I was so excited to hear about this network this week and start reading what I can find online about getting started. I’m still trying to figure out what I would need and and whether I can invest that much right now.
In the meantime, I’ve been thinking I should start connecting people here with CodeBridge and vice versa. CodeBridge is an movement working to support civic tech - tech helping society in some way. It’s partly a space to work on projects (it’s office space under a bridge) and a bunch of people working in civic tech supporting related projects, sometimes incubating them, helping with funding etc. We are ramping up the events - each month we aim to run two accountability (as in state accountable to citizens) workshops defining problems and identifying possible tech solutions, two dataquests (like hackathons but the point is to tell an important story with data, app optional) and two community evenings where the point is to work on your tech projects, share them, perhaps have others join them or find people to collaborate with.
I know we’re out of the way for most of you but I thought there’s a cool overlap between CodeBridge’s work and this community so I wanted to invite you in. We might be able to host some of your events - I think one can argue your events fall under our mission. Personally, I see the value in CTWUG as building up competence and providing access to a lot of services and knowledge to people who can’t afford (much or any) internet access - also very much having a lot of fun with cool tech.
So I’m plugging our events calendar to you ( http://www.meetup.com/Code-for-South-Africa/ ) and we’re looking into perhaps connecting up CodeBridge where curious people could perhaps come and explore the WUG.
Thanks for the post @jbothma. I can’t think where this might lead but there may be opportunities to use our network for some community good. I personally would have no objections with that.
I’d personally be keen for our network to be used for some public good if possible. I have to point out that we do not provide internet.
We cannot commit to much in advance but exploration and learning is part of our mission so I’m happy to think about ways we can work together.
I had a look at your projects and they look commendable and interesting.
Let us know if you have any ideas and our @Committee can see how we could assist.
So yeah the one aspect is that I’d like your members to be aware of us, a space with hopefully a creative hacker-y and community-oriented vibe where you’re welcome to come and hack at. Or just chat with cool nerds of all niches.
The other is using the network for community good. @Committee: Some things I currently have in mind are
get technically-interested young people or newbies of all ages in contact with something a bit bigger than more social than the classic hardware projects like an arduino or raspberry pi - they get to connect things to a wider alternative network and learn a lot of useful concepts along the way. I don’t know where they might come from. I’m reaching out to nearby high schools but the network is sparse around us and I think it’s also important to give the opportunity to people in other parts of the city where it seems like you have a presence, like the northern suburbs and part of the flats.
share educational material via the network e.g.
proxy or mirror some online courses like coursera or what MIT just open sourced - I say proxy because someone suggested in a thread somewhere that proxying certain walled gardens isn’t illegal?
mirror other important info e.g. I’m building a mirror of a government website which google isn’t indexing properly to help google and humans find important info. This would be the first site I’d serve on the network just because I can. This particular site explicitly says it can be used for non-commercial purposes and I’m sure most of the government websites have valuable and copyable content. The audience for this is really people who can’t afford large amounts of internet access but can get access to your network via cheaper equipment e.g. by connecting to a nearby sector node.
Both of these rely on people in the community being interested and available to take part in providing some leadership or network service. It also depends on people being interested in this learning opportunity/alternative knowledge access.
Do you know to what extent this need exists currently and to what extent you’re already serving it? I saw you’re already running some training but I haven’t looked at it very deeply.
We do offer limtied training to people looking to get involved with networking. This involves some basic training on IP networking and routing and also OSPF routing which is what we use to router our traffic.
We also have a Wikipedia mirror running on our network. That’s hosted by one of our members.
We also offer email to our members.
Mirrors or proxies to external sites could also be interesting.
Our DNS servers are mostly Pi’s running a custom bind config (our WugPi).
Members can easily learn how to host their websites or services on Pi or other hardware.
The network has dns and routing services provided so once you are connected you can host things on your PC/server on the network. We have no concerns unless what you are doing is outside our rules/constitution.
Coursera and similar proxies/mirrors sound interesting as well to me.
As to interest I am not certain. Perhaps @MDE can pip up on how many people visit his Wikipedia mirror for example? I know some portion of our members do not have internet (or unlimited internet) and might be interested in this sort of thing.