A further comment on leveraging the network effect is to <broken record mode>collaborate with various related projects to create a much larger combined community earlier than any of us can do alone</broken record mode>.
My suggestion is to pick something that people have to pay for today, that we can offer for free tomorrow. To me the obvious choice is telephony: VoIP is already fairly well proven, and people hate phone bills. The challenge is to make it "grand-mother proof", and more than that, actually attractive to a grand-mother. This means you have to be able to use existing phone numbers, and just have it work. (This introduces some authentication issues, which I can talk about separately, and also some tragedy of the commons issues, which I can also talk about, i.e., how to create incentives for people to keep their device on and contributing to the mesh). The number management has to be completely distributed as well, and there has to be support for using the internet to limit the local mesh size to deal with scalability. This is exactly what ServalProject.org is doing, and is already partnering with VillageTelco.org and GNU Free Call to achieve. We even have working prototype software for selected models of Android phone with Serval Disributed Numbering Architecture (Serval DNA). FB is more than welcome to use our work which is all GPL. I realise that FB is consolidating around the idea of using only existing Debian packages, and that might be a show stopper, but I think that there is tremendous value for FB and for the open source community as a whole if we can achieve a widely distributed alternative phone network that is not dependent on carrier cooperation or governmental blessing (as compared to enum). I'll go crawl back into my box now. Paul. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
