ok - surfacing for air and some sidelined discussion ... comments inline. when last we saw our hero (Thursday, Jun 20, 2002), Daniel Taylor was madly tapping out: > On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, SpencerUnderground wrote: > > > Mission Statement. > > Does anyone have any ideas for formulating a Mission statement? I > > for one feel this is of the utmost importance. If we do > > This is indeed necessary. this is a topic that i've studiously avoided to date. however it does bear discussion. what do we want to do and what services (if any) would we like to offer? in my initial missive i was curious to see what elements people where willing to sink their teeth into and see what people were interested in. there seems to be a fair amount of interest in the hot spot deployments since these appear to be realistically attainable goals. in looking at the maps that are online i see that we're really spread out all over the place. perhaps our efforts are most effectively expended helping folks get as many nodes as possible online and improving our odds for connecting the dots. the geography of the cities is rather daunting for our application. personally - i'd like to have internet access (tunneled or not) from a really wide range of locations. corner coffee shops, restaurants, parks, etc. i'd like to see an overlay network take off and would be willing to devote my energies to attaining that goal. however, i must say at this point (and after puttering with some map information) it's not looking too good. > > > indeed plan on filing for non-profit status (big fan of this) we > > will _have_ to have a mission statement. I know this is a > > "touchy" subject with some of you, since we are still not all in > > agreement as to what we are doing and how we plan to achieve what > > we don't agree on (that makes little sense ,eh?). As we build our > > network we must also build our organization. I believe the two go > > hand in hand. Bob has graciously offered us access to the work he > > has already done with the tclug non-profit paper work. I suggest > > we move forward with this. > > > > I talked to my boss this evening, he is interested in forming a > > relationship with the tcwug on a corp to corp level. Arnan > > Services Inc. is a local engineering firm that specializes in > > telecommunications. (this is the company I work for) We have a > > few radio links up in the twin cities, some of which have been up > > for over 2 years. We are expanding our wireless network at a > > steady pace. I believe, and have conveyed to my boss, that Arnan > > and the tcwug may share some common interest. i think that there are a variety of models that could be worked out here to make the group mesh up with various elements within the community. - we may want to see about establishing relationships with friendly local ISPs toward this. - cookbook configurations would go a long ways towards helping as many people get working configurations that minimize the abuse potential. - i know that i'm not at all averse to working with businesses in furthering these goals. i would hope that others are as well. the nycwireless folks have some interesting liasons that they've setups with local businesses in order to facilitate the introduction of their nodes and get folks setup. we might want to steal a page or two from their playbook in this regard. > > Steve has already "befriended" O'reily in the name of the tcwug. > > The concept of corporate sponsoroship is one that should not be > > overlooked. Again, a mission statement would help us to clarify > > what we want to do and who we want to do it with. I for one, as I > > have already stated, really just want to 1) have fun 2) make > > friends/connections 3) have ubiquitous inet access. > > I could agree with all three points. > > As far as concerns that were raised at the meeting regarding > people's persistance of resources: > > How about we set up the net access as a co-op service, with tiered > pricing depending upon level of participation and cost to maintain > the network. > > As long as we have the ability to restrict access, we can deal with > the evil spammer issues on a case by case basis. > > Note that the co-op setup does allow the WUG to purchase bandwidth > to merge the wireless network with the Internet (per Andy's concerns > among others). -- steve ulrich sulrich at botwerks.org PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7 AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC