have some impressive web services for node and network reporting and analysis, and some great maps using the data from the BBBike open mapping project, at olsrexperiment.de. They can install a new node in under a minute.

An OpenWRT based distribution combining all this stuff for wirelesslondon could be days, no more than weeks, away. The potential, especially to get into the virtuous circle with the Open Guide to London, and to produce something that could be quickly and interestingly rolled out by any local open wireless group; i feel excited by that potential seeming close to real.