[Commotion-dev] commotion news

[Josh King]

Hey all,

I just wanted to update you on some of the things that have been going
on in Commotion-land, and get some discussion and development going
again on this list after a bit of an absence. Entirely my fault, I've
been travelling for work over much of the past month, and when not doing
that, things have been pretty crazy (as you may have seen in the media ;-)).

* We had a very successful codesprint at the beginning of June to more
officially kick-off the project, and had developers from a number of
different projects around the globe in attendence, including Guardian
Project, Funkfeuer, OpenBTS, Serval, several community networks, and
more (you can see the complete list on the project site). Myself and
Preston at OTI are still working on turning all of the notes from that
into wiki pages and milestones; let me know if you want to lend a hand.
Among other things, codesprinters managed to make what we think is the
first ever OpenBTS to Serval phonecall over mesh wireless!

* You may have seen all of the press fallout from the New York Times
article; we knew that the Times was publishing an article, but not when
or what it would say exactly. The whole idea of an Internet in a
Suitcase (a total misnomer) seems to have caught on, with everyone from
Al-Jazeera to BBC to NBC and more being interested. This has also
created waves of misinformation about the project which I've been doing
my best to dispell; it's not a black-ops project by secret government
agents creating surveillance hardware, it's an open-source software
integration effort to create a platform for free speech and
communication on the Internet.

* Incidentally, I did register commotionwireless.net, .org, and .com, as
well as internetinasuitcase.net and .org (someone else picked up .com).
I'll be pointing those domains at the project site for now.

* A team from OTI in cooperation with the Detroit Digital Justice
Coalition and Allied Media Projects deployed a test network running the
Commotion firmware in Detroit during the Allied Media Conference. It's
pretty barebones but functional and sharing Internet through part of the
Cass Corridor neighborhood.

* Finally, the new Iranian Minister of Intelligence has apparently
predicted the Commotion project and "devised proper ways to combat
them." I hope you find this as interesting and worrying and oddly
hilarious as I do ;-)

I'm continuing to touch base with people individually as we work on
documentation, and I'm planning on sending out a doodle to schedule a
skype call sometime with in the next week or so soon to discuss progress
and next steps. Please let me know if anyone is having any trouble
accessing the project site, or if you have any questions. For the people
in Champaign-Urbana, IL US, I will be out there in the middle of July
partly to do some server and wireless work so hopefully we can meet up!

-- 
Josh King
Technologist
Open Technology Initiative
New America Foundation

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