Welcome to the Personal Telco's Monthly Meeting Wednesday Novemberer 19th @ Urban Grind Coffee

• 6:00PM - Introduction to Personal Telco for new comers
• 6:30PM - Meeting begins

• DarrinEden is the group director

• Scribe: Sam Churchill

Internet Simulcast Information

The IRC channel for the meeting is on server irc.freenode.net at channel #ptp.

The Photos of the meeting are [http://www.personaltelco.net/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=November-2003 on the PTP Photo Gallery]

This meetings audio is NOT being broadcast by KeeganQuinn with [http://thebasement.org/ The Basement Productions]. Streaming server URL: http://personaltelco.net:8000/status.xsl BR TomHiggins is recording a video.

Recordings of past meetings are archived: http://ptp.thebasement.org/meetings/

LIVE MEETING NOTES

November 19th, 2003:

6:00 pm:

LIVE MEETING NOTES: November 19th, 2003:

6:00 pm: About 40 people are gathering at Urban Grind for the monthly meeting. Nigel Ballard and Darin Eden, president of Personal Telco are at table in the front of the room here we go:

DarrinEden : Welcome remarks.

NigelBallard: Introduces self and asks new people to introduce themselves. About 3 people introduced themselves.

NigelBallard: Discusses the SuperNode site at the EcoTrust Building in the Pearl District. It serves Hot Lips Pizza, Panagonia, and other shops in the building as well as Jamison Square about a block away. It's connected via T-1 and uses a couple of Cisco 1200s.

NigelBallard: Shows a new HP box with two, 200 mW radios for bridging. Not much more information the box looks like a production mode. Nigel mentions a new 14 page magazine on restaurants in Portland. PTP (Nigel) was interviewed and is on the front cover. There will be 12,000 copies distributed tomorrow downtown.

DarrinEden : Next agenda reading of minutes from last month. Asked for members to approve. Was approved.

DarrinEden : Minutes of the Board Meeting: Had a meeting last week, focusing on more people to take responsibility. The goal is to get more people involved.

Law fees need to be resolved. A discussion is ongoing.

Rick Lundall: Education Committe chair: Looking for school presentations as well as representatives in public venues. Asks for contacts within education. Talk to Rick. OMSI was suggested as a good contact. PTP working with OMSI would combine strengths of both organization.

Another item Rick brought up: PersonalTelco.com (a competiting, independent ISP with no connection or relation to PersonalTelco.net). No action item, a discussion point. Little discussion.

NEW BUSINESS

AaronBaer brought up the possibility of a large spruce tree being used as a node. WilliamZimmer added that his SE location was also a possibility. Rick said a desiduous [sp] tree was a problem in the summer. There are practical problems but it works in one node in Borth Portland.

Joe said the Read Wing Bakery was interested in a hot spot service. Kegan did two installs recently.

DarrinEden explains: A PTP node uses a box with NoCat software that captures the WiFi with www.personaltelco.net. The city of Portland donated dozens of Pentium boxes so the issue is not hardware or software. We have that. If you need one, we have the hardware and software to do it. The box has a certain isolation from their own network but security cannot be the responsibilty of PTP.

Irving: Putting software on a Linksys AP WRT-54G was mentioned. Said would organize a PTP that would package the box and the software.

NigelBallard: Says that a small self-contained box with wifi cards and PTP software is the best solution. The Seattle Wireless folks have been leading much of this development.

NigelBallard: Says he just got an email from Glenn Fleishman who asked if we have regular meetings. Nigel wrote back and said we're having one now.

AaronBaer: Discusses PTP software and should we copy PTP node information to J-Wire. Ji-Wire is a hot spot directory. Currently we use NodedB for mapping the nodes. The software should be open source, said several members, and NodeDB is open source (I believe).

(note(AaronBaer) nodedb is not open source. However, when we first started using it evilbunny from sydneywireless had promised it's eventual GPL. This did not happen and we have yet to create an open source replacement.)

TomHiggins has an updated node list ["nodeinfoscratchpad"] so that he can use the RadioMobile mapping software. He has personally updated much of the database. Darrin said he contacted the City of Portland which runs portlandmaps.com and asked about putting PTPs node information on that. City representatives said "sure", sent the lat/long node information over and we'll see what we can do with it.

DarrinEden: Asked for a motion on moving PTP's node information to JiWire.

DISCUSSION;

TomHiggins: thinks it's a good idea to gather the info and distribute it as well as having a place to use it on the PTP site. Others ask what is the goal. Aaron says we need to get away from a patched up system. But it's setup to integrate both node information and member information and that we haven't had the manpower to keep it updated. Another opinion; it's open data. We can't keep it closed up. We need the data locally to keep track of our own business. Nigel mentioned Carnegie Mellon's realtime mapping.

Nigel: Says Glenn wrote back and said to go to JiWire and use their search engine for find out more.

TomHiggins: Write Once, Spew Everywhere

A MOTION;

PTP SHOULD HAVE A COMMITTE THAT INVESTIGATES THE CONCEPT OF A CENTRAL DATABASE AND POLICY OF PROPAGATING INFO ELSEWHERE (to paraphrase)

The motion has been seconded and passed. TomHiggins and AaronBaer will chair and cochair.

OTHER NEW BUSINESS

RickLindall : Suggests a Playday that combines an install day together at Urban Grid on December 6th. Everyone agreed. Done. Starts at 1pm.

DarrinEden: Holiday Party at NW Everett and Broadway, potluck at December 13th 8pm to whenever.

IDEAS:

Make a "wild hair ideas" wiki page ( WildHair ) that lists a series of goals for PTP. People would vote on three ideas of dozens of PTP goals. Put your ideas there. And vote.

DarrinEden: Meeting closed at 7:30pm, November 18th, 2003

- SamChurchill, scribe

CategoryMeetingNotes