[Freedombox-discuss] Introduction of myself :)

[k.]

Hi,

First a short introduction on myself:
I have a masters degree in media arts and design from 2007 at the
Bauhaus University of Weimar. I did my final thesis with Geert Lovink,
Amsterdam and Ralf Homann from Weimar, the title of the work was
"f.d.m.b.x. - the freedombox" ;)

At that time the TLDs for freedombox were taken by a software/hardware
solution for blind people and so I took the TLD fdmbx as a short name.

To sum up the content of my (still not translated to English) thesis, I
come from the strong background of community wireless mesh networks,
called Freifunk [1], and within years (starting in 2001) we had growing
real world mesh networks when in the academia teachers still were
saying, that meshing doesnt work as seen in the network simulators. At a
certain point of time we interconnected the mesh networks of Berlin,
Weimar, Leipzig and other cities via VPN and had more than 1000 nodes in
one olsr [2] mesh, which was still not to much for the 200mhz mips
routers (WRT54G at that time). 
So, what I called in my thesis the "infrastructure mesh" could be
considered doable and "solved". Therefore I introduces a new term for my
work, which I called "content mesh". The work itself was a mockup for a
next generation Mesh node "on steroids": A device which is the
datacenter of the owner, at home, being part of the local mesh cloud
meanwhile connected to the world wide web, offering services in the
local mesh as well to the outer world. I drafted some kind of "content
mesh" aware apps, as a blog and a wiki which should be based on a DHT.
The apps should be aware of their limited local storage and the
potential instability of ad-hoc mesh networks, and therefore work on a
store-forward approach with caching capabilities. The owner of such a
node should be able to decide if she wants to store/cache content on and
for physical neighbour nodes, friends' nodes or any other kind of
structure.
Further I designed a physical device which is very far from what we know
as routers, to attracked even fans of gadget hardware. So that not only
the local independent network, plus the local hosting, plus the content
meshed possibilities, but on top the device itself attrackts people to
join.

See the years old work, translation in progress at my site:
http://fdmbx.net 

We were motivated to such a project as the 'colored' revolutions in the
former sovjet states were just going on, the same momentum as I see atm
for the recent freedombox project with the actual political happenings.

Sadly, I focused to much on hardware and production issues and as a
single person I realised quickly, that producing such a freedombox is
beyond my capabilities, moneywise an more. 

So, besides testing sheeva plugs and other hardware for different
purposes I did not really push my original freedombox much further. I am
very happy to see so many people jumping on the whole idea recently!!

I am reading this list since a couple of weeks, and will anser to
certain thread from now on :)


best,
kloschi,
from leipzig, germany, earth, milky way


[1] http://freifunk.net 
[2] http://olsr.org

-- 
"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people
to stop reading them. " 

                                                     -- Ray Bradbury
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