The freethenet.ca crew of tech-revolutionaries met up last night to discuss "what's up? what's next how's it going?" I popped in for a bit (in between watching the Canucks lose to the Red Wings - argh!) to grasp the tenor of the non-organization in the wake of this heady couple of months.

First i gotta say ... to see a bunch of people voluntarily meeting up to talk about something that has no opportunity to make any of them money yet takes up substantial time and mental resource, is remarkable.

Another Raincity Radio podcast out the door, Cooperation and Openness in the Vancouver Tech Community - here's the full description with mucho linky goodness:

There's no need to wait for the mythical City of Vancouver WiFi. Build your own WiFi mesh today with a Meraki box imported by Mike West with some help from NetEquality. Bryght in combination with the folks at Outcome3, Nitobi, Donat Group Enterprises, Communicopia, Elastic Entertainment and more daily are "unwiring" our very large extended Gastown block (Alexander to Abbott-ish initially with the goal being everywhere in Gastown eventually) of tech friendly companies. This means that anywhere you are in the mesh you will be able to use WiFi.

Raincity Studios social media maven Dave Olson explains what this means:

QUOTE

When considering the usage patterns (home users at night, business user by day) there is certainly abundant redundant bandwidth available and yet no reliable way to just get online without trying a bunch of SSIDs, risking cleartext password, hacking through a backdoor or other scheme.

Tags:

• community wireless
• freethenet.ca
• Gastown
• meraki
• netequality
• Vancouver
• wireless

In Vancouver, like many other cities, complaining about the weather is the local pasttime. Certainly there *is* a reason we are called 'rain city' and for several months we Vancouverites toil indoors away from the perennial drizzle - i suggest true locals never use umbrellas but i digress ...