FNF and Connecting for Good Expand Free Network in KCMO
This quarter, we continued our work with non-profit Connecting for Good to bring Internet connectivity to more people in Kansas City. In late March and early April, we provided systems and systems know-how for a network network expansion at Posada del Sol, a subsidized apartment building for seniors in KCMO. The Posada site connects more than sixty housing units, the surrounding neighborhood, and serves as a relay to the 200 units we and Connecting for Good brought online at Rosedale Ridge last year. Posada del Sol is well situated to become a distribution center for connectivity on Kansas City’s west side.

Steady Progress on Technical Objectives
CTO Charles Wyble recently has continued his work on the FNF’s radio testbed and has begun benchmarking, experimenting, and integrating systems for our 1.0 FreedomStack release on July 4. James Yox, our CIO, has been penetration-testing our computer systems to ensure greater reliability and security. We began the quarter by completely rearchitecting our enterprise storage solution, and system performance is at an all-time high.

Guifi.us Demoed at SXSW
Isaac presented on the FNF and guifi.us at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, on March 9th. Also presenting on the panel “And What of Liberty? Networks and Freedom,” were Dan Phiffer of occupy.here and Harlo Holmes of the Guardian Project. Isaac spoke about network freedom and guifi.us, and demonstrated an early build of our network-planning tool. Guifi.us, our project to bring free networks like Guifi.net’s to the US. Guifi.us is a web platform enabling communities to plan, provision, and fund their own cooperative ISPs. Guifi.us will include mapping and RF planning features, community support for selected hardware platforms, tools to determine how best to backhaul networks, and a crowdfunding tool for communities to raise funds for network building. The objective of this project is to catalyze community wireless projects by providing decision support and organizing tools. The FNF is working in collaboration with Spanish networking group guifi.net, which has built a user-run cooperative network of over 20,000 nodes in Catalonia and Valencia, in an effort to bring their model to the US.

New FNF Website Launches
This quarter, we performed a complete overhaul of our public web properties, designing a custom WordPress theme in order to make it easier to find information, and establishing a uniform user experience across all of our sites. Please check the new site out at https://www.thefnf.org and let us know how we can make it even better.

Press Clippings
The FNF has been featured by several media outlets this quarter. Gordon Cook, who since 1992 has edited and published the longest running technology policy newsletter on the Internet, wrote on the FNF as well as Guifi.net in the March/April 2013 issue of the ”COOK Report on Internet Protocol”, “DIY Commons Infrastructure in the US.” ”Harper’s Magazine” and Kansas City writer Whitney Terrell also took notice of our work, in an article entitled “Network Free K.C.” And Isaac Wilder was interviewed by Elise Gallant for the Spring/Summer 2013 issue of ”Purple Magazine”. More about the FNF in the press can be found here.

Winter Summit 2013
The FNF held our biannual summit for winter 2013 in Austin, TX, during late January. We discussed the FNF’s operating procedures and plans for 2013, worked on our technical systems, strategized our upcoming efforts in publicity and fundraising, and talked about how to launch a community network on the guifi.net model. Attending the Summit was our core team: Charles Wyble, Isaac Wilder, Tyrone Greenfield, and James Yox; artist/activist Sean McIntyre and journalist Whitney Terrell.

Board of Directors Meets
The Board of Directors decided this January to begin meeting monthly rather than twice per year, and so far in 2013 they’ve held two Board meetings, in late January and in early March. The Board strategized on how to build guifi.us and integrate it with guifi.net and with FNF’s mission. They also discussed how the Board can exercise more effective oversight of the FNF, and how to move toward making the Board more democratic by having dues-paying members elect new directors.

FNF Moves into New Office
In January, the FNF moved into our first office, in the West Bottoms neighborhood of Kansas City, MO. We are very excited to have a dedicated space where we can plan, work and build. Additionally, the core team made significant efforts to improve their own workstations for better productivity and flow.

Financial Report
This quarter, the FNF took in $1411.50 in revenue, and spent $4037.08, ending with $2831.43 cash in hand. All of the income came from individual donations, while the greatest portions of expenses went towards electronic equipment, colocation/hosting/backhaul costs, and travel, in that order. A more detailed report can be found on the Commons.

