Report from New Orleans

We have spent our time in New Orleans installing, fixing, and trying to track down a bunch of small radios that shoot the internet around. These are called mesh nodes. Some were put on people's houses, one at a bed and breakfast, and there is even a park not too far from the French Quarter with wireless internet. We also did some tech support for a community level radio station and installed a mesh node enabling them to webcast.

The radios were provided by CU Wireless from Champaign-Urbana, who also very graciously donated $2000 toward our travel costs. Sasha Meinrath and CU Wireless were responsible for getting us placed and connected down here in the first place and arranged for safe border passage from the US State Department and FCC.

There are a few others working on the same sort of thing here but it's very hard to get any sort of concentrated effort because there is just too much to be done.

Gordon has his hands on two mobile satellite units from Wanderpod and a lot of time is spent in debate trying to figure out what to do with these things and how. One of them connects to our tech truck (courtesy of Resource Action Group) but is probably more useful somewhere else. Gordon seems set on Houma (First Nation) and he and Will were out looking at a camp in Covington which is just starting up, connected with the folks at plenty.org.

- Geoffrey Young