However the story on how I got there starts a few years earlier. I myself growing up in the countryside of Austria was very fond of the idea to experiment with anything network related and also undertook several attempts to wire up my neighborhood friends, whom I could only convince to do so in order to play CounterStrike together in times where no DSL or other high speed internet was anywhere on the horizon for this village. We pulled coax cable through the attic of our apartment building and ate a lot of dust. But in the end we had a 10Base-2 network which connected about 5 computers. All this was far from a community network as one would describe it today and neither did we have the intent to build one.

A bit later I remember stumbling upon an article describing a network using Wave LAN technology in suburban Sydney to connect up the neighborhood. Back then it didn’t strike me how much alike our attempts actually were. I then also tried to start a wireless network in a small town close to where I lived when the whole community network initiatives got traction. Back then however setting up such network was way to techy and it was therefor hard to convince even the young crowd to join in.

Shortly after I moved to Vienna I started to look for community wireless networks. There were a few strange webpages mentioning another initiative that I could not really get hold of. Then some day I found FunkFeuer which back then only offered a Wiki which vaguely described what it was about and that there was a meeting every Monday in a location called VIVI in the center of Vienna. I quickly checked if there would be a meeting the next Monday and got that confirmed from my now dear friend Andreas. Arriving at a stormy winter day somewhere in January 2005 at the “Montagstreffen” I met Aaron and Mihi. Mihi held an inspirational speech about OLSR and I was at first a bit turned down by no real structure after which I could get started in all of this (I guess it’s an Austrian thing ). However when I got home I started reading up on the various topics discussed in this 2 hour session and quickly started to like the idea more and more.

Fast forward 5 years and I have spent countless hours around FunkFeuer. We have spent nights in basements trying to get fibre links up and running and there was lots of frustration but I dearly believe that FunkFeuer in Vienna has reached a critical mass by now that the project is self sustaining and will take more and more shape as we move along. Personally I still like to keep a few tasks around the backbone close to my heart but have let go on lots of things others have picked up and probably done a better job than I ever could. At the same time it is interesting to see that some things do not change in a voluntary project like FunkFeuer. Our homepage as on my first day is still a kind of mess but nonetheless it seems that we attract people and I am very proud having and being part of this. What united us back then and what keeps impressing me about FunkFeuer is the drive to build something on our own.

I have attended both international summits (in 2007 and 2008) so far and have to say that it is always refreshing to see the various different approaches communities take to build their networks. At the same time it helps in finding solutions to common problems (both technical and social) that communities encounter. I am especially proud to to see this event hosted in Vienna where i have been part for many years in the build-up of FunkFeuer.

I certainly recommend you to attend this event and hope to see you there.

Kristjan (aka “Kiko”) from Croatia made a video that tells the full story:

From the summit site not much happened today. After the closing panels we headed to make some group photos and afterwards exchanged contacts. At about 5pm we ended up in our hotel where we tried to do our first sync-up for ourselfs. I made some notes to keep our main aspects and now leave everyone some time to order his thoughts.

As we had no chance to do some sightseeing yet, we headed over to Washington D.C. at about 9pm then. Matthias from Freifunk in Leipzig had a rental car we could hook up with.

As we were riding down interstate 95 we remembered that the NSA headquarter should be somewhere nearby. Some miles further we found some road signs heading there. As we were kind of in a good mood we immediatly drove there. There was also a visitors center signed out so we took this drive. For sure it was closed on sundays, which i didn’t catch up – we finally ended up in a one way road to some kind of secured entry. As there was no way back we drove to the police man and as he kinda confused asked what we want we responded “Well we wanna see the NSA“. It took him a second but then he responded “But — it’s restricted“. I shortly before starting to laugh responded, “Oh, so can you tell us where to get to Washington then“. He was so kind to give us the road free, to do a u-turn and head back to I95. So, we finally were at the NSA headquarters and also had the chance to do some photos (see Google Earth KML for proof). In reality we had a better view, but we were to feared to use the possibility in front of the policeman. Heading back we also took a step by at NASA Goddard space center where the visitor center was closed too, but we could watch the sun falling while checking out some old rocket models. Andreas indeed, was more impressed by the Antennas. Finally we made our trip to Washington D.C. where we found the Capitol quite easily. We checked out the Washington Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, World War 2 Memorial, Capitol and the White House (which was totally dark – George sleeping?). All in all that was really nice, because it was already late at night it was so silently and it was great to hang out with some really neat people in such a lovely place.

