Grow Your Own Network, Part Six of Six

In this “series finale,” we discuss how the FNF began, and a brief overview of its organizational history over the past two years. We hope you have enjoyed Grow Your Own Network, a review of where we came from, who we are, and where we’re going.

Part Six: A History of the FNF

The Free Network Foundation was formed in May 2011, after co-founders Charles Wyble and Isaac Wilder met on the NextNet mailing list. Charles, who serves as Technical Director, has an extensive background in large-scale systems engineering and integration. Isaac, who serves as Executive Director, studied Computer Science and Philosophy before leaving school to dedicate himself to the FNF. We are a registered non-profit organization in the state of Missouri, with an application for 501(c)(3) status pending.

Our team has grown a great deal since then, to include hardware engineers, radio experts, software developers, webmasters, educators, artists, and scholars. Our work has consisted in large part of capacity building that will pay significant dividends in the long run.

We built out two high availability on-net facilities, in Kansas City and Dallas. The KC site is designed to host organizational tools, community resources, lab components, a Network Operations Center, and the first FreedomLink. The Dallas site serves as a warm backup and disaster recovery site.

In April 2012, we applied for and received a nationwide, non-exclusive license from the FCC, to operate radios in the 3.65GHz band, providing access to 50MHz of clear spectrum for use in wide area communications.

During the Occupy Wall Street protests, the FNF worked with activists to build and deploy FreedomTowers in NYC and Austin, TX, and facilitated the building of FreedomTowers in San Antonio and LA. The Towers provided wireless internet access to local occupy movements.

The General Assembly of OWS reached consensus that they should build a tower of their own, which we then helped Occupy Tech Ops to construct. In October 2011, the FNF was awarded a $10,000 prize at the Contact Summit in NYC, a “festival of innovation” exploring how technology and media can bring about social change. We’ve used those funds to finance much of our work so far, in addition to building a base of monthly financial support that entirely covers our current operational overhead.

We are moving under our own steam now, and with a great deal of momentum. This is an idea whose time has come – the tools used to build free networks are reaching maturity, and we have put ourselves in a position to make a significant contribution to the integration and adoption of this technology.