Tethr: Getting online in a crisis (BBC) {lots of open sourceware discussed}
Clark Boyd From PRI's The World
"I'm five years too early with everything. I don't know if that's a bug, or a feature, but it is what it is," says Aaron Huslage with a laugh. He's explaining to me how, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he came up with the idea for tethr, a shoebox-sized set of hardware designed to help anyone get internet and phone connections from any spot on the planet.
At the time of the disaster, Huslage helped a group of volunteers build a working wireless network from Gulfport, Mississippi, to the Louisiana border. Using donated equipment, expertise and time, the group managed to create a network that provided free internet and phone service to between 70,000 and 80,000 people for half a year following the hurricane. Huslage did most of his work on the project remotely as he was living at the other end of the country in Portland, Oregon at the time. "I was mostly just wrangling things," he says. "Making sure people were going where they were supposed to go and that things were delivered to the right place at the right time." But he did eventually go down to the Gulf Coast for a week to work the project.
"The whole thing was crazy," he remembers. "We were building infrastructure, and I remember thinking, 'This is really, really hard stuff.'" Networks could include servers, multiples routers and various layers of software to configure. He started considering ways he might be able to miniaturize the hardware needed to make such connectivity possible. But the hardware, he discovered, really didn't exist, or at least not in forms small enough to work together efficiently, and affordably, in one small package."So, I shelved the idea," he tells me.
From 2005 to 2010, Huslage spent a lot of volunteer time working with, and helping develop, some of the incredibly powerful software that is now available to people working in crisis and post-crisis situations. For example, there's Ushahidi, a crowd-sourced reporting platform which has provided real-time data on everything from elections in Nigeria to "Snowmageddon" in New York City. Then there is Open Street Map, an open-source mapping project which provided some of the first truly accurate maps of Port-au-Prince, Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake.
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And so, after getting laid off from his day job last January ("Actually, I laid myself off," Huslage jokes), he decided to work full-time on the development of tethr. What he and his team have come up with is a package of hardware that fits into a case about 6in-long, 4in-wide and 3-in tall (15cmx10cmx7.5cm). It contains the hardware necessary to connect to the net via satellite modem, wi-fi, 3G, ethernet and even dial-up. It also comes with OpenBTS, an open-source GSM messaging box and platform. This prototype runs with a version of the open-source operating system Ubuntu Linux. The software could be tailored to any situation, but right now, Huslage has it loaded up with a database, VOIP software similar to Skype, Ushahidi, and Open Street Map. The user interface, Huslage says, is like a webpage, and is designed to allow the user maximum control over what type of connections to use for certain tasks, and also giving simple instructions on how to, say, point the satellite modem in the right direction.
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more: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120413-communicating-in-a-crisis
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