AdamShand, TerrySchmidt and MattPeterson will all be talking at the Eye for Wireless (http://www.eyeforwireless.com/) conference (different talks) in Austin this December. Here I'm putting some ideas as I think of them about them for the presentation. Adam's talk is titled "Community Networks and Why You Should Care".
Presentation Draft
- Introduction
Adam Shand & Terry Schmidt
- Talk is a little obsolete now but ...
- Time for questions at the end.
- What are Community Networks?
Whatever we want them to be
- Publicly accessible
- Free as in freedom (hopefully as in beer)
- Maintained by the user
- Evolving (802.11b for now) ...
- Who Is Building Them?
- IT Professionals
- Geek Hobbists
- Have spare time and disposable income
- Enjoy doing this (like working on the house or car)
- Commercial Cooperation
- Building user interest and encouraging early adoption
- Encouraging low cost technology
- Different markets
- Hot Spot vs. Residential Areas
- Grass roots market probably wouldn't be interested in commerical access (at least to start with)
- Do It Yourself
- Educating end users
- Building cheap access equipment
- Innovation in access control, resource control and scaling technology
- Politics
Building network equivelent of the FreeSoftwareFoundation
- Helping bridge the digital divide
Internet access for something other then money (FreeGeek)
- Future Sucess
- Has to be cheap and easy to participate
- Has to be open to the public
- Has to be able to grow and scale organically
- Has to be pervasive
- Has to be end to end (no NAT)
- More Information
Check out http://www.afcn.net/