MeetingJune2001 - Personal Telco Project

RoseAndRaindrop : 26th June 2001BR Scribe: AdamShand

This was a smaller meeting, not sure if people were "meeting out'd" from the WirelessSummit and other going on's if Tuesday's are just a bad day or what, but we only had about a dozen people make it. It was however a good crowd, we had a couple new people who were fairly lively.

We also have the next two months meetings reserved. LucasSheehan is now in charge or organizing the time and date of the MonthlyMeeting.

Focus Meeting

Went over the basic PersonalTelco network topology (NAN's, Aggregation points etc).

We still need a small high level technical discussion of how to actually implement routing protocols, peering agreements, etc.

We had a discussion on how RF works, what dB means as opposed to dBi or dBm, what line of sight means etc.
We had a discussion about Active (and captive or forced) portals, what they are, how they are influenced by wiki's idea of wiki:SoftSecurity and why I think they are a good thing. We went on to talk about reverse intrusion detection (aka. ExtrusionDetection) and how that can help us.
We talked (again) about putting antenna towers on private land and LucasSheehan informed us that you can go to a title company and many of them will provide a free service which will inform you of all neighborhood covenants which are in place for a specific address.

General Meeting

My (AdamShand) node is up ... finally. Yeah! Thanks to TerrySchmidt for helping me resolve the Windows driver issue I'd been having with Windows 2000.
We were hoping the guys from the potential new wireless group in Seaside would show up but they had other commitments and couldn't make it, hopefully next month.
Forming a NonProfit looks like it's a bad idea, at least in the short term. It's possible that setting up a NonProfit parent company might be workable but we need more information.
Kris was voted treasurer but is no where to be found. Any one want to be treasurer if he doesn't want to do it?
General consensus that a group purchase of a bulk roll of LMR-400, crimpers etc would be a good thing. No one has taken initative on organizing this yet.
Talked about the Community Incubator project. GeneMerrill is helping with the design of the new wiki/weblog hybrid that we hope will make jump starting new WirelessCommunities easier.
GeneMerrill will contact computer bits about advertising for the next monthly meeting.
General consensus that a beer/food fundraiser would be a good thing for money to buy T-Shirts and other group goodies. We need someone to organize this.
The official meeting place is now the RoseAndRaindrop.
A big question was raised ... why are we doing this? What makes you come to the meetings? Sure beer, food and geek talk is good ... but it's not good enough to get 30 people out ... what is it that draws you to the meetings? What do you want to see happen from this?
SuperPass will supposedly offer us cheap prices on hardware if you tell them you are part of a WirelessCommunity when you talk to them. If they don't know what you're talking about try mentioning NoCat (they are the WirelessCommunity that clued us into this).
LucasSheehan and DavidSmith "volunteered" to be emergency coordinators incase a meeting is organized but I can't make it.

[CategoryMeetingNotes]