some notes from the meeting this last tuesday - some of this was covered very briefly with me promising to push some of my research elements into the mailing list. as such this email is not to scale. administravia / group discounts ------------------------------- we have been signed up for the oreilly and associates user group membership. this means that we get the following perks. - group members are entitled to a 20% discount on O'Reilly products purchased directly from ora. Information for placing an order is provided on the discount flyers that will be shipped to us, upon acceptance to the program. (sometimes this is cheaper than amazon / sometimes it isn't) - members are also entitled to a 20% discount on o'reilly conferences and tutorials. other special discount offers may also be forwarded to our group from time to time. - they regularly donate books and other promotional items for raffles or auctions to help user groups raise money, or for meeting door prizes. on a quarterly basis, they'll send their latest catalog. some of their authors are willing to speak at user group meetings they'll do what they can to help us arrange speakers. - we can get a single review copy of a book for our group, provided we're willing to follow up with a review of the book and give them either a copy of the review if it happens in printed publication or a url for a web based version of it. interested parties can drop me a line for details. - asim was curious as to whether or not this discount applied to the safari books online. i will be following up on this. - we're supposed to be getting a welcome package with the discount flyers and more information within the next couple of weeks. i'll have the contents of this care package for the next meeting. what ORA would like from us (note: these are not required but do go some ways to helping us sponsor events and generate relationships with other people) - post an o'reilly user group program banner to the web site, which can be found at: http://ug.oreilly.com/banners/. they would like the banner to link back to www.oreilly.com. - encourage members to review ora books and post the reviews on the web site or newsletter--making sure to notify ora when the reviews are available. if we don't have a newsletter, provide information to the group about o'reilly products and ug program benefits to the group email list (editorial aside - some of these items may not have direct applicability to the user group but may be of tangential interest.) additional vendors i have contacted a handful of antenna and wireless equipment vendors to see about getting discounts on gear and group purchase options. more on this as i coalesce the information. many of these companies don't have formal user group programs like ORA hence they're making some of this up as they go. administravia / web collaboration software ------------------------------------------ - i conducted a fair amount of research on collaborative web tools and came to the conclusion that these for the most part stunk. kent ritchie pointed out that there doesn't seem to be a burning need for additional content on the web site and this seems to be a topic that we can handle as it comes up later. -- further discussion on this has been tabled for the time being. misc group discussion --------------------- we now move to a rather rambling discussion regarding what the desires of the group as a whole were. andy warner had summarized his SIG tabulation in email prior to the meeting and while the interested parties seem fairly well split regarding interest there is a lot of overlap between the hotspot folks and the infrastructure folks. while there wasn't as much structure to the discussion as there was at our first meeting there were a lot of topics covered and a very engaging discussion was had. i'll attempt to hit the topics in a rough progression of order as well as highlight what i saw to be the take aways. if i missed something of interest please, please add to the discussion. - hot spots - ------------- there was a lot of interest in this topic and folks seem to have a wide range of opinions regarding what would and would not be successful. much of the discussion centered around the challenges with the geographic coverage of points of interest. to that end there are a few elements that bear noting. - while we feel that we may not have much in common areaswe don't know for certain where people in the group are localized. matthew hallacy has volunteered to log the access points and locations that people have setup and are planning on setting up. we will review these locations to see if there are locations of interest/overlap and see what we can focus our immediate energies on. initial research seems to indicate that we have some overlap. - there is a need for a common authentication arrangement that allows us to share our nodes with other members in the city as well as the need to come up with cookbook configurations for members who may not necessarily be comfortable with some of the technology elements. *project - wireless config distro* - this need for a cookbook configuration and the support of it brought up the topic of rolling our own sputnik-like distro with support provided by the local user group. this seems like a project that many folks were interested in and will likely be a topic for further development. - also within the scope of this discussion was the notion of wiring the state fair from a publicity perspective and providing access from the fairgrounds. this bears further research. - other topics of conversation over the course of this discussion included the various flavors of firewalls that are available on the different platforms and the current state of the NoCatAuth system. - overlay network - ------------------- there is just as much interest in an overlay network which can be used to move bits around the twin cities independently of wired infrastructure which is purchased from the teleco. this brings with it a host of new challenges many of which were discussed. there are some significant benefits in this too. one of the primary challenges facing this sort of endeavor is the need to donate assets to the group and the need to provide some administrative structure. bob tanner has done research regarding the creation of a non-profit for the tclug group and is willing to share the information for the tcwug group as well. this may make more sense for the tcwug group vs. the tclug group since there is the creation of infrastructure elements as well. additional topics ----------------- peter saly brought up a very good point regarding his desire to put a node together with the goal of making it available to himself and his neighbors. however, he had some concerns regarding the security implications of doing so and what his risks were. we need to follow up with the cookbook approach to de-skill the process of setting up a wireless access point for public use and help people mitigate the risks associated with doing it. this is good from a PR perspective as well as just making folks lives easier. conclusion ---------- i'm sure that i've missed topics here. if folks would like to fill in any gaps i would appreciate it. hopefully this is useful to the folks who weren't able to make the meeting. -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC