Picture special further down, don't miss it !! While I attended the Wizards of OS 4 conference in Berlin in September (and reported for a couple of publications) I received an offer I could not resist: To rent a fully furnished, newly renovated, apartment from a Swedish friend. I might write some posts in English from now, if they are not only about Sweden.
Yes, I am curious when it comes to Berlin and what is going on here. Particularly the edgy, alternative, activist, cultural fringes that seem to thrive in this environment. I have now started to explore what is going on in the Internet related areas that is the concern of this blog: Freedom of communications, intellectual property, open source and new ways of collaborating and producing culture on the Internet, file-sharing, creative destruction ... . So yesterday I went to a meeting of Berlin Freifunkers at c-base. It turned out that other things were going on there also. Some kind of reunion and evaluation of that WOS4 conference. So I actually met some people I hade talked to earlier.
I am sorry, but I still have not understood what c-base is ... I think that's the point actually. c-base had a big inflatable tent with a lounge and a space theme and a lot of monitors at the Wizards of OS 4 conference. The event yesterday took place in their spaceship headquarters at the edge of Kreuzberg. They had a bar of course. Beer and interesting people made the evening a hit! Sven Wagner from c-base (whatever it is ...) treated me to beer and I had a nice chat with e.g. the formidable wireless routing guru Elektra.
[I know, it sounds like a joke to Swedes, since we all know (don't we?) that the equally formidable Birgit Nilsson was the greatest Wagner singer ever AND the greatest Elektra ever in Richard Strauss' opera (here I would be happy if my loyal blog reading fan ArmchairConductor, who is active in the Wagner society, can comment on this statement since I am not an opera expert).]
Here are some 256k pictures with comments from the night (as you know I - by necessity - love low resolution pictures, they look more artsy and yes, they are clickable for larger versions):
the entrance to spaceship c-base, kreuzberg, berlin
nice chap sven wagner, associated in some major way with both c-base and freifunk. sven (aka cven) had that guru aura hovering around him ...
freifunkers @ c-base
the formidable elektra, who seems to be chief technician and routing developer of the freifunk network in berlin. they have developed an own routing protocol (olsr) for wireless meshed networks that dynamically adapt to nodes coming up and down and where access to internet can occur in many places. the idea is of course that people with internet connections can let others ride on their connection if they just have a wireless base station themselves (one has to download olsr firmware to participate) and all the base stations then form a large meshed network that is constantly changing. tonight elektra and the freifunkers released a new smarter routing protocol called B.A.T.M.A.N. and here you can see the specially created logotype for the protocol:
B.A.T.M.A.N. - almost covered by some object that i suspect may be my finger
a netizen that did not want to reveal his real name or nick in connection with a face picture. oh, i mean the guy behind the laptop, the one *on* the laptop is of course alex in "a clockwork orange". maybe the guy is a german anakata, although i doubt he has been raided :-)
the ever-present berlin free software activist markus beckedahl who seems to have boundless energy. he is involved in initiatives like netzpolitik.org, newthinking network and newthinking store, where i will check out some activities later. he has also been involved in the green party here.
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