A really great front page New York Times article on the work we've been doing at the Open Technology Initiative. The full article is available here:

U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors

The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe.

The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

In one of the most ambitious efforts, United States officials say, the State Department and Pentagon have spent at least $50 million to create an independent cellphone network in Afghanistan using towers on protected military bases inside the country. It is intended to offset the Taliban’s ability to shut down the official Afghan services, seemingly at will.

The effort has picked up momentum since the government of President Hosni Mubarak shut down the Egyptian Internet in the last days of his rule. In recent days, the Syrian government also temporarily disabled much of that country’s Internet, which had helped protesters mobilize.

The Obama administration’s initiative is in one sense a new front in a longstanding diplomatic push to defend free speech and nurture democracy. For decades, the United States has sent radio broadcasts into autocratic countries through Voice of America and other means. More recently, Washington has supported the development of software that preserves the anonymity of users in places like China, and training for citizens who want to pass information along the government-owned Internet without getting caught.

But the latest initiative depends on creating entirely separate pathways for communication. It has brought together an improbable alliance of diplomats and military engineers, young programmers and dissidents from at least a dozen countries, many of whom variously describe the new approach as more audacious and clever and, yes, cooler.

Sometimes the State Department is simply taking advantage of enterprising dissidents who have found ways to get around government censorship. American diplomats are meeting with operatives who have been burying Chinese cellphones in the hills near the border with North Korea, where they can be dug up and used to make furtive calls, according to interviews and the diplomatic cables.

The new initiatives have found a champion in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose department is spearheading the American effort. “We see more and more people around the globe using the Internet, mobile phones and other technologies to make their voices heard as they protest against injustice and seek to realize their aspirations,” Mrs. Clinton said in an e-mail response to a query on the topic. “There is a historic opportunity to effect positive change, change America supports,” she said. “So we’re focused on helping them do that, on helping them talk to each other, to their communities, to their governments and to the world.”

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

“The implication is that this disempowers central authorities from infringing on people’s fundamental human right to communicate,” Mr. Meinrath added.

The Invisible Web

In an anonymous office building on L Street in Washington, four unlikely State Department contractors sat around a table. Josh King, sporting multiple ear piercings and a studded leather wristband, taught himself programming while working as a barista. Thomas Gideon was an accomplished hacker. Dan Meredith, a bicycle polo enthusiast, helped companies protect their digital secrets.

Then there was Mr. Meinrath, wearing a tie as the dean of the group at age 37. He has a master’s degree in psychology and helped set up wireless networks in underserved communities in Detroit and Philadelphia.

The group’s suitcase project will rely on a version of “mesh network” technology, which can transform devices like cellphones or personal computers to create an invisible wireless web without a centralized hub. In other words, a voice, picture or e-mail message could hop directly between the modified wireless devices — each one acting as a mini cell “tower” and phone — and bypass the official network.

Mr. Meinrath said that the suitcase would include small wireless antennas, which could increase the area of coverage; a laptop to administer the system; thumb drives and CDs to spread the software to more devices and encrypt the communications; and other components like Ethernet cables.

The project will also rely on the innovations of independent Internet and telecommunications developers.

“The cool thing in this political context is that you cannot easily control it,” said Aaron Kaplan, an Austrian cybersecurity expert whose work will be used in the suitcase project. Mr. Kaplan has set up a functioning mesh network in Vienna and says related systems have operated in Venezuela, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Mr. Meinrath said his team was focused on fitting the system into the bland-looking suitcase and making it simple to implement — by, say, using “pictograms” in the how-to manual.

In addition to the Obama administration’s initiatives, there are almost a dozen independent ventures that also aim to make it possible for unskilled users to employ existing devices like laptops or smartphones to build a wireless network. One mesh network was created around Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as early as five years ago, using technology developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most “circumvention” technologies — the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks — nearly useless, he said.

“No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can’t upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings,” Mr. Anderson said. “They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country.”

That need is so urgent, citizens are finding their own ways to set up rudimentary networks. Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian expatriate and technology developer who co-founded a popular Persian-language Web site, estimates that nearly half the people who visit the site from inside Iran share files using Bluetooth — which is best known in the West for running wireless headsets and the like. In more closed societies, however, Bluetooth is used to discreetly beam information — a video, an electronic business card — directly from one cellphone to another.

