Editing WeeklyStatus05/13/2012

Conference Call Minutes
13 may 2012

participants:
Tyrone
Isaac
Bill
Nick
Leonard

Agenda:
1. our relationship w project meshnet
2. mechanisms for collaboration: mailing lists, bulletin boards, &c
3. isaac's going to the colo tomorrow to install stuff

MECHANISMS FOR COLLABORATION
-Bill talked about his experience w bulletin boards in the earlier days of the internet
	-boards have some advantages, like searchability, ability to transfer between machines
-isaac: we put a forum up, it's been used limitedly but organically
	-the ideal solution would be a “reddit-style” forum
	-we only want to use tools that we can run ourselves and that could be deployed by operators 	elsewhere
	-does software exist that would allow us to run our own reddit-style forums?
	-i'd like to get a chatroom going too. We have an IRC channel, but we don't really use it
	-one option would be to integrate IRC into our wiki
-we should stand up some kind of forum, but not prioritize migrating everything there from mailing lists

isaac: we have a lot of resources, but I don't know how visible/accessible they are to newcomers
	-bill: I was looking at the front page, thinking about reorganizing it to make it easier to reach our resources
	-leonard: mailing lists have worked pretty well for me. I think the best would be to combine mailing lists and forums
	-concerns about redundancy/fracturing the conversation
	-isaac: maybe we should add subtitles under “learn, contribute, etc” to have hyperlinks directly to things like the wiki from the mainpage
	-we're also thinking about adding the blog, or wiki updates, to the main page
	-Sara in NYC is working on some new website code
	-is there any way to avoid fracturing discussion between mailing list and forum? We'll look into it further
	-right now we use a wordpress plugin for the forum, maybe we want to find a better forum code, or stand up reddit code
	-if anyone comes across a forum question they can't answer themselves, forward it to a list so that someone can
		-this could be a good way to integrate email and forum data, for the moment

PROJECT MESHNET:
	-isaac: project meshnet is a reddit community that emerged from darknet plan, sub/r/ has 35,000 subscribers, with hundreds of active participants and dozens of active devs
	-that makes it just about the biggest other community of free network people, other than us
	-isaac was talking with Richard Stallman, who introduced isaac to Chris Breezy, the mod on meshnet
	-isaac and chris have been talking about bringing our two projects together
		-one concern is they've put a lot of stock into one piece of software
		-another issue is we don't share exactly the same goals, but we should definitely collaborate and help each other out
			-they are focused on CJDNS, anonymity
		-how can we make our systems interoperable?

DISCUSSION OF CJDNS, ROUTING SYSTEMS
	-isaac: so far most of our work has been at the hardware level. CJDNS as a protocol is designed to be agnostic. It can run over a TCP socket, or anything that links things. So, CJDNS can run over anything, but with significant overhead costs
	-we could integrate it into our stack, but we've looked at the code, looked at the protocol, and are skeptical of whether it can deliver what it promises
	-b/c an address book routing protocol isn't a protocol at all, it's an address book, so it doesn't scale well
	-it's more like a p2p system, a distributed look-up mechanism
	-the routing table for hyperborea is 5 MB, and there are only 300 nodes
	-how are they going to deal with the costs/size of routing tables with growth
	-nevertheless, we can still work with them even if we don't agree with their tech solutions, and hopefully convince them to adopt better practices
	-we have nothing to lose by establishing stronger lines of communication
	-let's engage with the community, stay hands-off on the software project for now
	-isaac's gonna talk w chris more on tuesday, hopes we can bring our communities together in a more meaningful way
	-what would we use as a protocol? DNS is pretty good as a protocol
	-isaac: we've considered including alternate route directories and a dns system as one option, and a more CJDNS-like system as another option
	-there's a problem in p2p systems called zuko's triangle: readable by a human, cryptographically secure, useful for a worldwide system: choose two
		-we're looking at a system that gets around this with pet names and software
		-there is some promise in CJDNS as a naming system for “Neruda”
	-nick: a release candidate of “Santiago” should be dropping within the next twelve hours on github
		-it's similar to CJDNS but designed to solve a slightly different problem: server discovery  between friends' nodes
		-so scale of routing tables is not so much an issue

COLO TOMORROW
	-isaac: i'm going in there tomorrow to install some on-site backups. Not too much more on that because charles isn't here

-Bill had a question about switching his email addresses on the list. Isaac will check it out.