Steady Progress on Technical Objectives
CTO Charles Wyble recently has continued his work on the FNF’s radio testbed and has begun benchmarking, experimenting, and integrating systems for our 1.0 FreedomStack release on July 4. James Yox, our CIO, has been penetration-testing our computer systems to ensure greater reliability and security. We began the quarter by completely rearchitecting our enterprise storage solution, and system performance is at an all-time high.

Guifi.us Demoed at SXSW
Isaac presented on the FNF and guifi.us at SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX, on March 9th. Also presenting on the panel “And What of Liberty? Networks and Freedom,” were Dan Phiffer of occupy.here and Harlo Holmes of the Guardian Project. Isaac spoke about network freedom and guifi.us, and demonstrated an early build of our network-planning tool. Guifi.us, our project to bring free networks like Guifi.net’s to the US. Guifi.us is a web platform enabling communities to plan, provision, and fund their own cooperative ISPs. Guifi.us will include mapping and RF planning features, community support for selected hardware platforms, tools to determine how best to backhaul networks, and a crowdfunding tool for communities to raise funds for network building. The objective of this project is to catalyze community wireless projects by providing decision support and organizing tools. The FNF is working in collaboration with Spanish networking group guifi.net, which has built a user-run cooperative network of over 20,000 nodes in Catalonia and Valencia, in an effort to bring their model to the US.

New FNF Website Launches
This quarter, we performed a complete overhaul of our public web properties, designing a custom WordPress theme in order to make it easier to find information, and establishing a uniform user experience across all of our sites. Please check the new site out at https://www.thefnf.org and let us know how we can make it even better.

Press Clippings
The FNF has been featured by several media outlets this quarter. Gordon Cook, who since 1992 has edited and published the longest running technology policy newsletter on the Internet, wrote on the FNF as well as Guifi.net in the March/April 2013 issue of the ”COOK Report on Internet Protocol”, “DIY Commons Infrastructure in the US.” ”Harper’s Magazine” and Kansas City writer Whitney Terrell also took notice of our work, in an article entitled “Network Free K.C.” And Isaac Wilder was interviewed by Elise Gallant for the Spring/Summer 2013 issue of ”Purple Magazine”. More about the FNF in the press can be found here.

Board of Directors Meets
The Board of Directors decided this January to begin meeting monthly rather than twice per year, and so far in 2013 they’ve held two Board meetings, in late January and in early March. The Board strategized on how to build guifi.us and integrate it with guifi.net and with FNF’s mission. They also discussed how the Board can exercise more effective oversight of the FNF, and how to move toward making the Board more democratic by having dues-paying members elect new directors.

FNF Moves into New Office
In January, the FNF moved into our first office, in the West Bottoms neighborhood of Kansas City, MO. We are very excited to have a dedicated space where we can plan, work and build. Additionally, the core team made significant efforts to improve their own workstations for better productivity and flow.

Financial Report
This quarter, the FNF took in $1411.50 in revenue, and spent $4037.08, ending with $2831.43 cash in hand. All of the income came from individual donations, while the greatest portions of expenses went towards electronic equipment, colocation/hosting/backhaul costs, and travel, in that order. A more detailed report can be found on the Commons.

Join the FNF
The FNF relies on individual donors like you to keep bringing people online and developing tools to truly make the Internet a commons for all of humanity. You can help us bring about our vision of a world where networks are owned and run by all. Please consider signing up today as a monthly donor, or give a one-time contribution, on our website.

Isaac presented at SXSW last Saturday, speaking about the FNF and previewing the pre-alpha build of guifi.us. We haven’t been able to find any recordings of the panel yet, but shall update this post if we can locate one.

While four members of the Board of Directors were in Austin, we held a meeting, following our decision at the 2013 Winter Summit to meet monthly rather than bi-annually. The board came to a decision at the meeting to increase participation in the FNF by allowing all dues-paying members to vote for Directors. We’re still working out the details on how this will operate, but expect an announcement soon, here and on our mailing lists. We’re very excited to extend the governenace of the FNF to all our supporters.

The full minutes from the meeting can be found on the wiki.

[image from @geoffreyfowler]

Part I of the Report

Part II of the Report

Gordon Cook is a technologist who has edited and published the COOK Report, the longest running technology policy newsletter on the Internet, since 1992. He also runs the [Arch-econ] mailing list on the economics and architechture of IP networks.

