Jure Cuhalev

How far are you willing to go to spread your knowledge and make world easier for people to use?

Seen on a wall in Berlin.

Posted URL – http://addresstrick.tk/ is actually a really useful one if you’re a Windows user.

Wireless Community Weekend 2010 at Berlin is a conference of different wireless networks around Europe. One of the sessions we held was on what kind of services people are running on their networks and what should be develop (as a community) next to enrich our infrastructure.

We’ve built the network: what now?

Services

• radio and video streaming http://rund.freifunk.net or http://www.livestream.com/dubnighttv/
• Voice over IP http://wiki.ninux.org/Elenco_Telefonico_rete_VoIP_di_ninux.org
• Public web Cams (over the roofs, bird nest’s – very popular in Berlin)

Discovery

Splash screen:

• They don’t really work in most experience. People don’t read them or respond to them.
• Intercepts connections and makes a bad experience
• Problems when being on dual stack
• If you have it: don’t mention money as people will go away (even if just for donations).  Explain what will happen after they press the login button.
• Use SSID as name that you want to announce (use WWW so people know it’s a website)

mDNS:

• Service discovery, networks
• Music sharing services (iTunes like sharing (DAAP))
• Serverless chat
• Good resource: http://wiki.ninux.org/ZeroconfServices

Kiberpipa.net is running:

• Video streaming from Cyberpipe (lectures – http://video.kiberpipa.org)
• VPN for end users
• Local irc server with SSL suport (irc.sioff.net)
• VPS to run and learn about Linux (all the servers are accessible inside network + ipv6 only connectivity from the outside world)
• Multiple-storages (NAS) for sharing stuff/run your own FTP server
• Peering connectivity to other Freifunk networks/hackerspaces

Other services that people are running

• Used books
• Weather report
• Blog server
• Radio streaming
• DNS servers that do all the fancy remapping (service to all the users)

Wishlist:

• WE NEED working SPLASH SCREENS
• nodes running their own webserver
• automatic name registration system (web site)
• alternative domain names redirection (custom zones)
• internet caching services (uncensored)
• decentralized community radio station / shared radio schedule (gsoc project this year): http://radiomate.org and http://fusoradio.net
• game servers (freeciv works!)
• mesh-partys (like lan party)
• local search engines
• good service discovery service. What is the most common way to announce new service around the whole network: mDNS?

Want to share your experience in running services on your wireless networks? Share it in the comments.

I’m at Campus Party EU in Madrid this week and while it was a decent event, the part that it’s interesting is to see how community of over 200 international participants organize themselves as most of the flights back are canceled. As almost here is versed in IT technologies it is safe to say that we’re seeing the future of citizen self-organizing using modern collaboration technologies.

1. Projecting Twitter stream to the stages. This was more of a gimmick and nice to have back channel before, but during the time of the crisis provides an excellent overview of the chatter and what people are saying or trying to organize.

2. Travel Wiki, where people started writing down which cities or towns they need to get and what are different options of travel and prices.

3. Official blog that keeps everyone updated with the latest information. This if of course transmitted to the wiki and twitter stream.

All the solutions, except for the official blog, relay on the crowd to filter the information and self organize while everyone thinks of the solution. It ensures people don’t panic and there are centralized and maintained places to find the latest information, reducing the level of misinformation and things lost in translation.

Usability of 3rd party modules is often interesting and you can see evolution of the product through the interface. Breezing Forms is not exception to this, as it uses interesting formation of  radio buttons to indicate validation options.

Trick question: what is current setting?

Yep, it’s None. Not Library that it seems from the first glance. Readability of this form can be greatly improved by moving radio button field to the left of text:

The lesson here is that if you’re forms are making you hesitate before clicking, you probably have to rethink them.

Update: D. submitted further improvement in the comments (thanks!):

Slovenian budget is a 12 billion euro monster that most citizens don’t understand or even have remote idea how it’s structured and where does their money go. As it turns out, people are just not good at taking abstract numbers to go into billions and understanding proportions and what it means to spend 50 million on one thing and 1 billion on something else.

That is what I’m trying to solve with this Visualization of budget of Slovenia for 2010. Show where the money is going as well as tell a story of a country that’s so much in debt that it would be a reason for panic if it happened to a person or a company. Yet we don’t seem to talk or address the issue that we’re 3.6 billion EUR short of making budget and that we have to borrow more money to pay our old debts.

(click on image for interactive version)

Income

Spending

(red is debt)

Lesson

Having access to experts or your own understanding of the data you’re trying to visualize is essential. In this case we had to reassemble budget since they form listing in a way that presents debt separately from the rest of the budget.