I'm apparently entering a "long, ranty e-mail" phase of my life. Brace yourselves.
On 9/28/07, Five Able <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Not orphaned just lacking funds, hardware, and geek-power. Once Eater left > Dragon never helped with anything. Vudu was keeping things going but he > left for Wisconsin not long after Eater left. For the last year everything > has been run by Sam and myself. The last big event was the party at Rhino's > where there were lots of people involved like Heat, Dub, and a few others. > Other than that things have been pretty quiet although a couple new nodes > are up and we have implemented wifi-dog for authorization and usage > tracking. We have also migrated our web services to a MediaTemple host > which handles authorization and website delivery as well as email functions. > Mostly we have been trying to cut costs as much as possible. Bell South > sucked most of the funds, $120 a month for a crappy DSL connection, we had > until Knology came through with a free connection which was negotiated by > Brian Sorrels when he was still with Carmike. > Yeah, that BellSouth bill was a bastard. I fronted that for several months :\ > At the very minimum it costs $20.00 a month to keep things running. That > only covers the hosting cost. > That doesn't cover anything else and Judy > Bug's Books, where the Lolpht is located, is also increasingly concerned > about power usage. > Is the uptick in power more than the cost of their old Knology bill they no longer have to pay? Because that was the arrangement... > > Summary: we are still around but operating on an old and tattered > shoestring budget. > Same as when it started :) > > For those interested in donating please check out: > > http://www.columbusfreenet.org/index.php?title=Donations > > There is a PayPal button for those who prefer to donate online. > So, my broader question still remains. If you could start over, and do something even bigger but took much less money and ongoing maintenance... how would you do it? General ideas: 1. Better community. The project's staffing level sucks because CHAOS went dormant. Our LUG meetings used to enjoy a pretty large turn-out (for Columbus) at least once in a while, and the wireless project was basically just a follow-on thing for the CHAOSers to play with. When was the last time Columbus geeks plastered CSU and Columbus Tech with CHAOS-meeting posters? :) It's hard getting interesting speakers that appeal to a lot of people, but in all honesty the regular meet-up at the coffee shop was probably more popular anyway. So just advertise that :) Everything else aside, the CFn project's main goal was just to get people together. 2. Better tech. We learned a shitload doing that wireless project. You and Sam learned a lot more about it after I left, for sure. The stuff you showed me when I visited last year was rad. You guys have done an awesome job. What if you had to design another CFn that scaled to ten blocks. Could you re-work the implementation to be cheaper, say, with an adaptive mesh that would use multiple egress points to the Internet? Bandwidth isn't a problem now, thanks to Knology, but if you were to scale to an area 10x as large, it wouldn't be enough. A smart mesh with clever routing might allow you to take advantage of random business' cable/dsl connections (with blessing from the owners, of course.) A LOLphtless freenet, if you will. Organic to the existing grid. We all talked about that in the beginning, but that sort of thing was really beyond our ability three years ago... but everyone's learned a lot since then. Naturally, you probably don't have time to do it unless you get more folks (see #1). That's all just a half-assed suggestion; my real point is: what technical solutions might lighten the load? 3. Better business We did pretty well getting the local businesses to fork over cash for the access points, but we never had a great solution for remaining costs... aside from donations. Our fund raisers were fun, but not very lucrative. If a project like that were to scale beyond Broadway, it would need a self-sustaining business model. I can't think of one that would work. Maybe someone else can? This is really at the heart of the original question. Striking a deal with a quasi-municipal org might be an option (ie, getting funding from hotel/motel tax) but they'd want a solid proof of concept in addition to a reliable staffing level (see #1 again). This isn't my favorite approach... I think a free-market approach would be better. But, it's not an easy problem to solve. In case this all comes off as negative criticism or something, I want to emphasize that it's anything but! Again, the real goal of the project was to bring a lot of people together to do something relatively constructive, and have everybody walk away a little smarter than when they showed up. I think we accomplished that pretty well. As to the secondary goal of providing a cool free wireless solution (one that's sustainable over the long-run and doesn't require some volunteer footing all the bills)... well, maybe there's different way to approach that than what we considered back when it started. And maybe everybody involved is smarter and more experienced now, so maybe it's time to re-think the original assumptions. Anyway, If nothing else, it's all just an interesting problem to think about. Cheers! Eater (PS, somebody should start the LUG thing going again!) -- E a t e r http://eater.org/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CHAOS706.ORG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/chaos706?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
