2015

April

We held two meetings in Cerrito de La Bolsa, where a group of neighbors were organizing to create a new community network in their area. About 20 people attended each meeting, with a balance of men and women (around 60%/40%)

We moved forward in the development of a stable release of Libre-Mesh to be tested in Quintana town during May.

Our main activity was polishing up the stable Libre-Mesh release: squashing bugs, doing extensive tests, discussing alternatives to known problems or complicated scenarios, and troubleshooting strange behaviours. The result was officially released, and was left running on a small 15 router cloud in one of the local networks.

We held another community workshop in LaBolsa, where 9 men, 7 women and many children built a total of 6 nodes. During the following days, they installed them in their neighbourhood.

We also sent a proposal for FRIDA awards, where one of the winning criteria was the number of public votes received. We quickly reached 2nd place but the first candidate was very popular as well, so it was a very tight competition that lasted days, alternating 1st place with them many times. We had to reach out to every social circle, even made a promo video in a rush, and finally won. Besides the award, a nice “bonus takeaway” was that the media campaign had a surprising impact on our publicity; we strengthened many relationships, and formed new ones.

Deployed the recently released Libre-Mesh 15.04 in a town near Quintana, by means of a workshop where the neighbors built the nodes to expand the Internet to cover their town, and used our firmware to flash the out-of-the-box routers.

This particular workshop was divided in two days: one to prepare all the materials, and another day to chat a bit about organization, and train people to actually put the stuff in their roofs. Almost 30 people attended (with women and men in equal proportion, including some children)

We managed to deploy Libre-Mesh 15.04 firmware to the nodes that interconnect the different towns in the region, and monitoring every day since for bugs or unexpected behaviours, then figuring out workarounds or fixes.

Our main focus was deploying Libre-Mesh 15.04 firmware to a remote town, in another province, coordinating the task with the local community, and monitoring performance since then.

Did a video-tutorial of the dual-band DIY antennas we build, a key piece of documentation we were severely lacking for more than a year!

Had such a great experience participating in the regional meeting at Nuvem, Brasil, along with folks from the Open Technology Institute, Rhizomatica, Cooperativa Maria Luisa Ortiz, Falanster.by, and other brazilians projects.

AlterMundi became an Autonomous System, which means having our own range of ip addresses (v4 and v6) and thus being able to make local community networks officially part of The Internet!

Did some gigabit-longshot tests with Ubiquiti AirFiber-5X equipment, and in the end upgraded our main backbone using a couple of AirFiber-5U

Hosted the QuintanaCamp 2015 gathering in Cordoba during the whole month, while Nico traveled to Brasil for a week to represent AlterMundi at the Internet Governance Forum.

The remaining funds of the Shuttleworth Flash Grant were used to partially finance a Europe trip next year, in order for Gui to participate in the Internet Freedom Festival and BattleMesh v9.