devlog

I find it startling that Mike from ile sans fil has so recently expressed self-doubt about the work they are doing on local services on open wireless networks.

Our conversations since have convinced me that we have something more promising, more nearly ready to go that i could have dreamt. For some time i’ve had a feeling of working in isolation, though with support from earle and openguides, outreach and inspiration from Saul, free software backbone from Schuyler… oh, terrible isolation…

I’ve been honoured to meet someone with a powerful, cotangent and in some ways quite different vision from our own, but one that will mesh nicely with our tools; should enable some of the calendar sharing / annotation service at EVNT to really come to life; with an awareness of the whole ’social software’ complex of system ideas that i, soured by the hype, tend to have written off; i’ve been encouraged to see a whole new practical application set. A lot of which we can do very simply with FOAF, using RSS as a carrier; some of which we could quickly extend to media sharing applications like v2v; as well as the idealised sharing of physical goods and services.

when you sign up on the web for the wireless nodedb service, that
creates you an account on the actual network, and when you connect to it,
you see a portal page of local information about where you are etc,
but when you log in with that same account, you get access to a pile
of RSS based services and you get to see the people around you and
potentially the stuff emerging from their RSS based services. this is
basically just a web application, but connected to the wireless auth
gateway and potentially runnable on a purely local network without
backhaul. add jabber…

less writing words, more writing code, required…