Monthly Meeting Tues 6 th June 2006

Minutes of meeting held at Room 5, St Werburgh's Community Centre, Tuesday 6th June at 6.30 pm

PRESENT

• Sean K
• May
• Lloyd
• Jim
• Rich
• Michael H
• Ben G
• Mike B
• Sam
• Matt T
• Hibu
• Pete F
• Woodsy

APOLOGIES

• Chris P
• Matt M-W
• Andy L
• Julien
• Matt L

MINUTES OF LAST MEETING

After agreeing small amendment requested by Sam to the effect that Sam & Sean wanted client connections instead of acting as POPs, the minutes of the last meeting were approved.

MATTERS ARISING

• Business West - correct invoice has now been received.
• AGM full audit - this now appears not to be necessary; Sam has posted to Grindstone to this effect.
• Bannerman Road - proposed meeting between Sean, Lloyd & Mohammed (Horn of Africa) due to take place today, did not occur due to latter's non-appearance.
• Sugar/VTiger - Bails is busy getting VTiger running to our requirements: it looks like SugarCRM, but with ticketing system and other enhancements. Bails to integrate VTiger with comms/Asterisk in the next 4 weeks.
• Level 2 POPs - the Cube roof is unsound, but installation may be possible on roof of meighbouring NHS building (to be surveyed with offer of installation as part of the Cube installation). A decision is need re install specification (e.g. sectors, how many). Rich is to arrange survey. Hilroyd: surrounding high buildings mean there are some obstacles. On the matters Trinity Community Arts in interested in hosting a Level 2 POP, whilst promotional literature is needed for organisations to encourage interest in becoming Level 2 POPs.
• Fundraising - breakdown by projects will require the use of Quickbooks software (Julien to provide) running under Wine.
• Connecting Bristol - bid has now been submitted; it contains plenty of promotion of Bristol Wireless (20 or so mentions).
• VAT registration - this is apparently not required on account of our being mainly funded by grant income.

(At this point in the proceedings, there was a round of introductions due to the large number of new attendees at their first meeting)

FINANCIAL REPORT

Julien not present, so no report.

PRINCESS ROYAL GARDENS

5-6 m of trunking + 6 sockets and mains are required. Ronnie Corbett has a budget of £100 for installation. This will involve about 5-6 hours work, which Lloyd may be able to do in July. A written quote is to be prepared by Lloyd and Jim for Ronnie to forward to the council.

EXTENSION DIALLING ON VOIP

There is a method similar to mobile phone top-up for assigning credit to extension phones, which is not enabled at present. Enabling would also have benefits for outside callers - e.g. routing calls to ECC. Ben G proposed enabling extension dialling - this was agreed without objections.

VIDEO JUKEBOX DEBUT

May reported there are still some bugs with the jukebox she has developed.

AUSTRALIAN INQUIRY

An email was received this afternoon from Right Choice Consultants in Australia. Someone is flying to Bristol shortly and would like to visit Bristol Wireless. Sean agreed to draft an email in response.

SWISS WIRELESS

Sam, Rich and Pete have now met Neil Fairley. As per the admin wiki page, Neil wants to develop a service primarily for handheld mobile devices. Ultimately the aim is to licence the infrastructure and billing system worldwide. Bristol Wireless has been asked to do a site survey in Lausanne and the network design, as well as provide consultancy and training advice for any local installation team. We have requested the availability of free access as part of the package; this is currently being discussed by Neil with the local authority in Lausanne. The investor and Neil have been involved in telecommunications in the Middle East and Africa. Sam and Rich have also met the Lebanese university professor who has set the billing software as a project for his final year students. It is planned to release the billing software under the GPL.

A joint venture has been proposed to implement the project with investor/Neil/BW as the partners. Following successful implementation, the joint venture would licence the solution to other cities.

Neil now wishes to proceed with a one-page commercial website listing the partners and their services.

It was felt that before proceeding further, legal advice should be sought before any decision is reached re the one-page website; Sam is to give Neil a holding reply on this matter.

Lloyd mentioned he had a contact in solicitors Osborne Clark; a member of this firm would be prepared to offer initial free advice to Bristol. Lloyd will make contact with a view to setting up a meeting.

In addition, Sean thought it would be worthwhile approaching Co-opportunity who have a barrister and will arrange this, whilst Sam will contact EFF and/or Groklaw to see what advice can be offered.

Questions of a legal nature will be collated on a wiki page in preparation for these approaches.

As a middle way, a page on the public wiki discussing our wireless networking achievements to date - i.e. active exploration of technology for mobile networking, particularly VoIP - was proposed.

Finally, Rich is to visit Italy shortly to collect VoIP-enabled phones for local testing.

C3 PERFORMANCE REVIEW

We are now in the final stage of the review with workin progressing on the final action plan. Progress to date is documented on the wiki and has been received favourably.

ECC

New longer opening hours have been implemented and Sam has more time available to assist over the next 2 months. However, it needs publicising and it was agreed that Indymedia, BBC Bristol, the Evening Post and mailing lists would be approached.

VOLUNTEER PROGRAMME

3 of our newer volunteers were present at this their first meeting and commented as follows:

• Michael H - More structure needed to ensure volunteers' time used productively;
• Hibu - would like to become better acquainted with Mepis and do interesting things with Java;
• May - very pleased with involvement. This is her first serious contact with the Linux world.

As regards action, the induction programme should be reviewed and implemented for our longer-serving volunteers who predated its introduction.

TECHNICAL

Some antennae may need retuning as some blindspots currently exist. The sectors on Kingsdown are working: Sam has been able to ping them today from home.

Lloyd expressed his concern about shortage of people with appropriate networking skills to assist him and is currently trying to arrange for Matt L to help out on infrastructure matters for 2 hours/week.

In addition, Lloyd is to prepare a wiki page documenting the software currently used to run the infrastructure.

At St Werburghs a 5G connection is to be installed (Thursday/Friday) linking to Kingsdown. This will entail the installation of a 3 m pole and omni on the old boilerhouse chimney.

MAKING THE BACKBONE LIVE & PUBLICITY

John Palfrey would like to see some publicity forthcoming for all the work done on the backbone. It was agreed progress would be reviewed next month and a press release drafted.

Putting the Cube on the network as a Level 2 POP would enable the implementation of a captive portal plus web page. In addition, this could be used as a publicity in the POP promotion pack (see above).

AOB

• Network outages - the matter of UPS was again raised. Ben G proposed buying 5 @ £20ish. Lloyd is currently writing scripts for the remote rebooting of network for installation on the infrastructure APs. However, the ECC gateway does not have a wireless network rebootable option. Lloyd also mentioned that Voyage Linux needs installing on the gateways.

There being no other business, the meeting closed at 8.00 pm.

DATE OF NEXT MEETING

Tuesday, 4th July 06 at the Lab.