Having finally wrapped up my involvement with the very successful BarCampCanberra 2008, including all preparation before the event on 19 April and post-BarCamp tasks including processing and publishing 14 audio podcasts of presentations … I am now once again available to pick-up and continue with Free Australia Wireless which unfortunately I haven’t really touched since attending the Wireless World 2008 exhibition 4 weeks ago.

I’ve been fielding a few enquiries from local Canberra people interested in participating in the project and made contact with a few 3rd parties - community groups etc - but it’s time to start taking things to the next level; large-scale awareness and promotion campaigns, advocacy and lobbying local government. The upcoming ACT election in October I think will be a good opportunity to do this - I’ll shortly be contacting David Mathews, Labor candidate for Molonglo, who with his history in Information Technology will be an ideal contact point to start talking to local government about the Free Australia Wireless project in Canberra as I really think that we are going to need the cooperation, endorsement and support of local government and councils to roll out mesh network nodes particularly in business districts where it’s a bit trickier than just plugging a Meraki node into a residential ADSL-connected local network. We need to be able to assure local businesses of the legality of providing free wireless access without the need for a carrier licence.

As for ongoing research and such I’m still working on turning my Asus Eee PC into a router so I can provide free wireless via a Meraki device over a 3G USB modem; I’ll be using this to start providing free wireless in my workplace and once I have gained some interest and support for the idea then I plan to take the idea to our IT department … which takes me to the next point: content tracking, logging and filtering. I’ve been asked a few times about this and although I appreciate DFWFreeNet’s position on this I don’t think it’s a position that we can maintain - so we will be looking at options for hardware or software that sits between Meraki gateway nodes and wired networks for tracking usage at a detailed level and providing a level of additional firewall protection and content filtering to prevent the downloading of illegal content through free wireless networks.

Also, work is ongoing with preparing the content for the new and consolidated Free Australia Wireless website. JJ has been talking to the Open-Mesh people and made progress with getting them interested in gaining the necessary certification to start bringing Open-Mesh devices into Australia - which would be awesome given that they’re cheaper, fully open source … not to mention that Meraki (the company) hasn’t been very responsive, helpful or interested in assisting us so we are looking at other options.

4 Ways to Keep Your Public Wi-Fi Sessions Secure

Some good tips - including setting up a VPN; something I have little experience with (especially for this purpose) but will be looking in to!

And I’ve managed to register an account over at the Aus/NZ Meraki user group forum site Merakeye.com after some technical difficulties which with assistance from the forum admin we discovered was a delay caused by phpBB attempting a reverse MX record lookup on my domain causing a MySQL connection timeout.

If you’re going to connect to an open network - Meraki, free or simply open - it’s great if you’re able to drop them an email to say hi, maybe say thanks, introduce yourself (especially if you’re settling in to be a long-term WiFi resident on that network) … but at the very least it’s nice if you at least have a name.

Any name. A handle. An alias. Just name your device!

The Meraki Dashboard software is able to differentiate by MAC address so it won’t get confused by anonymous devices … but this is a little sad:

Where it says “Click to set” is where you can assign a name to a device for your own reference where that device connected to your network without a name.

Please give your laptop, phone, PDA or computer a name!

First day of the 2-day Wireless World 2008 tri-summit and exhibition, with JJ and myself working flat out all day promoting Free Australia Wireless, explaining how mesh networking works, what our plan is and some of the finer details … occasionally with some one-on-one sessions with people lasting over 20 minutes. We had about 90 fliers at the start of the day and finished up the day at 5:00pm with only 4 left.

Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways - although luckily most of the exhibition visitors had at least some basic knowledge of 802.11 and WLAN.

Also got some good contacts in government and other vendors that we can follow up in the coming weeks to discuss opportunities and gain support for Free Australia Wireless.

On the right here is a pic taken by Chris Rodrigues (one of the event organisers) of a 20 minute Meraki installation and configuration demonstration I gave yesterday in the main presentation area of the exhibition.

Unfortunately I had to return last night back to Canberra so today JJ, Matt and Ajay will be looking after the Free Australia Wireless stall, and Mark Pesce will be delivering his 30 minute presentation at the Wireless & Mobility Summit next door to the exhibition this afternoon.

Sorry, and how could I forget to recognise the assistance of Alison who came down to the stall yesterday just to say hi to JJ and myself … and ended up helping out with promoting Free Australia Wireless and answering questions about mesh networking topography and Meraki specifications - at one point even looking at the stall herself while JJ and myself had to go off at 3:30pm for the Meraki demo. Thanks Ali!

Also have a read of Mark Pesce’s latest blog post Everywhere which is what his presentation today will be based on.

JJ took some photos of the stall and my presentation and I’ve also put up an article on Norg.

That’s right - if you’re on Twitter then go to the FreeAusWireless profile page on Twitter and follow. We’ll be microblogging our exhibition at Wireless World 2008 in Darling Harbour, Sydney, over the next two days.

Once again - if you’re in Sydney then it’d be great if you could drop by the Free Australia Wireless exhibition stall at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre (stall #65) and say hi.

The plan is that I’ll be driving up tomorrow morning (leaving Canberra around 5:00am) and will be behind the stall with JJ and Ajay tomorrow, and then on Thursday it’ll be JJ and Matthew. Also Mark Pesce will be giving a half-hour presentation to the (paying) Wireless World convention participants on the Thursday.

We will be giving a 20 minute demo of Merakis and maybe JJ’s new FON tomorrow at 3:30 - that demo will be in the free area of the exhibition.