Mr. Yahyanejad said he and his research colleagues were also slated to receive State Department financing for a project that would modify Bluetooth so that a file containing, say, a video of a protester being beaten, could automatically jump from phone to phone within a “trusted network” of citizens. The system would be more limited than the suitcase but would only require the software modification on ordinary phones.

By the end of 2011, the State Department will have spent some $70 million on circumvention efforts and related technologies, according to department figures.

Mrs. Clinton has made Internet freedom into a signature cause. But the State Department has carefully framed its support as promoting free speech and human rights for their own sake, not as a policy aimed at destabilizing autocratic governments.

That distinction is difficult to maintain, said Clay Shirky, an assistant professor at New York University who studies the Internet and social media. “You can’t say, ‘All we want is for people to speak their minds, not bring down autocratic regimes’ — they’re the same thing,” Mr. Shirky said.

He added that the United States could expose itself to charges of hypocrisy if the State Department maintained its support, tacit or otherwise, for autocratic governments running countries like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain while deploying technology that was likely to undermine them.

Shadow Cellphone System

In February 2009, Richard C. Holbrooke and Lt. Gen. John R. Allen were taking a helicopter tour over southern Afghanistan and getting a panoramic view of the cellphone towers dotting the remote countryside, according to two officials on the flight. By then, millions of Afghans were using cellphones, compared with a few thousand after the 2001 invasion. Towers built by private companies had sprung up across the country. The United States had promoted the network as a way to cultivate good will and encourage local businesses in a country that in other ways looked as if it had not changed much in centuries.

There was just one problem, General Allen told Mr. Holbrooke, who only weeks before had been appointed special envoy to the region. With a combination of threats to phone company officials and attacks on the towers, the Taliban was able to shut down the main network in the countryside virtually at will. Local residents report that the networks are often out from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., presumably to enable the Taliban to carry out operations without being reported to security forces.

The Pentagon and State Department were soon collaborating on the project to build a “shadow” cellphone system in a country where repressive forces exert control over the official network.

Details of the network, which the military named the Palisades project, are scarce, but current and former military and civilian officials said it relied in part on cell towers placed on protected American bases. A large tower on the Kandahar air base serves as a base station or data collection point for the network, officials said.

A senior United States official said the towers were close to being up and running in the south and described the effort as a kind of 911 system that would be available to anyone with a cellphone.

By shutting down cellphone service, the Taliban had found a potent strategic tool in its asymmetric battle with American and Afghan security forces.

The United States is widely understood to use cellphone networks in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries for intelligence gathering. And the ability to silence the network was also a powerful reminder to the local populace that the Taliban retained control over some of the most vital organs of the nation.

When asked about the system, Lt. Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the American-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, would only confirm the existence of a project to create what he called an “expeditionary cellular communication service” in Afghanistan. He said the project was being carried out in collaboration with the Afghan government in order to “restore 24/7 cellular access.”

“As of yet the program is not fully operational, so it would be premature to go into details,” Colonel Dorrian said.

Colonel Dorrian declined to release cost figures. Estimates by United States military and civilian officials ranged widely, from $50 million to $250 million. A senior official said that Afghan officials, who anticipate taking over American bases when troops pull out, have insisted on an elaborate system. “The Afghans wanted the Cadillac plan, which is pretty expensive,” the official said.

Broad Subversive Effort

In May 2009, a North Korean defector named Kim met with officials at the American Consulate in Shenyang, a Chinese city about 120 miles from North Korea, according to a diplomatic cable. Officials wanted to know how Mr. Kim, who was active in smuggling others out of the country, communicated across the border. “Kim would not go into much detail,” the cable says, but did mention the burying of Chinese cellphones “on hillsides for people to dig up at night.” Mr. Kim said Dandong, China, and the surrounding Jilin Province “were natural gathering points for cross-border cellphone communication and for meeting sources.” The cellphones are able to pick up signals from towers in China, said Libby Liu, head of Radio Free Asia, the United States-financed broadcaster, who confirmed their existence and said her organization uses the calls to collect information for broadcasts as well.

The effort, in what is perhaps the world’s most closed nation, suggests just how many independent actors are involved in the subversive efforts. From the activist geeks on L Street in Washington to the military engineers in Afghanistan, the global appeal of the technology hints at the craving for open communication.

In a chat with a Times reporter via Facebook, Malik Ibrahim Sahad, the son of Libyan dissidents who largely grew up in suburban Virginia, said he was tapping into the Internet using a commercial satellite connection in Benghazi. “Internet is in dire need here. The people are cut off in that respect,” wrote Mr. Sahad, who had never been to Libya before the uprising and is now working in support of rebel authorities. Even so, he said, “I don’t think this revolution could have taken place without the existence of the World Wide Web.”

