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Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: Look Tux, no wires
Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: Look Tux, no wires | linux.conf.au: Look Tux, no wires |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 15 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 6 In 2005 Hawtin could not get leave from Ratbag - with whom he was then employed - to attend the LCA which was held in Canberra. "So, for 2006 I made sure that I could go and both my wife - Janet - and myself flew to Dunedin, mostly as hobbyist/attendees, but both of us also presented at the SysAdmin miniconf. We both presented 10-minute lightning talks. They went down well enough and folks quizzed us on the respective topics afterwards." Here the geek in him surfaces: "I'm not really into public speaking in any way, but interest showed afterwards made me think about doing more..." At the 2007 LCA, he presented a paper on server redundancy. "Some time after the conference, speaking with local FLOSS folks about the whole experience, as a process, how I used one talk as a platform upon which to propose the next, I decided that it was something that I should give others the opportunity to do too. This time on a topic a little closer to my interest set, rather than work projects. And, of course, that's wireless," Hawtin said. "So, here I suppose I need to mention that I'm a member of Air-Stream. I've also been a member of Consume in the UK/London and I've talked to and visited folks in other community wireless groups in the UK, Germany, Holland, Spain and around Australia... I also met many American folks in London who were into using wireless, but not really in a community network sense, their main aim is free internet access..." For Hawtin, the people from Barcelona and Guadalajara (a city and municipality in the autonomous community of Castile-La Mancha near Madrid, not the city in Mexico) are the ones he remembers from these trips. "Their purpose, their sense of community were inspiring! Nowhere else has anyone really given me the same sense of urgency and has the strong values of community that I experienced there," he says. Once the call for presentations for the 2008 conference was announced along with the call for miniconfs. Hawtin was the first to submit a plan for a day on "Community Wireless and Connecting Community". "The main aim for me... is that I would like to see all the community wireless groups from around Australia meet and thrash out ideas for things that work and things that don't and get some strategies together to make bigger, better, more widely connected, more diverse, networks that are full of content. And keep talking until next LCA!" he says. "I don't envisage that this will happen all in one year, but I hope to try again in 2009 to connect more people and build better links between the community wireless groups of Australia." He says there are lots of FOSS people interested in community wireless. "Most Air-Stream members use FLOSS in some way. There are also some FLOSS advocates who help educate those that haven't come across FLOSS before. The principles of community wireless and free software are similar. They are both about participation and collaboration. There is a large community interested in building software to drive consumer hardware like access points, which are used to build community wireless networks. An example of this is OpenWRT which we are using at the Linux Conference." |
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