Once again I’m shaking my head in amazement at how many people in the world read Baba Tim’s little blog. We were Boingboing’ed then gizmodo’ed then /.’ed, and that exploded into far too many requests for information which among other things took down our server. All while I was in Haiti and “connected” via the absolute opposite of “high speed internet”.

I have a ton of updates since this post and of course we’re behind in keeping our blog and websites updated. You’ll see some of this stuff show up in more detail at the FabFi Blog over the next few weeks.

Here are the highlights:

• * since Baba Tim’s post, there are something like 10 new nodes
• * one of the nodes is at a girl’s dorm. In exchange for the FabFi boys making and installing the antenna for them (the costs of materials were a private donation), the girls have agreed to teach computers at the orphanage across the street which is also where the girl’s connection comes from. Wireless meshing makes human networks grow too!
• * the Afghans went on an hunt for all the materials and resources they could use to make their new home grown design and then made more links with this locally found stuff.
• * we found a cheaper, smaller router that is available for sale at the local electronics store in Jbad! Did I mention it’s cheaper?! It’s also even simpler to configure. Go figure. We’ll probably start seeing those populate Jbad real, real soon. Now EVERYTHING is available in Jbad!
• * the Afghans also now have an antenna and access to the tallest building in Jalalabad at Shirin Dil Plaza
• * Keith hosted a FabFi Hackathon in Boston

In Haiti I found an amazing group with who we’ll be doing nationwide wireless a la FabFi. In addition to building the infrastructure, there is a very strong focus on services that will be available within the network alongside GSM bridging. Some of the comments deal with the bottleneck of reaching the “Big Internet” and the island nature of Haiti sharpens that problem. In addition to mirroring the common and popular content in country and implementing proxy servers to use the outgoing bandwidth more efficiently, the Haitians are explicitly interested in locally generated content and intra-net communications.

This is the awesome part of the way we work, the Haitians get to benefit directly from the output of what the Afghans have learned in making their network, which will allow the Haitians to skip the early fiddling and development and get right to the services and content. Reciprocally, the services and content they figure out will installable in Jbad without the Afghans poking at the software. Better yet, they’ll work on things together, along with the Peruvians, Ethiopians, Indians, Spaniards, and other fab labbers who have begun to make networks too.

I think I’ve mentioned before – we don’t really know what we’re doing and just learn stuff along the way. That turns out to be a feature because the Afghans watch us figure stuff out and in turn learn how to learn, how to ask, how to experiment. That said, we need help.

If you have experience, hardware, donations, time, contacts, resources, or words of encouragement please email me. We’ve moved beyond needing simply RF, networking, antennas, etc. and now need all kinds of tech (mechanical, chem (esp. polymers), electrical (esp. FM xmit/rcvr, microcontrollers, and power conditioning)), GIS/mapping/pointing, every kind of software and web, language (esp. translations) as well as technical project management and social science analysis writer types. If all goes well, soon we’ll need some regular old back office help too.

ps –

PDT guy: I can’t find your email. Next stop in Afghanistan is your current AO. I think we absolutely need your help!

Ezuks – the email address you posted is invalid. Write again.

Hillery – need exact model numbers and/or you can ship to Boston (where I’m based) for evaluation/hacking.

anyone in Boston – the FabFi in Jbad *might* be in today’s Herald (Sunday 3/28). I wasn’t paying attention to which Sunday. If you see us, let us know!

Bluetooth and other wireless devices were used to hone in on targets when insurgents were lopping mortars in.

I’d be GLAD to go over there and setup wireless….. *sarcasm*