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.