Back at home, now it's time to talk and provide feedback on what happened last weekend: The International Summit of Wireless Communities in Columbia, MD (IS4CWN).
First thing to mention has to be a big credit to Sasha Meinrath and all the team who organized the event (applause). Was near to the perfection (place, panelists, logistics, hotels, meeting rooms, organization, ...). I'm quite sure that on the event we are planning to host next July will be far from being well organized as this one, knowing our "latin enthusiasm"... will be quite more anarchic and spontaneous (which by the way doesn't have to be bad, simply distinct ).

Jordi and I arrived one day after than expected, after 30 hours of non-sleep travel, thanks to the D.on't E.ver L.eave T.he A.irport airlines (I didn't knew that when I  bought the ticked, just told me the meaning of those letters an Austrian colleague when we finally arrived at Loyola). It was just on time to get a shower, go to Loyola and hear the opening session, and then fall to sleep. Obviously we didn't socialized very much that night.

On Saturday, lots of simultaneous interesting sessions. That gave me the impression that I missed half, if not more, of the Summit, which is bad, but being honest, in our case, and having to fly back on sunday afternoon before the summit closing, I can't criticize what gave me a chance to attend. You know, a compressed schedule has good and bad things. Now just waiting to see the published materials/conclusions from the other sessions. However here there are some comments/summary about the ones which I attended:

What's happening in Europe:

Many groups around the EU and some of them quite active and with many users and big networks. There we heard from Leipzig in Gemany, czfree, Austria, the Balcans, of course guifi.net but there also some other which were not present there but also relevant, like the communities in greece and many others I'm missing. I would say that Europe is like a permanent discover of community driven networks promoted mainly directly by the people or geeks which are getting better from time to time. There was no presence at all from NGO's, research, academic or institutions like in the other geographies.
We've got some updates on OLSR-NG status, and saw an overview on the Leipzig mesh.
Some curiosities: Austrians are reusing II World War refugees as Data Centers and the Serbians are recycling old refrigerators to put servers on them and building teamwork doing BBQ's...

What's happening in Latin America:

Sylvia from WiLAC and John from Chile gave us and update on what was going on in Latin America, which was completed later in another session by Ermanno (ESLARED) while talking on how he is breaking world records on wifi links and Pablo about how EHAS is connecting the health centers in the jungle. In contrast on what's going on in Europe, that was very much about NGO's initiatives.
Being quite often an upset taxpayer seeing many times spending public money in agonizing micro-telco or muniwireless initiatives replicating again and again the story of setting up outsourced unprofitable proprietary network operators with fictitious "business models" (if we can call business models to parasitic or permanently subsidized models) and later on "take the money and get out of there" scene instead of a real vocation of public service, and afterwards having to build the real public and neutral networks ourselves and revisiting our pocket again (in catalan "cornut i pagar el beure"), I felt some relief seeing those beautiful initiatives in South America leaded by NGO's somewhat funded by the EU and Spain. Sounds strange to find out that my most profitable taxes could be the ones which get out of my country, and still happy because of that. I'm just hoping that Latin American countries will still get those funds in the future, even increased, until they really don't need them anymore (unfortunately they still).

Adaptations of wireless technologies for long distance and solar applications:

I already explained a little bit on Ermanno setting records on long distance links and Pablo connecting the doctors in the jungle. It's nice to see how Ermanno accrue tons of practical experience in radio communications since the pre-wifi era and generous to share that knowledge with us, and Pablo giving an example of how wifi can help with the public health while sometimes we feel dominated by the microwave paranoia but forgetting this kind of applications and that the real focus of pollution is coming much more form other sources. In line with this Steve (inveneo) tols us how they are using open source projects to bundle off-the-shield solutions for telecenters in Africa.
Sonesh Surana excited our expectations on wifi technologies explaining how they are working at the University of California - Berkeley at the driver level to tune it for long distance applications and economize spectrum with multi-radio nodes avoiding collisions by synchronizing them. By having in the future this kind of drivers in open source that this will boost real works applications for our wireless communities.

Taking Commons Global:

That's really a challenging initiative for using a fiber backbone to make the wireless last mile phenomenon much more global and revisit some of the original concepts of the internet which got lost someday in the way. Shasha just pointed some of the tons of good reasons for that, digital inclusion indexes, innovation and research. Really the wireless communities can play a role here by providing users and let's hope it develops, from the other hand we do really need robust backbones, our all-wifi "islands" are getting the point where they are enormeous, which is very good but doesn't have a lot of sense at all. I'm just wondering here how we can help given the fact that our wireless communities at guifi.net doesn't have fiber at all. But certainly that is something to add to our agendas any time we have talks with research and governmental folks.

At the night some socializing, this time very much with the Latin America folks. Maybe we were still too much jet lagged for having to squeeze our brains by using a foreign language?

Closing

On Sunday morning, time for breakouts and initiatives. That was very varied, for thinks like better collecting the knowledge, proposals for doing wifi at cities like Boston using open source (and hopefully not proprietary networks), lobbying the FCC or international initiatives.
I just realized then that in that room was represented the full picture of what wireless communities are about. In terms or working fronts, people is currently working at all levels: Hardware & physics (electronics, RF...), drivers (madwifi...), continuing with firmwares (freifunk, cuwinware...), applications (wifidog portal, guifi.net provisioning...), social....
Talking from the perspective of profiles, there are also many formats: Academic/Reasearch, NGO's, providers for those organizations, geeks, ... and civil societ in general.
And regarding networks models, both proprietary and free (neutral) networks.
This provides a lot of diversity, which might result dispersion. But taking it in the other way might also become a great opportunity. The only way I can imagine for doing so is that instead of reinventing the wheel many times and trying each one to won the battle by his own, is putting all together in context in a common framework. For doing so, maybe we still have to realize that no single piece does everything and find some consensus on the very basics of the network model: It's difficult to collaborate if someone is looking for proprietary and being funded for that while others think that they have to be neutral or based on volunteers.

Then lunch and back to home even before the formal closing. Flight to Paris, and the connection flight delayed for 8 hours... got into Barcelona in the evening next day. Conclusion: Don't travel to the East Coast of the US just for a weekend arriving late Friday and leaving Sunday afternoon, that's very stressing and not very healthy, but if it was for attending an event like that, then could make sense .