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Andrew W. Lehren from New York, and Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Call for Paper Proposals

New ICTs + New Media = New Democracy? Communications policy and public life in the age of broadband

A by-invitation experts’ workshop

New America Foundation, September 20-22, 2011

Are “new media” fundamentally changing the practice of democracy? Recent years have seen a significant transition in the role computer mediated communications play in the political sphere. A technological revolution driven by economic and market forces is undermining settled practices, established institutions, and traditional communications norms. As a result, public policies governing the telecommunications and media infrastructure need to be re-examined, and their theoretical foundations and paradigmatic assumptions reformulated.

Technological developments and broadband communications have forced the rules of political discourse to change: contemporary new media are circumventing and displacing old media; political candidates and public officials are finding new ways of communicating with the public; fundraising and advertising in political campaigns are being reshaped; and voiceless organizations and communities around the world are making themselves heard -- both within their national boundaries and around the world.

The Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative are pleased to announce this call for paper proposals, which focuses on the role broadband policies play in the promotion and preservation of democracy and human rights. Authors of the selected papers will be invited to present and discuss them during a three day by-invitation-only experts workshop designed to bring together American and international experts and to be held at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, between September 20-22, 2011. This workshop is part of a series of events focused on “Making Policy Research Accessible,” organized by the IIP, with the support of the Ford Foundation. Presenters at the workshop will be invited to submit their completed papers for review by the Journal of Information Policy (www.jip-online.org).

Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Freedom, democracy and justice: Changing concepts of democracy in the 21st century
• Campaign financing policies in the age of broadband communications
• Viability of existing telecommunications/media policies in light of technological change
• Preservation of freedom of expression and the public sphere in the new media environment
• Human rights and policy implications of recent popular uprisings around the world
• Allocation of resources allowing broadband communication to fulfill their role in democracy
• Private and public ownership of communication networks and their implications for democracy

Abstracts of up to 500 words and a short bio of the author(s) should be submitted to pennstateiip@psu.edu by June 30, 2011. Please write IIPOTIWS: YOUR NAME in the subject line. Abstracts not sent according to the above instructions will not be reviewed. Accepted presenters

will be notified by July 15, 2011.

Thanks to Kristijan Fabina, many of the talks from the 2010 International Summit for Community Wireless Networks are now online. You can check out the video list either at:

http://www.youtube.com/kikodw (tagged as IS4CWN)

or take a look at the individual videos below.

*The Serval project*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yk1FdFsQUA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3SUWE5F7SM
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGXoe424t5M
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_YIJXq-BzY
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrgvkSzdZ2E

*BGWireless Serbia Freemium Model*
1/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZ-Cl8ggj8
2/2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hTw677X5-Y

*Next Steps for Community Wireless Networks*
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDoARBaIuA
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkm8i7XQSUs
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsNGEOhBrls
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGhloXSOW78
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pm4TYGQ8dc

*Wireless Toronto*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtGSuAopOII

*Village Telco*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EsctLSG5dI

*FunkFeuer*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUMUnMkVm_w

*WLAN Ljubljana, Slovenia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKFgWZO6Inw

*Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (AWMN)*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5krFJ8nNpY

*Austin Wireless Freemium model*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC-U_IfV_hQ

*Freemium model - Brough Turner talk *
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbEnl6fdBBo

*Tribal Digital Village*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYXCCN-yxds

*Chambana Wireless*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKBdRt2xxWg

*BGWireless, Serbia*
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI3MufT9ZAE

Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM wrote a great overview piece of the wireless integration initiative we've been working on over at the Open Technology Initiative:

Hillary Clinton called for the U.S. to promote Internet freedoms earlier this week and introduced a $25 million fund for technology companies that might help with the task. The New America Foundation has already applied for a grant under that program that includes a $3.5 million proposal, of which $500,000 will be funded by the New America Foundation itself. The mission? To build the technology stack for a distributed, open source telecommunications system.

