Open Mesh Project

Description

"Within hours of Egypt’s attempt to stifle communication by activists, both among each other and to the outside world, an initiative was launched with the lofty goal that, in their words, “no power shall ever block or filter the right of all men and women to communicate together again”.

It started with a tweet from Shervin Pishevar, an American venture capitalist, on Jan. 27.

“If we build my #OPENMESH idea then we can solve this problem of governments like Egypt blocking access.”

By the next day, the Open Mesh Project had formed and volunteer Gary Brooks had given it a domain name, a website and a forum.

Their charter?

“We will be establishing, building, maintaining, and distributing a common Open Source Mesh software/firmware that will allow citizens of the world to commonly communicate without telephone or cable companies. …The idea all revolves around wireless technology that will allow us to connect and communicate with each other without telephone lines, cable, or fiber.”

Unfortunately, this project seems to have since run out of steam, although tweets this past September from Brooks indicate that work is progressing in the background:

“I’m delivering this message as a promise to prepare this system, Open Mesh, for our future. If you’re a reporter and I have been ignoring you, please stay away still. Not interested. Build first, talk second”.

The Open Mesh Project team never explicitly said they were building a new Internet, merely an Internet-like digital communications system over wireless network technology. But it’s a short leap indeed to the idea of building a new Internet, something which could actually compete with and eventually replace the Internet we all know and use every day." (http://fork-freedom.tumblr.com/post/15632299227/fork-freedom)