IS4CWN was held in Berlin 2nd to 4th October at cBase  home of Freifunk celbrating a decade of wireless freenetworking. James Stevens travelled there with Alexei Blinov and was reunited with long term Consume collaborator Julian Priest (nz) currently living in Pisa Italy.

Juergen Neuman ( freifunk ) arranged for us all to stay in the old pig sty at K9 a housing commune/bar. Then, 3 days of workshops, Wednesday 2nd, Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th during which time we listened, questioned and exchanged information with the many international community wireless network groups represented.

The first day we spent visiting the three presentation rooms as well as enjoying the hospitality at cBase. In the afternoon Julian Priest presented the picosat project ‘weight of information‘ and we met with Luka Mustafa from Ljubljana who has spent three years in London at uni and returned to europe with a  3D printed prototype of gigabit optical networking solution inspired by Ronja. Met with Rodger of Guifi.net (topnotch) Attended a range of sessions… see timetable. lots of drinking all day then diner with Juergen, Alexei and Julian.

After a morning spent recovering from the night before and a lovely walk along the river, met with Richard from Austin wireless and talked about Borgfest his latest project, also talked with Sam of Occupy London and Hacklab London who showed a fantastic video playback project (link lost). Spent short periods in a selection of sessions till Freifunkers celebrated ten years meshness. Thursday evening keynote from Amelia Anderstrotter of German Pirate Party . Diner with Juergen and gf Julian, Alexei and joined by Ramon Rocco (guifi.net) and Axel Nuemann (Batman)

Met with Robert Horvitz from Open Spectrum Alliance he invited us to attend his exhibition in London at glasshouse trust gallery (weird link) attended many session including one of the last  on Friday explaining progress on libre-mesh.org a very recent collaboration of AlterMesh (from AlterMundi, Argentina), qMp (from guifi.net, Catalunya), eigenNet (from eigenLab, Ninux, Italia). This was the most inspiring and fascinating moments of the summit.. pure technical insight and progressive utilisation of BATMAN eXtended (layer2), BMX (layer3)  to hugely extend the scope and scale of future networks.. brilliant.

Finished off talking with Sven-Ola architect of much freifunk advanced work as we plan to offer VLAN exchange with SPC in London and complete the 11 year round trip of BerLon!

Deckspace.tv have arranged a series of themed public events @ Deckspace for October and November 2013, each recognising key interests of its subscribers during the last decade.

reSync – Wilderness | Transmissions | Rights | Objectives | Origins | Screens | Futures

Review existing SPC and subscriber projects to collect fresh insights and inspiration from the originators and work together to republish using a range of flexible, efficient and playful technologies and techniques.

Check out the Workshops tab…

And that was it, the first meeting sessions ended with a proper filmriss at the filmrisz bar, discussing the next release of Datacide, also coming to the Anarchist Bookfair.

For some noise, listen to PRAXIS.

One of our workshops will take place during/at the Mozfest. Meeting up with the Flossmanuals people, joining the School of Open (Creative Commons & P2PU) and  the Open Knowledge Foundation for a fun evening to connect with peers in the open education space. Mick Fuzz writes: “So many efforts exist to “open” up  education around the world. How can we help connect these efforts? We’d  like to start by collaboratively building a human timeline of open education — Do you remember when and where you first became aware of open education?  When did you first become passionate about “open” or  participate in an “open” event or job? Where and what was it? What else in this area has most inspired you? We will share experiences and manually place ourselves along a real world  timeline (think rolls of butcher paper, markers, glitter is optional). Then we’ll start fleshing out  the timeline with key events and persons that we think brought the open education and knowledge movement to where it is today. We’ll stop whenever we get tired, make merry with refreshments and snacks, and  digitize whatever we have by the end of the evening for further contributions from everyone and anyone on the web. We’ll make the resulting timeline available openly (either via CC0, CC BY, or CC  BY-SA), and feature it in a chapter of the Open Education Handbook!

The FLOSS Manuals Foundation is a collection of different language communities that produce educational materials about Free Software using innovative collaborative tools and processes. http://www.flossmanuals.org/”

The Transmediale resource006 event runs under the title: Overflow. Transmediale therefore manifests on their website that “In the current development of digital culture we are experiencing an “overflow condition”, where more information is being transmitted than machines can process, and humans can handle. This need for accumulation make us part of a constant flow of data, so big and complex that it becomes impossible to analyse and to filter. The urgent pressure of issues such as ownership and privacy related to data overflow makes us wonder if producing more data instead means generating more control.”

deadSwap

Recruiting performance of the Telekommunisten for deadSwap, “Agents Recruiting for deadSwap // Numbers Station by the Telekommunisten network activists. Whistleblowers. Spies. Covert action requires clandestine networks. Data hidden in public space. Seemingly random numbers spoken on the radio. What does it mean? There must be a system! How do you join the network? Can you be counted on? Are you committed? Do you have what it takes to join the network?”

Dead Drop ness

Danya Vassilev had similar system (proposal) for transport (buses, trams)
Aram Barthold  had something similar too -> Dead Drops

Work of previous PML fellows was discussed in the Mining the Image session.

A short c-base visit in order to sync up between the open wireless network OWN in London, and the open wireless network FREIFUNK in Berlin.

James Stevens will visit the international summit for community wireless networks next month meeting technology experts, policy analysts, on-the-ground specialists, university research, discussing state-of-the-art community wireless projects, and their futures.

Quote from the agenda:

How to Avoid Tragedy of The Commons in Wi-Fi Networks:
The performance of a Wi-Fi link (in meshes and in access point settings) is subject to sometimes uncontrollable interference and channel congestion. But until now it was very hard to troubleshoot and find out what really causes a link to perform poorly without investing heavily in special measurement equipment and time. This has changed now. We present a heavily modified and enhanced version the already existing software tool called “horst” (lightweight IEEE802.11 wireless LAN analyzer similar to tcpdump, Wireshark or Kismet). This can be used to implement mechanisms/protocols to cooperatively conserve channel airtime–to avoid depletion of the resources shared—in order to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

Adnan Hadzi travelled to Berlin with James Stevens in September to meet with fellows of Post Media Lab to exchange current ideas and prepare the research programme leading up to Taking care of Things session as part of Transmediale 2014.

SPC are setting out to revisit subscriber materials including image bank of still and moving image recordings on media and servers in Deckspace with a view to re-presentation. Surprisingly little formal documentary material exists to account for the reeling years at SPC, such that we have is on video tape or in html and email.  In October and November will offer Friday workshops at Deckspace for groups to review some of their preferred moments and bring them into focus again utilising some contemporary publishing and distribution methods. With the public appetite for news and media concentrators migrating to touch screen readers and smart phones we will formulate our workshop output to offer secure syncronisation options as well as more traditional web publishing and RSS.

In December we will travel to Germany again this time to Luneburg to host similar workshops with local groups there.

Expect BitMessage, Bit torrent Sync and Stream and NFC/RFID interactions.