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Sun 7 Oct 2018 11:01AM

October 2018 meetup

NS Nick S Public Seen by 203

Date: Monday October 29th
When: 6pm until ~9ish
Where: the Shrub's office at 17 Guthrie Street (map)
What: we plan to watch "Building Communities of Commons. A documentary on DIY networks at Sarantaporo, Greece.", duration ~1h

This is topical since there was a MAZI project wifi-networking workshop and symposium at Summerhall last week. @pennytravlou was there, and she says should be able to make it to the meeting too.

I'll bring some beer and wine, and there should be tea and coffee available too. There'll be a donations box to help cover the cost of these; also the Shrub have a suggested donation of £1/person/hour.

Now on GetTogether (a federated Meetup.com alternative):
https://gettogether.community/events/339/p2p-edinburgh/

R

RoryG Mon 29 Oct 2018 9:46AM

Fab see you all there

NS

Nick S Mon 29 Oct 2018 10:58AM

Just had official confirmation from Siri of the Shrub. She says the Shrub are formulating their guidelines but have have a suggested donation of £1/person/hour.

NS

Nick S Mon 29 Oct 2018 11:14AM

I don't know much about this, but someone on the hacklab mailing list posted a link to a Scottish community wi-fi network, for the region around Loch Eil, on the west coast.

https://www.locheilnet.co.uk/

Also, excuse me if I quote some of the discussion:

DG: I am still having a lot of difficulty trying to find out what exactly
"MAZI" does, and what purpose it serves.

G: They link you to the internet without phone line nor mobile data. Probably microwave if they say they are using dishes. You could be up a mountain living with a generator and they would throw internet at you.

GG:The Mazi project isn't about an internet connection though. The toolkit is made to help create web apps which are then hosted on a LAN for the benefit of a regional community. For example, you might have a Rasperry Pi hosting a community wiki which is only accessible if you're in range of the open WiFi AP (If you think this sounds a lot like a piratebox, I agree with you).

There was some discussion of meshnets and connecting nodes over the internet, but generally the point is to empower communities. Think of the role currently performed by a local neighbourhood Facebook group and you might imagine what more open alternatives to that could look like.

PT

Penny Travlou Mon 29 Oct 2018 1:54PM

Hi All, I will be at the screening later today. So I am happy to answer any questions you may have about the film, particularly the communities/individuals presented here. I can also try to respond to any questions about the Mazizone as I am collborating with one of the project partners, the unMonastery

NS

Nick S Wed 31 Oct 2018 3:04PM

Thanks for all who came - there were seven of us this time.

Penny gave some good background to the film, filled us in on the MAZI project and generally answered questions, and a couple of people present who'd been to the workshops were able to demonstrate a MAZI zone device.

The film link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA4u03iKmRA. It is in Greek but there are English subtitles.

There are various videos about the MAZIzone project on their resources page:

https://www.mazizone.eu/presentations-talks/

...Including one in Edinburgh from a few years back, but the links seems broken.

(Aside: Rory pointed out the GetTogether link, if you focus on the map it presents rather than the address, guides you to the Bread Street branch of The Shrub. This is despite my placing a peg in the exact location on the map when configuring! Revisiting it seems hard to correct that. GetTogether could be improved in that and a few other respects, but then it's only at version 0.8.)