Metrics

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Personal Telco at FreeGeek, and a fellow asked, "How's that doing?" I didn't know how to answer him, but the question got me thinking. Here are some ideas I came up with that would be a fun -- and dare I hope, meaningful -- way to assess PTP's growth. ThePlan lists a few measures I mostly don't care for - a meeting with 20 people isn't necessarily better than one with eight, more email isn't always better than less, etc. Maybe we could come up with some numbers, and update those numbers when the facts change. -- DanRasmussen 2012-04-02 15:12:53

Measures of Success

Maximum Distance to a PTP Node

You're in Portland, Oregon city limits, as far from a Personal Telco node as possible. How far are you? How long will it take you to walk/bicycle there? Has this distance gone up since it was last calculated? What can we do to decrease it? I would love to be able to say, "Wherever you are in PDX, you're never more than a 20 minute walk from the nearest node."

Maximum Distance to Open Wifi

Same as above, but with known open access points (ideally ones whose owners have committed to staying open and available 24 hours, not filtering content, etc). See CoreIdeas.

Electricity Usage of Nodes

(number wifi AccessPoints in PDX) x (electricity usage of each)

versus

(guess as to number of wifi AccessPoints in PDX actually required if neighbors shared) x (electricity usage of each)

Another fun calculation: how much would each of these measures cost, in 2012 (your year here) electricity costs. And how much carbon dioxide does that keep out of the air?

Environmental Impact of All Those Access Points

If the manufacturing of AccessPoints is anything like that of other electronic devices, it:

is toxic
wastes lots of water
requires assembly by people making little money, in non-stellar conditions?
finances murder and human indecency? See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/13/AR2010121304571_pf.html
furthers ongoing cycle of planned obsolescence

It'd be interesting to see an estimation of the impact of each house, business, room in every apartment in the city having its own wireless router (getting a new one every x YEARS) versus the impact of the minimum number of devices required to blanket the city with wifi.

Number of Active Nodes

How many nodes do we have? How much has that number changed in the last quarter/year/(relevant time period)?

These two commands tell you how many active nodes we have - if Nodes contains an accurate count.

wget --no-check-certificate https://personaltelco.net/map/wiki.php
grep "marker_active_small" wiki.php | wc -l

Result running this on 3. April 2012 gives result: 91. Any way to go back in time and get snapshots at various points? -- DanRasmussen