Join the FNF
The FNF relies on individual donors like you to keep bringing people online and developing tools to truly make the Internet a commons for all of humanity. You can help us bring about our vision of a world where networks are owned and run by all. Please consider signing up today as a monthly donor, or give a one-time contribution, on our website.

Recently, the Free Network Foundation attracted the attention of Harper’s Magazine and KC-based author Whitney Terrell, who published an article Wednesday, March 20, about our recent activities in Kansas City. We’re very happy with the quality of the article and with the focus Whitney brings to technological issues now affecting KC and everywhere. The article, entitled “Network Free K.C.” can be found on Harper’s website.

We’re excited to announce that the FNF was extensively featured in the March/April 2013 issue of the COOK Report on Internet Protocol. Following many conversations with Executive Director Isaac Wilder, Gordon Cook has published a long-form piece on our work as well as that of our friends at guifi.net in Catalonia.

Part I of the Report

Part II of the Report

Gordon Cook is a technologist who has edited and published the COOK Report, the longest running technology policy newsletter on the Internet, since 1992. He also runs the [Arch-econ] mailing list on the economics and architechture of IP networks.

This Saturday, March 9th, at 11:00 AM, Isaac will be presenting at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, on a panel entitled And What of Liberty? Networks & Freedom. Isaac will speak on the importance of network sovereignty, as well as exciting new developments for the FNF. He will be joining Dan Phiffer of occupy.here and Harlo Holmes of the Guardian Project. Please join us at the Austin Convention Center, Room 9ABC, 500 E Cesar Chavez St.

Following our summit in Austin last week, the FNF held a meeting of its Board of Directors, as well as a hackfest that entailed work on Tech Ops projects, in addition to strategic discussions on fundraising and outreach. The Board meeting was our first with Martin Dluhos, a longtime FNF contributor newly on the Board, and it was the first time for the rest of the directors to meet in-person.

 

The Board of Directors, consisting of Martin, Gregory Foster,  Tyrone Greenfield, Isaac Wilder, and Patti Wyble, discussed the FNF’s progress during the summit and since their last meeting, in late December. The Board then strategized about how best to move forward in our collaboration with Catalonian network commons Guifi.net and how this will fit into Isaac’s plans to present at the SXSW Interactive tech conference in early March 2013. The FNF is currently investigating the development of a GIS platform, and Greg lent his expertise on the subject. The meeting also included an extensive discussion of how to increase the Board’s role in oversight of the FNF, and in fundraising, as well as a temporarily closed session to discuss personnel issues.

 

Read full minutes from the meeting, here.

From Thursday, 24 January, until Sunday, 27 January, we held our Winter Summit in Austin, TX. This post covers the Summit proper. Isaac and Tyrone are staying with Charles in Austin until Wednesday for a post-summit hackfest, which we’ll write up in a later post. Another post will cover the meeting of the Board of Directors that was held in Austin on 27 January.

Attending the Summit was our core team: Charles Wyble, Isaac Wilder, Tyrone Greenfield, and James Yox; artist/activist Sean McIntyre and journalist Whitney Terrell. We discussed the FNF’s operating procedures and plans for 2013, worked on our technical systems, strategized our upcoming efforts in publicity and fundraising, and talked about how to launch a community network on the guifi.net model.

OPERATING PROCEDURES AND PLANS

Our operations are divided into four categories, each of which is managed by a member of the FNF executive team. Charles oversees technology development, Isaac oversees organizational development, Tyrone oversees business operations, and James oversees technical operations. We went over planning documents, which can be viewed here, and discussed the scope of the four departments. We also went over our progress on our 18-month Roadmap from late 2011, which will terminate on 4 July 2013. Finally, we went over how to improve our internal work-flows and communication, especially through incorporating daily updates among the executive team.

SYSTEMS WORK

On Thursday, Charles led a tour of the FNF Austin Radio Lab – the architecture of which will allow for rapid vetting of radio firmwares and featuresets. We revamped our coordination and tracking workflow to allow for easier integration between email and chili, our task tracker.  We implemented phase one of a plan for a single source of authentication across all FNF properties. Using OpenLDAP and Pluggable Authentication Modules, we brought all of our Virtual Machines under unified access control. We hacked out rough prototypes of three properties: one static HTML page to replace our current front page, one drupal-based GIS platform that will serve as a provisioning/link qualification engine, and one webpy/JS widget, just for fun :-)

PUBLICITY AND FUNDRAISING

Throughout the Summit, we talked extensively about how best to publicize our success, now and going forward. Sean provided some very valuable inputs, stressing the need for personal testimonials from those we’ve affected, as well as presentation strategies closely tailored to their intended audiences, especially in regard to presenting at upcoming conferences such as SXSW in March. We also discussed how to pursue fundraising, including the possibility of applying for grants from other non-profits, and the potential of applying for a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship.

