LuckyLab : 23rd February, 2002 Next Meeting: MeetingMarch2002

February's PTP meeting started at 6 pm Monday with hard core geeks (and drinkers) raving until 11:30pm. The Monday time was due to a booking problem but should return to the standard schedule, the last Wednesday of the month, in March.

The meeting was crowded as usual and more new faces were seen perhaps due to Jeffrey Kosseff's story on PTP in the Business section of the February 19th Oregonian.

Feel free to add and edit these notes !

Sam Speaks:

First, here's Adam Shand's note on the February Meeting. We've posted it here. How meetings are structured is the topic of Adam's email. The opinion was expressed that a less techical (general) session and a more technical (geek) session might better address the needs of a larger group and not alienate newbies:

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Adam Speaks:

Hey All.

I'm hoping that Sam will be coming up with the actual meeting notes since Christian wasn't there last night, here are some issues that I wanted to make sure were publicly announced for people that may have missed the meeting.

For those of you who were first timers last night, thanks for sticking through it, that was a pretty full on meeting! We are going to try and restructure the meetings to be a little friendlier to new comers.

After the meeting I was approached by Brian, Nigel and Lonnie. They felt that we'd missed a prime opportunity to rope in new members that showed up because of recent press (portland business journal, oregonian, red herring) by launching pretty much straight into "geek talk" with the node standardization stuff and then the urld and ipsec talks. I've been feeling for a while that meeting desperately needs to be re-organized but I haven't been quite sure how to do it. As I see it our monthly meetings try to solve all these problems and it just isn't working very cleanly.

  1. Newbie introduction to Personal Telco (introductions, goals,

    • basic presentation and Q&A session etc)

  2. Our advanced topics presentations (mid to high level tech stuff)
  3. Meeting business (decisions, thrashing stuff out, politics etc)
  4. Technical brainstorming (how do we ...)
  5. Drinking beer and hanging out.

So we need to figure out what we want our meetings to be, and I honestly don't think we can do it all in one meeting. This means we either axe some of the things or we have a second meeting. So if there are people on the list for whom this was their first meeting (or still remember their first meeting!) we'd love to hear from you. What did you like, what didn't you like. For the regulars, you're important as well, what do you get from the meetings that you like, what do you want to see more of?

We continued the "What makes a Node a Node" discussion. Here was the closest we came to consensus. A node:

We briefly touched on the ESSID standardization issue which has gone around the list a few times. We need to make a decision on what the standard we want to adopt is, I think it should be something recognizable as a URL so that people can put it into a browser and find out what it's all about. The options as I see it are:

1. www.personaltelco.net

2. www.personaltelco.net/node111

3. use 1 for nodes which are part of the "wireless cloud" and 2 for

It was also suggested (and I now agree) that there should be two new types of nodes on the map. An "end user" and a "repeater". End user nodes are people that have a permanent connection to a node but don't share out themselves, it is basically an extension of the "Interested" node type but implies that they already have some gear and clue and could be useful for RF debugging/troubleshooting purposes. A repeater node is one which doesn't share out access but connects two or more nodes together (either via adhoc links or with multiple client connections). I have written up a more comprehensive proposal here, if you are interested in such things please read it over and offer suggestions:

Austin Schutz has offered to take over maintenance of the map server code base and assist with fixes, patches improvements etc.

We discussed using the Personal Telco web site as a kick start for the Free Networks site. We have been approached by a couple members of the Free Networks groups asking if we would be willing to donate our web content to get the Free Networks website going and work on building a global site with technical content. Many people said that they would no longer contribute if it wasn't a local site and that they felt that it should stay a Portland based site.

We discussed letting Boingo list our nodes, and everyone agreed that unless Boingo shows a willingness to contribute back to the community (which they haven't so far) we aren't interested in letting them list our nodes. I will send them a message with this message.

There was a huge debate over the "no commercial usage" statement which devolved into a total mess. The problem with this is that as soon as we start making rules about what it can and can't be used for you begin to find much grey area. My inclination is to keep the rules as simple as possible, right now the only thing I would like to prohibit going over the network is commercial re-sale of the network itself. This means no charging for *access* to the network, everything else (unless it is illegal or spam) is legit until it causes a problem. Please add your thoughts on the Wiki.

Steve and Crispin from Wirex presented on the grant which they would like to help Personal Telco get. The basic idea is that they will help us write the grant, in exchange we will use some of the grant money to fund their hacking on Open Source software which can be used by the community and they can sell as a bundled part of their product. This also devolved into a mess but in the end there were 17 people who said that they were interested in pursuing it further and no one said that our pursuit of it would "irrevocably alienate them from the project". Several people did express concern over possible outcomes though. If you want to help out with this, no of people that might be willing to offer up cash or "in kind" donations please email crispin@wirex.com.

So that's a lot of stuff!

Adam.

PS. Did anyone hear the PTP bit on 95.5 this morning? It was all of 4 minutes long but it was there and live from Pioneer Square!

Sam Speaks:

February SIG Meeting Notes (6pm-7pm):

February General Meeting (7pm-9pm):

Post Meeting (9pm-11pm):

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