The Board of Directors, consisting of Martin, Gregory Foster,  Tyrone Greenfield, Isaac Wilder, and Patti Wyble, discussed the FNF’s progress during the summit and since their last meeting, in late December. The Board then strategized about how best to move forward in our collaboration with Catalonian network commons Guifi.net and how this will fit into Isaac’s plans to present at the SXSW Interactive tech conference in early March 2013. The FNF is currently investigating the development of a GIS platform, and Greg lent his expertise on the subject. The meeting also included an extensive discussion of how to increase the Board’s role in oversight of the FNF, and in fundraising, as well as a temporarily closed session to discuss personnel issues.

Read full minutes from the meeting, here.

Last weekend we found a new direction. This doesn’t serve as an official announcement, and I won’t get into our plans here (you can join the mailing list if you want to know), but I will say that for the first time in a long time, all of us at the FNF are feeling genuinely sanguine. It feels like the summer of 2011 all over again: everything new, everything urgent.

It takes courage to reinvent – or to become what you were always becoming. In some ways it feels as though we’ve shifted course, and in some ways it feels as if we’ve kept the rudder steady and true since we set out almost two years ago. There are bound to be more challenges ahead, bigger challenges. There are bound to be rough spots, things that don’t go as planned, delays and disappointments. But now more than ever, it feels as if there is bound to be a movement toward the world that ought to be but isn’t, what’s just out of our grasp. We are going to get there. We are as committed as we’ve ever been — as committed as we could possibly be to the idea that the network ought to be a commons. For a while it felt as though we had run our course — but it feels now as if we’ve turned the corner, and there’s a long, open road unfolding before us. We’ve found our feet again — it’s time to walk.

Attending the Summit was our core team: Charles Wyble, Isaac Wilder, Tyrone Greenfield, and James Yox; artist/activist Sean McIntyre and journalist Whitney Terrell. We discussed the FNF’s operating procedures and plans for 2013, worked on our technical systems, strategized our upcoming efforts in publicity and fundraising, and talked about how to launch a community network on the guifi.net model.

OPERATING PROCEDURES AND PLANS

Our operations are divided into four categories, each of which is managed by a member of the FNF executive team. Charles oversees technology development, Isaac oversees organizational development, Tyrone oversees business operations, and James oversees technical operations. We went over planning documents, which can be viewed here, and discussed the scope of the four departments. We also went over our progress on our 18-month Roadmap from late 2011, which will terminate on 4 July 2013. Finally, we went over how to improve our internal work-flows and communication, especially through incorporating daily updates among the executive team.

SYSTEMS WORK

On Thursday, Charles led a tour of the FNF Austin Radio Lab – the architecture of which will allow for rapid vetting of radio firmwares and featuresets. We revamped our coordination and tracking workflow to allow for easier integration between email and chili, our task tracker.  We implemented phase one of a plan for a single source of authentication across all FNF properties. Using OpenLDAP and Pluggable Authentication Modules, we brought all of our Virtual Machines under unified access control. We hacked out rough prototypes of three properties: one static HTML page to replace our current front page, one drupal-based GIS platform that will serve as a provisioning/link qualification engine, and one webpy/JS widget, just for fun :-)

PUBLICITY AND FUNDRAISING

Throughout the Summit, we talked extensively about how best to publicize our success, now and going forward. Sean provided some very valuable inputs, stressing the need for personal testimonials from those we’ve affected, as well as presentation strategies closely tailored to their intended audiences, especially in regard to presenting at upcoming conferences such as SXSW in March. We also discussed how to pursue fundraising, including the possibility of applying for grants from other non-profits, and the potential of applying for a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship.

LAUNCHING A COMMUNITY NETWORK

A major theme of our Winter Summit was building a road map to launching a prototype community network in Kansas City that will serve as a replicable model. We have been remarkably impressed by the methods and success of guifi.net in building community networks in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, and we decided that we want to build on their model. Guifi.net is held together by their Commons for Open, Free, and Neutral Networks, and thus we have been developing a Commons agreement for use in the US, as well as iterating our Free network Definition that acts as a statement of the FNF’s principles. We are now talking with the organizers of guifi.net as well as our partner organizations in KC to bringing guifi practices and principles to the United States.

You can read detailed notes from the Winter Summit here.