The project would combine well known projects, such as the open source voice projects Asterisk and OpenBTS, with new projects for mesh networking known as The Serval Project, which Kevin covered earlier this month and Commotion, open source firmware to enable routers to create an open mesh network. Dan Meredith, a technologist at New America broke it down for me, and said the hope is to deliver communications in areas where Internet access is scarce, but also among populations that are unable to use communications because of government interference. While this technology stack would have been of limited use in Egypt, it actually could have helped protesters in the country stay connected to each other if not to the wider Internet. Here’s how the pieces fit together:

The Serval Project: The goal here is to create software used to connect phones with or without Internet access. The project uses an existing phone number and handsets with the application installed can communicate with each other by calling the phone number of other phones in the Serval network. Serval does need some kind of wireless network on which to run, be it a wireless LAN that’s not connected back to the web or a GSM cellular network.

Commotion: This is a fairly new project that seeks to make distributed communications easier by turning any device from a phone to a router into a node on a mesh network. This can be used to create a wireless LAN for Serval-enabled handsets to run on top of, or it can be used to create an access network in general. The point here is that it’s distributed, as opposed to every connection going back to a central wireless or wireline provider. Commotion networks have been set up in Detroit and Washington D.C. and the same technology has been used to set up networks worldwide. The Commotion site says:

Our first hope is first create an intranet as requested from our growing contacts on the ground to facilitate the creation of local based organizing and outreach intranet applications. Concurrently, we are working to provide strategic uplinks via satellite and dial-up to get folks reconnected to the global internet. Finally, we hope to integrate the good work folks at Tor are doing (https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TheOnionRouter/Torouter) into a bundle and the firmware as well. More ideas are of course welcome!

Tor: If Commotion is the road for packets to drive around on and Serval is like the car enabling the drivers to get on the road, then Tor tints the car’s windows, according to Meredith. The software uses multiple encrypted nodes to route your traffic requests around the web to disguise where it is coming from, this shielding the identity of user or person making a web search. Bloggers, activists, journalists and the military use Tor to keep their location, IP address and web site visits secret. For dissidents, running Tor on top of Commotion can disguise the location of network nodes and users.

Open BTS or Asterisk : Using OpenBTS linked to an open source voice server running software such as Asterisk, a distributed network now has the ability to make voice calls without going back to the centralized core network of a wireless or wireline carrier. If one hooks a server running OpenBTS to an Asterisk server on a Commotion network then voice calls via VoIP are now available via the existing GSM radios on the phones, even without using something like Serval.

Open GSM: This one is a bit like Pump up the Volume, meaning it may be all rebel cool, but it may not be legal. Essentially its a project to build cheap base stations in various cellular frequency bands to deliver a cell signal to GSM phones. Since these towers are using airwaves purchased by private or state-owned telecommunications companies and could cause interference it’s pretty much going to be reserved for folks who aren’t okay with government regulations, or who can get approval for their networks. If your government doesn’t want you access the web, though, this base station connected back to a web gateway is one way to fight the power and provide web access.

Is this the final technology stack for providing safer and more reliable Internet access for activists and dissidents? I can’t say but as protests sweep across the Middle East and governments such as Egypt, China or Burma are willing to crack down on Internet access, the need for innovation around decentralized networks grows.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Muhammed Ghafari

Today's interview (along with Susan Crawford) in Marketplace Tech Report here's the background and synopsis along with link so you can listen to the radio feed:

Election Day is tomorrow. By all indications we're going to be getting a very different, much more Republican Congress this time around. But before they come in, let's remember one of the last things the old, more Democratic Congress did. Or attempted to do, unsuccessfully.

By that, I mean net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers should be prevented from giving some Internet traffic priority over other Internet traffic. So if your provider decided you would get videos from YouTube really fast but websites from somewhere else really slow, they would be legally prohibited from doing so.

We talk to Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, and Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School in New York. They say not to expect much to come out of Congress this time either but that the ball has been placed clearly in the court of the Federal Communications Commission.

Late this year or possibly early next year, FCC Chairman will likely assert his agency's authority over internet communications. From there it's a question of whether whatever they do holds up in court.

Also in this show, a new software program lets employees of a company know where all their co-workers are physically located at all times. Which comes as a relief to people who hate privacy and never want to be left alone.

The Open Technology Initiative Helps Bring $11.8 Million for Broadband Adoption in Philadelphia

Second “Freedom Rings” Broadband Stimulus Award will Support Internet Access, Computers and Training

Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration awarded an $11.8 million grant to an 11 member coalition of community organizations lead by the Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition, the second “Freedom Rings” proposal to be awarded in the City from the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. Compounding the $6.4 million awarded in June to the City of Philadelphia for 77 computer centers, this grant supports sustainable broadband adoption programs that will:

• Generate 5,000 new broadband household subscribers;
• Distribute over 5,500 computers to public housing residents and formerly homeless youth;
• Support 50 businesses to adopt broadband;
• Provide over 100,000 hours of hands-on training to 15,000 people; and,
• Create over 75,000 new broadband users through a viral social marketing campaign.

