Winter Summit 2013 Report, Part 1

From Thursday, 24 January, until Sunday, 27 January, we held our Winter Summit in Austin, TX. This post covers the Summit proper. Isaac and Tyrone are staying with Charles in Austin until Wednesday for a post-summit hackfest, which we’ll write up in a later post. Another post will cover the meeting of the Board of Directors that was held in Austin on 27 January.

Attending the Summit was our core team: Charles Wyble, Isaac Wilder, Tyrone Greenfield, and James Yox; artist/activist Sean McIntyre and journalist Whitney Terrell. We discussed the FNF’s operating procedures and plans for 2013, worked on our technical systems, strategized our upcoming efforts in publicity and fundraising, and talked about how to launch a community network on the guifi.net model.

OPERATING PROCEDURES AND PLANS

Our operations are divided into four categories, each of which is managed by a member of the FNF executive team. Charles oversees technology development, Isaac oversees organizational development, Tyrone oversees business operations, and James oversees technical operations. We went over planning documents, which can be viewed here, and discussed the scope of the four departments. We also went over our progress on our 18-month Roadmap from late 2011, which will terminate on 4 July 2013. Finally, we went over how to improve our internal work-flows and communication, especially through incorporating daily updates among the executive team.

SYSTEMS WORK

On Thursday, Charles led a tour of the FNF Austin Radio Lab – the architecture of which will allow for rapid vetting of radio firmwares and featuresets. We revamped our coordination and tracking workflow to allow for easier integration between email and chili, our task tracker.  We implemented phase one of a plan for a single source of authentication across all FNF properties. Using OpenLDAP and Pluggable Authentication Modules, we brought all of our Virtual Machines under unified access control. We hacked out rough prototypes of three properties: one static HTML page to replace our current front page, one drupal-based GIS platform that will serve as a provisioning/link qualification engine, and one webpy/JS widget, just for fun

PUBLICITY AND FUNDRAISING

Throughout the Summit, we talked extensively about how best to publicize our success, now and going forward. Sean provided some very valuable inputs, stressing the need for personal testimonials from those we’ve affected, as well as presentation strategies closely tailored to their intended audiences, especially in regard to presenting at upcoming conferences such as SXSW in March. We also discussed how to pursue fundraising, including the possibility of applying for grants from other non-profits, and the potential of applying for a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship.

LAUNCHING A COMMUNITY NETWORK

A major theme of our Winter Summit was building a road map to launching a prototype community network in Kansas City that will serve as a replicable model. We have been remarkably impressed by the methods and success of guifi.net in building community networks in Catalonia and elsewhere in Spain, and we decided that we want to build on their model. Guifi.net is held together by their Commons for Open, Free, and Neutral Networks, and thus we have been developing a Commons agreement for use in the US, as well as iterating our Free network Definition that acts as a statement of the FNF’s principles. We are now talking with the organizers of guifi.net as well as our partner organizations in KC to bringing guifi practices and principles to the United States.

You can read detailed notes from the Winter Summit here.