In my last post I described the beginning of my involvement with the geek environment in Vienna. The club we founded back then did not achieve much, however it really got me to know all kinds of interesting people including the quintessenz tribe. It was around a time when they first settled on the "Affenfelsen" that soon became more of a fortress than a rock. During that time wireless networks were still a new and fascinated thing and people would go on war-driving adventures actively seeking unsecured wireless networks. An unsecured wireless network would allow the person to use it anonymously and do whatever wanted. In this perspective some people had the idea of purposefully creating a wireless network at a public space as an anonymous link up point. I don't remember exactly who had the idea but a small group of people (including Aaron, Markus S. and me) started to work on this. We pitched the idea to quintessenz because privacy is one of their main topics and they had a hand-full of resources (including contact to ISPs for sponsoring). We pretty soon settled on the location (the MQ) and the ssid (q/spot - still operating today, although I guess not in it's original setup). We got hardware (a soekris box and wireless cards) and started to work on our own access point firmware (based on Linux+busybox+hostap, but that's details). During that time I realized I enjoyed working with both Aaron and Markus and we formed a good team hacking things together.

Soon after the q/spot launched, Aaron was approached by Xav and asked if we would be interested in taking over a (sort of failed) experiment to create a wifi network in Vienna started by VBS. The name: "FunkFeuer". We briefly discussed this and agreed to take it over only if we could turn it into a free citizens network. Creating infrastructure controlled by the people using it was our main goal. We had a long look and many discussions on the existing network (it was 5-8 nodes, static routing and very dispersed). Immediately we realized that the approach is too maintenance heavy. Thus we began to search for dynamic routing protocols and got into the whole area of MANETs (Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks) and mesh routing. During our then established weekly meetings we tried several different approaches, algorithms and implementations. Only one seemed to satisfy what we needed at this time: OLSR.

In the same time-frame, due to sinking hardware costs and the active development of mesh routing protocols free wireless networks boomed all around the world. We suddenly found ourselves to be part of a movement. Soon more and more people were pouring in (with favorable reports in different media outlets) and the movement grew. We changed our regular weekly meetings (usually happening at some private space) to a more accessible location: A rarely used office and hosting space of the Austrian provider ATNET called "ViVi". It was them also who kindly donated Internet up-link and an IP range during this critical phase. FunkFeuer kept on growing (and still is) and was able to get support by the city of Vienna as well as private initiatives. It still is a wonderful vibrant network where theoretical concepts are put into real world use. Some years ago people at FunkFeuer (headed by Aaron) started to maintain the OLSR implementation and are continuing to push the protocol further. Others have wandered of to take a job at RIPE to maintain root DNS servers (a skill acquired when FunkFeuer decided to run an ORSN Root server) or build up a community based server housing location.

I consider FunkFeuer to be one of the most successful ventures I've been part of. Both technically (I wrote about this above) and socially (we had unemployed getting jobs trough it, former junkies regain mental capacity etc.). A small but strong community has formed and I'd like to say: I've done a minimal part to go this far, but I'm proud of what has evolved.