The Community Takes Notice
Luckily, we didn't have to wait very long for the
community to notice us. Just after I returned from Seattle, a local
newspaper (The Press Democrat, http://www.pressdemo.com/business/columns/02sims.html)
ran a feature on some of my wireless shenanigans. I had no idea at
the time how valuable this kind of exposure could be to the community
LAN idea. Within a week, I had received a few dozen emails and
several phone calls from locals who were interested in wireless
networking. Some offered expertise and equipment, while others were
simply curious about our plans and what could be accomplished with
802.11b.
After the article ran, our mailing list grew to about 25 people. We
decided to hold a general meeting to get organized and figure out
what we wanted to do with this stuff. I was pleasantly surprised when
16 interested people showed up at that first meeting. Many were
looking for free high-speed access, while others were simply curious.
A few were Northpoint victims who had been forcibly unplugged from
their DSL when that company went under, and they were looking for any
alternative (apparently, they were no longer considered part of the
"prime" market, and would likely
not see high-speed access again for quite a while).
As the discussion went well into the third hour, it was obvious from
that first meeting that this was going to turn into a regular event.
These people were keenly interested in contributing to a free local
network, and had a tremendous amount of knowledge and resources among
them. But until now, they had no good way of connecting with each
other. From this first get-together, all sorts of possibilities began
to present themselves.
The general consensus was that, if people who had high-speed Net
access wanted to share with those who wanted it but, for whatever
reason, could not get it, there were several technical obstacles that
needed to be overcome:
-
The solution couldn't cost thousands of dollars, or
else no one could afford it.
-
There had to be a secure and easy way of figuring out who was who,
and limiting what they could do on the network (so that node owners
wouldn't be exposed to abusers, or have their
hard-earned bandwidth monopolized by a freeloading few).
-
The solution needed to be easy for someone with limited skills to set
up, and require little or no maintenance.
-
There had to be an easy way for people interested in point-to-point
links to meet with each other.
-
People who did have a fair idea of how to proceed needed access to
all sorts of information, from choosing microwave connectors to
configuring laptops.
We had some answers to these issues, but it became clear that these
were going to be long-term problems, shared by anyone attempting to
put together a community group. We put as much information as we
could up at NoCat and pointed to others who had answers whenever
possible.
The nearest wireless community group to Sebastopol was the BAWUG, who
met regularly in the San Jose area. Since we were obviously
working on parallel lines, it seemed to be time to see what our
neighbors to the south were up to. I got a couple of local wireless
zealots together and we made the two-hour trek to San Jose for a
meeting.
The June 2001 BAWUG meeting was a great opportunity to network
further. Much like our Sebastopol meeting, there were people with all
different abilities and expectations present (only here there were
about 50 of them!). After a couple of interesting presentations, I
got a chance to talk with antenna gurus, some Apple Airport hackers,
and even a commercial wireless startup.
There was much buzz about the impending Portland Summit meeting:
wireless community leaders from all over were going to converge on
Portland for a weekend of planning, talk, beer, and general hackery.
This was a meeting I could not miss.
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