[Babel-users] Osijek, Otvorena Mreža, MeshPoint

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

Hi,

I've just spent four days in Osijek, a small city in the East of Croatia,
invited by Valent Turković (in copy of this mail).  It was an interesting
stay.

For those of you who are not up to scratch in European Geography, the part
of Croatia that everyone knows about is the west, on the Adriatic gulfn.
But Croatia also has an inland part, in the east, which is flat and
agricultural.  The region is known as Slavonia (no relation to either
Slovenia or Slovakia), and the main city is Osijek (pronounced "Osiek");
the other well-known town there is Vukovar.

Valent is the founder (co-founder?) of three projects:

1. Osijek Wireless, a non-profit that puts open access points all over the
   place, both in fixed locations and to support events;
2. Otvorena Mreža (Open Network), an informal project that develops
   a number of technologies including a free hardware outdoor router
   running Babel, known as MeshPoint; Otvorena Mreža notably provided
   Internet access to a Syrian refugee camp in Beli Monastir back in 2015;
3. Crisis Innovation Lab, a limited responsibility company (for profit)
   that aims to market an outdoor router for crisis situations.

The Otvorena Mreža technology stack uses a number of familiar open-source
technologies, notably Babel for meshing the routers when the need arises.

Valent is unfortunately not the best at communicating about his
activities, and the only website I could find in English is about the
MeshPoint crisis router.  It runs Babel ;-)

  https://meshpoint.me/
  
-- Juliusz