LAUNCHING A COMMUNITY NETWORK

A major theme of our Winter Summit was building a road map to launching a prototype community network in Kansas City that will serve as a replicable model. We have been remarkably impressed by the methods and success of guifi.net in building community networks in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, and we decided that we want to build on their model. Guifi.net is held together by their Commons for Open, Free, and Neutral Networks, and thus we have been developing a Commons agreement for use in the US, as well as iterating our Free network Definition that acts as a statement of the FNF’s principles. We are now talking with the organizers of guifi.net as well as our partner organizations in KC to bringing guifi practices and principles to the United States.

You can read detailed notes from the Winter Summit here.

We are pleased to announce the release of our Annual Report for 2012. Check it out in pdf here.

We just posted a report on our financial operations, spanning the period from June 2011-November 2012, on the Commons. Please check it out, and let us know how we can improve it, and our transparency efforts in general.

Over the past month or so, the FNF has worked with Kansas City nonprofit Connecting for Good to plan and implement a network with the Rosedale Ridge housing project in Kansas City, Kansas.  Over the course of the last week, prototype FreedomLink and FreedomTower equipment was deployed in conjunction with a more conventional access mesh to provide a connectivity solution at small fraction of the retail cost. More than 200 families at Rosedale Ridge are now able to access the Internet from their homes, rather than having to travel many miles to the nearest public library. Connecting for Good also plans to provide tech education and access to affordable computers to the residents of Rosedale Ridge, so that they can take full advantage of the network.

 

We’re thrilled to be able to help Connecting for Good in their mission, and very pleased to have a production testbed for our solutions. Development continues on the entire suite of free network tools. We hope that the Kansas City network will grow, in the fullness of time, to include more sites using better tools.

 

KC weekly The Pitch wrote more about Connecting for Good’s network.

In this “series finale,” we discuss how the FNF began, and a brief overview of its organizational history over the past two years. We hope you have enjoyed Grow Your Own Network, a review of where we came from, who we are, and where we’re going.

Part Six: A History of the FNF

The Free Network Foundation was formed in May 2011, after co-founders Charles Wyble and Isaac Wilder met on the NextNet mailing list. Charles, who serves as Technical Director, has an extensive background in large-scale systems engineering and integration. Isaac, who serves as Executive Director, studied Computer Science and Philosophy before leaving school to dedicate himself to the FNF. We are a registered non-profit organization in the state of Missouri, with an application for 501(c)(3) status pending.

Our team has grown a great deal since then, to include hardware engineers, radio experts, software developers, webmasters, educators, artists, and scholars. Our work has consisted in large part of capacity building that will pay significant dividends in the long run.

We built out two high availability on-net facilities, in Kansas City and Dallas. The KC site is designed to host organizational tools, community resources, lab components, a Network Operations Center, and the first FreedomLink. The Dallas site serves as a warm backup and disaster recovery site.

In April 2012, we applied for and received a nationwide, non-exclusive license from the FCC, to operate radios in the 3.65GHz band, providing access to 50MHz of clear spectrum for use in wide area communications.

During the Occupy Wall Street protests, the FNF worked with activists to build and deploy FreedomTowers in NYC and Austin, TX, and facilitated the building of FreedomTowers in San Antonio and LA. The Towers provided wireless internet access to local occupy movements.

The General Assembly of OWS reached consensus that they should build a tower of their own, which we then helped Occupy Tech Ops to construct. In October 2011, the FNF was awarded a $10,000 prize at the Contact Summit in NYC, a “festival of innovation” exploring how technology and media can bring about social change. We’ve used those funds to finance much of our work so far, in addition to building a base of monthly financial support that entirely covers our current operational overhead.

We are moving under our own steam now, and with a great deal of momentum. This is an idea whose time has come – the tools used to build free networks are reaching maturity, and we have put ourselves in a position to make a significant contribution to the integration and adoption of this technology.