All in all i enjoyed the trip, Columbia was kind of well – seemingless, but for the Summit it was an awesome place. Currently we’re in the flight from Philadelphia to Frankfurt at about 11000 meters going by at the south of Iceland.

My picture sets around the summit can be found here.

• guifi.net (Spain) – Ramon, Jodi
• BGWireless (Serbia) – Bogdan, Nemanja
• Freifunk Leipzig (Germany) – Matthias aka U.F.O.
• FunkFeuer (Austria) – Andreas, Aaron, Me

The panel was kinda complicated. Yesterday we wanted to focus on 2 to 3 questions we should talk about (i won’t say throw up again – thanks Laura ), but it was waytoo complicated to find 3 questions which would fit for everyone as our networks are currently so different. So we decided to introduce our networks, go into questions directly and leave the next days open for attendees to question us. We really tried to keep our information short, but we just couldn’t make it under 40 minutes. As far as i’ve heard from Laura and Faith they both liked our panel though – thanks for this.

In the afternoon i attended Holistic Planning & Deployment of Wireless Networks. It was about further possibilities to make a value out of community wireless networks for their sponsors. There was one idea regarding the reading of the power meters and that power companies could have a real interest in this which i think is a very good point to think about. As i had to attend a conference call i had to leave too early from there.

Next panel was from Sascha Meinrath which was Taking COMMONS global. It was interesting to hear their idea about how to break the broadband gap they have. As this problem is not existant in europe we have another position here though. But nevertheless i guess it would be kind of a statement from us to show our support. Thefor i will give my best and hope that we find a partner for this to achieve, to connect to COMMONS in the future.

Also had another nice talk with Daniel from CUWiN about splicing of fibre and that kind of stuff where there was a majority who really thinks or has thought it is way too complicated to do splicing on your own (Thats no rocket science – if you have the equipment!). Also it seemed impossible to some to build a working Mesh-Router as a non-techie. We pointed over to guifi.net who have a fully working solution – where the whole configuration is compiled out of the data provided by the user. After that they simply have to import this and they’re done. Not more than 10 steps. We also had an even more automated solution for that in Austria till a year ago. There we compiled a whole binary firmware for certain devices (like the Linksys WRT54G) for the user and they simply had to upload this file directly via the normal webinterface and they were done. We stopped this because it caused too much support effort for us though. Users just weren’t aware how to fix their devices on their own if something was broken. However we are rethinking this in the context of taking FunkFeuer to a broader range of people, because we’ve seen as guifi.net does it’s possible to make support cooperations with local dealers for that.

The social event was at Nottinghams this time. This was a way more nice bar. I played shuffleboard for my first time there, nevertheless it seems that americans don’t like the austrian drinking games associated with it.

They gave us a short intro in their current network and their philosophy which is mostly fixed on team-play. We were impressed what technically impressive network they have built. They run “only” 35 nodes but they are mostly interconnected with high-capacity links which means they have about 13 Megabytes(!) per second transfer rates in their network.

Some hours later also Ramon and Jordi from guifi.net finally arrived after an over 30h flight from Barcelona. Normally they would have arrived yesterday evening as we did. But they were lucky to catch a flight via Atlanta from Barcelona where their original plane could not depart because of some technical problems. So they had to wait for a machine coming over from Rome. As this caused several hours of delay they weren’t able to catch any connection to Baltimore on the same day any more. As we had informations how big their network was we needed to get confirmation on that – and, yes they really have over 2000 nodes. They’re going the KISS way of freenetworking. Resulting in partners in the commercial sector who sell their packages (Router, Antenna, T-Shirt). Great work indeed.

