Assuming that Byzantium is started up in a group of laptop pc's in response to an emergency, I can see two cases of users: A. Support Team and B. Victims. The support team is airlifted into the disaster area and has a specific humanitarian aid task to perform. Their needs are to communicate with each other, communicate with home base and to access relatively large pdf manuals, rules and procedures files for their organization. They may need to communicate with local organizations or the local population using a pc but this is less likely in the initial aftermath. They may need to order equipment and materials online via a web browser app. In an emergency situation, high bandwidth internet is probably not available although the support team may have low bandwidth internet available to them (cell, satphone, packet radio). For initial communication before there is any access to internet, I would recommend a webforum type application instead of IRC. A forum allows for the creation of stickies and allows for searching of older posts. More people are familiar with webforums than IRC. IRC can work but there needs to be an instruction manual on how to use it. For distributing large pdf files of manuals, rules and procedures, the options are to have one laptop serve all other users. This is somewhat inefficient use of the servers bandwidth since is it probably also serving other applications. I would suggest some type of torrent application so that any pc with even a piece of the document could serve parts of the document that is needed by all users. Perhaps there could be a persistant directory that is set up so that any document that is saved there would be made available as a torrent to other users and the torrent program would automatically start upon boot from CD. When internet is available, the ideal method of communication is by email. Ideally, each support team member would have a gmail account and access it over the internet. I am assuming that an email server is too complicated to configure and set up. This may not be correct. A cell phone application similar to villagetelco.org (asterisk) could be very useful to allow the use of cell phones in the local area even if cell towers are not working. This would allow the use of smartphones similar to walkie talkies, even if there were no connection outside of the local meshnet. Support team services should be given priority and dedicated bandwidth. Victim services. The most important victim service during an emergency is health and welfare traffic. Most of this traffic is family members calling in to the disaster area to try to find the status of loved ones. In this case, when internet access is available, some kind of forum or bulletin board could be used to post questions, and those who have information can respond. This should be set up in advance and hosted offsite. Requests for information on family member status should be referred to this website. Some health and welfare traffic is related to medical advice. This should be given some type of priority and should be confidential. Perhaps a private IRC channel is best for this. There needs to be a way to allow some groups prioritized access to internet. For example, there may be local government agencies that need an internet connection. There needs to be a way to separate this traffic and allow it a prioritized access to the internet. The Support Team needs prioritized access to the internet. In some cases it may be desired to allow Byzantium to provide internet access to the public. For many nonemergency uses, this is probably an important option. For emergency services, it should be possible to limit the public's use of bandwidth so that critical communication has priority. A thought about CDs versus USB sticks. I think that only the laptops with server functions need USB sticks and persistent memory. It is probably better in an emergency situation to limit the number of servers (USB sticks) but maximize the number of users (CD meshnodes). Otherwise some users will click on buttons and make mistakes and set up unnecessary services, which would cause confusion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Project Byzantium (Emergency Mesh Networking)" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/d/msg/Byzantium/-/E3CdL6x9Wx8J. To post to this group, send email to Byzantium@hacdc.org. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to Byzantium+unsubscribe@hacdc.org. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/hacdc.org/group/Byzantium/?hl=en. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE