The seventh annual International Summit for Community Wireless Networks took place in Berlin, Germany from October 2 – 4, 2013. The event was sponsored in part by the Heinrich Boell Foundation and organized by the Open Technology Institute of the New America Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, DC, and Freifunk, a German association founded in Berlin that builds, maintains, and advocates for free, local and independent wireless networks. The wireless summit also served to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Freifunk.
The community wireless network movement began to take shape in the early 2000s. Many networks were created out of a response to a lack of broadband internet access. Individuals in a community joined together to place antennas on roofs and Wi-Fi routers in windows in an effort to promote local, wireless internet access. Today community wireless networks often still play the role of providing internet access, but focus more and more on providing a platform for a community to communicate locally. Community wireless networks around the world now feature and host content that is generated locally, such as local education support or information on neighborhood businesses, creating a wireless “intranet” that is still useful even without internet access.
The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks truly was an international affair. It brought together 200 attendees from over 20 different countries, including Thailand, India, Cameroon, Kenya, Argentina, Brazil and Canada, among others. Participants discussed a wide variety of topics related to local wireless networks, from technical subjects such as wireless routing protocols, to issues of community engagement and digital literacy, to policy discussions about the use of unlicensed spectrum, the range of frequencies used by Wi-Fi technologies.
Besides insightful panel discussions, the Wireless Summit also featured several keynote speeches from leaders in the community wireless space and related fields. Mahabir Pun, the founder of the Nepal Wireless Networking Project, spoke about the challenges of building wireless networks across the rural and mountainous terrain of Nepal in order to provide rural villages with access to communications services. Amelia Andersdotter, a member of the European Parliament representing the Swedish Pirate Party, gave an articulate and honest assessment of the challenges implementing tech policy reforms at the EU level. Björn Böhning, chief of the Berlin State Senate, spoke about his views on creating a city-wide Wi-Fi network for Berlin. Virginia Eubanks, a professor from the State University of New York at Albany, challenged the audience to think about how community wireless are a tool, not a solution in and of themselves, to addressing problems surrounding economic and social justice issues.
Other keynotes included: Joana Varon Ferraz, a researcher for the Center for Technology and Society in Brazil, Daniel Kitscha, a policy officer at the European Commission working on wireless spectrum issues, Juergen Neumann, one of the co-founders of the Freifunk network, as well as Sascha Meinrath, director of the Open Technology Institute and the one of the founders of the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks.
But perhaps more important than the agenda, the Wireless Summit provided a space where supporters of community wireless networks--both those experienced in constructing and maintaining networks and those learning about local networks for the first time— could meet and collaborate. It is that valuable experience of networking and knowledge exchange that participants in the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks can take back to their communities and apply to their existing local wireless project or use to start a new project of their own.