"The New America Foundation has been engaged in the assessment and evaluation of Philadelphia broadband initiatives since 2007," stated Sascha Meinrath, Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative. "OTI utilized the knowledge we've gleaned over the years to help develop the Philadelphia Freedom Rings Initiative – supporting an innovative collaboration to bring digital excellence to the city's residents."

Sharmain Matlock-Turner, President and CEO of the Urban Affairs Coalition, said, “we thank our friends at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative for helping us connect Philadelphia’s communities to broadband technologies. Most people know that broadband is essential for their daily lives. We know that long-term adoption strategies must be thoughtfully tailored to community needs and delivered through trusted, neighborhood-level organizations, like the Urban Affairs Coalition and Philadelphia’s Freedom Rings Partnership, in order to be effective and sustainable. New America is going to help us do just that.”

In Philadelphia, the Open Technology Initiative continued its on-the-ground support beyond the 2007 analysis of Philadelphia's Municipal wireless project The Philadelphia Story with strategy, grant writing, technical consulting, and guidance for the grants offered through the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Building on expertise in Philadelphia, OTI has committed to evaluate the impact of the project through both quantitative and qualitative metrics.

"We are excited because this project prioritizes placing resources and skills training in the hands of those most in need, and will put Philadelphia at the forefront of cities building towards a digital future for all residents," explained Todd Wolfson, a co-founder of Media Mobilizing Project, a partner in the proposal.

“Today's announcement is another example of Philadelphia's deep history to lead and spur innovation through community engagement,” added Dan Meredith, Technologist and OTI's lead in Philadelphia. “This project's priorities move past typical dump and run technology efforts with an attempt to stymie the digital divide by bringing broadband adoption programs directly to Philadelphia residents.”

The Open Technology Initiative has supported efforts to direct broadband stimulus funding to community-focused projects across the country, through both on-the-ground efforts and providing expansive application resources.

A fact sheet on the Freedom Rings: Sustainable Broadband Adoption is available here: http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/files/grantees/factsheetpaurbanaffairscoalition.pdf

Please contact Kate Brown with media requests at 202-596-3365 or brown@newamerica.net.

Hoo-ray, it's time for the International Summit for Community Wireless Networks! The call for proposals is now officially open -- this is our first time hosting the Summit outside the U.S., so we're expecting a whole bunch of new folks from overseas. Here's more:

CALL FOR PROPOSALS -- Accepted April 1 - June 1, 2010

International Summit for Community Wireless Networks
August 12-15, 2010
Vienna, Austria

Propose panels online at www.wirelesssummit.org

Since the first National Summit for Community Wireless Networks in 2004, tens of thousands of community and municipal broadband initiatives have been deployed around the globe. The 2010 International Summit for Community Wireless Networks offers panelists to help shape the future direction of this thriving global movement. Over the course of three days, panels and workshops provide a significant opportunity for thinkers, developers, and stakeholders to swap notes and produce substantial recommendations supporting the continuing development of community wireless networks. By gathering leaders from across this field to exchange of strategies, stories, and best practices, the Summit is a key place to help shape the future of this global networking movement.

Interested presenters should propose innovative panels and workshops focusing on the three themes for the Summit: technology, policy, and implementation. The International Summit for Community Wireless Networks distinguishes itself from typical technical and academic conferences by engaging all participants in an ongoing dialog that encourages a strategic approach to community wireless network development and telecommunications policy reform. Panelists do more than present their work and opinions -- they facilitate a process that records lessons learned and help produce a comprehensive "to-do list" of action items for the coming months and years.

We invite your panel proposals and participation in this year's International Summit for Community Wireless Networks to discuss and exchange ideas on how to make universal broadband access a reality. Demonstrations of software innovation, success stories of network deployment, presentations of ongoing research and discussion of municipal and governmental collaboration, on both the national and transnational levels, are welcome. Panelists are encouraged to convene panels that look at specific issues from multiple angles and perspectives. Panel ideas will be accepted on a rolling basis and must be received no later than June 1, 2010. Please send panel proposals of 250 words or less to: summit at chambana.net. Travel stipends are available for speakers with financial need.

Past panels can be reviewed at http://wirelesssummit.org.