Sorry I have been very busy and have not had time to update the blog, but I have been doing much research for the project. I have been reading gobs and gobs on the OLSR routing protocol implementations, and have decided to write some of the folks at freifunk.net in Germany, funkfreuer.at in Austria, and the olsr-users mailing list (olsr.org) about my project. OLSR apparently works but does not scale well at all. The freifunk folks have been hacking on it, extending it, and have even come up with the B.A.T.M.A.N. (better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking) protocol. The have this interesting article entitled "The OLSR story". Well the people at funkfreuer.at have this page detailing OLSR-NG development, apparently taking in the lessons from the freifunk and funkfreuer MESH communities, including the olsrd extensions done by freifunk and the b.a.t.m.a.n. protocol. OLSR-NG seems to be the protocol I am looking for. Yet, I have many questions. And, of course, I am very interested in auto-config extensions. Plug and Play is foremost in my mind with every aspect of this project. No time to read the friendly manual when there are lives to save.

Besides protocol research, I have also been looking into options for some of the application components that will be needed. As I mentioned in my OSW Project Proposal, an important part of the Disaster Relief Network will be applications for logistics, finding missing people, communications and coordination, etc. To be honest, I figured that much of this would have to be home-spun, and I was planning to delve into a massive review process of the available CMS systems and web application frameworks. Guess what?!?! Someone else has already been tackling this problem, and it is open source!!! How cool is that?!?! Well I stumbled onto the Sahana FOSS Disaster Management System. (Here is their Wikipedia entry, too). This is just so perfect! Not only is it Open Source, but it is Web-based as well!!! This is exactly the sort of application suite I was envisioning! Man I love Open Source. Soon I will be installing Sahana on my machine to check it out. It is quite simple to do, as it only requires Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Sweet!! Just as this project was inspired by work done in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the SAHANA project was inspired by the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. And you can bet, any additions or ideas I have beyond the fantastic work SAHANA have already done will be given back to them and coordinated with them. Just as no man is an island, well, no FOSS Project is an island either! And, of course, I am practically giddy over the serendipitous synchronisity between our projects. I hope they like what I am intending to do with my modest little EFIKA project. Some questions I will have for them are infrastructure related. I want to be able to empower different shelters/camps to set up their own services even before the mesh is fully deployed, and later migrate them to centralized servers. I have not even installed it yet and already I have so many questions! Needless to say I am excited about this find!

Okay, well, no more time just now but I will try to keep up with more frequent updates as I have them.

PEACE!!

Tim