Chris and I thought it might be worthwhile writing a weekly report on how this project is progressing. So here it is, the beginning of our weeknotes, which is a way to let you know what’s going on. This week we just received some fantastic news regarding funding which we cannot release unfortunately till later this month. All will soon be revealed!

Concurrently, we have been busy attracting a bunch of great developers contributing to our network engineering team. Welcome aboard Gustaf, Erik and Bart. They are working on setting up the architecture for being able to provide an easy to digest data stream of network traffic and choke points as well as different layers of connectivity so our data visualization crew can make meaning from this.

As we’ve been talking to so many people about the project, we have also come to realise that there is a need for offline education about what the Internet is and the issues around it.  Chris has been behind setting up a Internet Security and Chokepoint Workshop which will be offered to educators (schools, universities), non-profits, NGO’s, journalists and political institutions which will teach how the Internet works and at the same time installs security on participants’ laptops and other items they bring. Leave with network protocols, GPG encryption understood and ready to go, while showing people who participate which files on their machine are encrypted and how they can add extra security for file storage amongst other things. This is currently being offered as a one or two day course starting in Spain. This is the first project of the newly formed Educational Programme which will be developed by Pau Domínguez Ara.

We’ve also got a mobile team raring to go. Javier Arturo Rodríguez & Carlos A Rodríguez will be putting their talents to work on ensuring that the website is “mobile-friendly”, optimizing its code for the widest possible audience, making relevant content available both to modern smartphone web browsers and to the existing user base of WAP/WML handsets. They will also be carrying out the construction of native clients for the leading mobile platforms, taking advantage of hardware acceleration and communication features of the latest hardware in order to show the visualizations developed by the project. Javier will also be doing the practical security parts of our workshops.

There will be a Choke Point Project event in November or December in Amsterdam to bring together a group of leading researchers from open access and web infrastructure communities to discuss current state of web and approaches to dealing with Internet choke points and current thought, projects and philosophy regarding distributed “Next Net” activity.

We’ve been actively seeking funding more in the Netherlands so far than in other countries. We can’t really name, names at this juncture. Let’s just say that we’ve been struggling with filling in applications and overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem due to funders wanting to see which other funders are contributing to getting the project funded. It seems that you need funding already before you get funded. Infuriating, yes! At the same time, there’s issue of who you accept money from. Some organizations can be generous in offering, but will lead to political situations which might hijack the project further down the road.

Ok, that’s just about it for what we’ve been up to since the project began. We’ll be back with that special news soon…

Cheers, James & Chris

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