it was another beee-utiful ride in. Overcast skies and relatively warm weather. It gives me time to think. Im not sure what direction to put my eneriges in. Each direction has significant, small, wildly different benefits. I need a medium to large force in my thinkspace.

I put a significant amount of effort into school, because a) there is a lot of "programmed" positive reenforcement around a degree and b) there is a community of people that makes me feel, a little, like Im a part of something and makes me want to "keep up with the crowd" by getting a passing grade. this week for the first time, I got one class's homework done way early. Normally Im, working on it up to the start of class on Wednesday.

So on today's ride in I thought about, suprize, building a wireless network. It needs to happen at a much more peer to peer level. Not these big beacons on hills, but low-power radios at every home. The old TV broadcast model is such a metaphore for how it shaped our thinking. Now, thank god, technology is advanced enough and cheap enough to go back to community generated content. Jerritt reminded me about the wonderful Linksys products that are sub $200 and sub $100 that have ethernet, 32MB ram, flash storage, a capable CPU, and sometimes miniPCI. Add power over ethernet, a cheap radio or two, and you have a mesh node. If its possible to put together a sub $100 mesh node, that opens doors.

From the PoE device, put the power plug into the wall and the ethernet cable into the hub. The connect ethernet from the PoE device to the brigade box. The brigade box is the size of a shoebox or less, and made to mount outside your house, near a porch light for instance. Its made to look like house siding. 11g radios, IPv6 networking, with an appliaction to scan for neighbors and setup links and routes. Id like a bar of LEDs on the box so you could just hold it and see if you were in range of any other brigade box.

Lets say most of the homes in your neighborhood have a brigade box and they've established a net of 12 boxes. Now you can look at a neat overview of the boxes overlaid on a map with signal strength and bandwidth usage readings. That'd be cool for the geeks or for anyone who has to troubleshoot problems. But what content would there be? what is its killer app?

Assicated with setting up a brigade box, the installer would know that there is also a standard set of services on a brigade net. Chat is a big one. File sharing with really good searches on all kinds of different metadata. These services would be outside the brigade boxes of course. A particular house could be the neighborhood hero for providing the chat server for the whole net. People would know that Bob is mildly tech savvy, and a PC in Bob's house was the chat server. Maybe when someone came to Bob's house for coffee they would ask "hows the load on the chat server these days bob?". Alice, who is an open source nerd, has setup a searchable meta-data server that takes metadata submissions from anyone on the brigade net. There is an extension to nautilus to do searches on a remote meta-data server. Now you can find that local copy of the trailer for the The Matrix.

All of the plans, the software, everything would be open hardware and open source. I'd make money off it because some people, not all people, but some people would buy hardware that I put together (i use that term loosely). Software would free, donations accepted. Open standards are important for interoperablility. Its been a back burner todo to make a neighborhood oriented website where a cartoon-ish map of the neightborhood comes up and you can click on a house to send someone a message or see how active they are on the site. You could also see what information is made public there, like maybe the people who live there would like you to see a photo of them with their first names.

If those services can be associated with the building of a network, a customer owned data network, that might be incentive enough to buy a brigade box. Or even better, nerds can assemble one the way you can build your own PC.

People talk about the 5th Utility, which data is, but I think its Personal Telco's destiny to create a new kind of utility. A utility where each customer owns a piece of the network and noone owns so much as to be overly influential. Utilities are a great idea, they are supposed to be non-profit and work in the public's best interest. I want to see that for water/sewer distribution, where the resources are obviously physically limited. But I think an experiment can be made with data, and electric power, where generation and ownership moves closer, or much closer, to the consumer. Or put another way, turns the consumer into an owner/producer.