At the same time the Commons Strategy Workshop was held with kc from CAIDA. As i was very interested in this project it was great to have all the people involved in this project there. There were several groups formed according to their topics. We joined the group Peering and Privacy which we thought would be most beneficial to be participating in. There was also Steve Mansour from Canada, Josh from CUWiN and Daniel from CUWiN which i remember. We held some talks about the current problems with data retention laws coming up in Europe. Mostly i remember that we should keep out privacy issues from the Peering Agreement itself because peering agreements are about the interconnection. I’m not so sure if this is the case, but agree that it comes to misunderstandings between providers and community networks here. Therefor i would suggest to choose another name like Community Connection Agreement which covers this topics and probably reference to the Pico Peering Agreement in it. Just a first thought.

After our small workgroup discussions we dropped in the big round where Steve was presenting our talks. I guess everyone was most amused about the Dutch “Anti-Data-Retention demonstration” which is already kind of a legend in Europe.

However kc’s talk caused most controversational positions. As far as i remember there was one big point in there which can be given back as like Privacy in the 21st century where there were some voices saying something like “As everyone gives his data to Google, flickr, co. we should think about privacy in our century” – i hope i don’t lay any unappropriate words in someones mouth here. My oppinion is that it’s something absolutely different if someone is registering for a Google Account and therefor should know that this data will be used in some way for profit of Google too and if we’re logging data from our networks and provide researchers with them. Even if the user knows about it, it would be hard to make them agree on that. So i suggested to think about a transparent entity which can be placed between the researchers and the network providing this data. To achieve faster processing in this entity it would be necessary to have standardized formats for the anonymous or aggregated data. As kc mentioned there is already a proposal on that out there. I’ve looked at the CAIDA homepage, but couldn’t find any details on this, if someone could provide me with these i would be very happy.

Another point was privacy and people who think that everyone who is not encrypting his mails, etc. is a fool himself – because the internet is insecure. I tried to point out why the postcard comparison here is not sufficient. Postcards are kept private by law – which does not mean that no one will ever read them (and i’m sure that people from postal service do) – but, and that’s the main difference they are forbidden by law to give this information to someone or use it in what kind of context ever, except the address for delivery purpose. For me this means, in the closed way a postcard has to travel it’s kept private (as long as everything works right, which i assume here). In the internet i don’t see this currently. However i think people who say that “Everyone should know that the internet is insecure” are right – but the accent lies on should. Think for some non-techie you know of and try him to use current encryption methods – he or she will just fail, because it’s way too complicated. As he or she don’t see so much sense in that topic they will also not further investigate. From my view there are two possible solutions:

• Regulate it by law,
• Make encryption as easy as everyone could use it.

In the evening 3 keynotes were held and so the Summit was officially started. The first panels would start at the next morning 10am. Our panel What’s happening in europe is one of the first. Looking forward to it.

The evening social at Green Turtle was not my kinda thing. We already have been there yesterday and i was kinda surprised that it was described as Irish style. However i had a very nice talk with Laura Forlano from NYCWireless there which made the evening way more comfortable (thanks Laura!).

Time for some better news. Sascha posted some first lines about the preperations for this years summit and a look back in time. At least our tickets to the summit are already here.

So far it’s clear, that Aaron will take the coordination of the panel “What’s Happening in Europe“.

I’m looking forward to see you all soon …

I really look forward to meet Sascha Meinrath and KC Claffy from CAIDA again. Also i hope to get a lot of new input from other freenetwork initiatives. Current considerations are that Andreas Marksteiner and Aaron Kaplan will also attend. Probably Aaron will give some workshop or presentation about OLSR NG which he is currently working on. Andreas and me will probably go for a presentation of our FunkFeuer Housing project which finances the bandwidth for FunkFeuer in Vienna currently. I assume this as a good way to get the necessary financial backing to keep the freenet really free of any charge. At least in Vienna this is working quite smoothly now.