Specifications.txt : The Stumbler Event Coordination DB
Discussion: #bcwireless on irc.bcwireless.net
The website for this DB lives at http://stumblers.bcwireless.net/
PREAMBLE
One late night Wiredboy and I got to talking about how cool it would be to put together a site that let's people interested in Wifi get together and meet new people. We figured it'd be cool if we could host a Netstumbling (aka: War Driving) event, but be able to setup teams of people based around who has what gear and in a random fashion so that people would actually meet new people, not the same old friends.
So, here it is. A draft spec document of how it could work. The beta site for this is foo.bcwireless.net, and if this works out we'll setup a more generic site and release the source code under a yet to be determined viral copyright license.
WHO ARE YOU AND WHAT'YOU HAVE
To take part, you need to create yourself a profile that consists of:
- Your name
- Your Email address
- A password
- What gear you have, ie: A laptop, GPS, Wifi Card, antenna, a car, bus pass, etc.
- Your experience level (novice, ???, intermediate).
XP
Here's some possible experience levels for people to be classified by:
- Novice - no experience with Wifi at all, just want to see how it works
- ??? - something in between Novice and Intermediate
- Intermediate - Someone who's knowledgable about Wifi but wants to take
- part anyway. This person will answer novice questions.
TEAMS
By default, anyone who has a car becomes a team leader. We figure this makes sense 'cause drivers usually have a navigator and laptop operator working with them.
Teams can also be created by people who don't want to go by car (BusStumblers, SkyTrainStumblers, etc.) or those who are just plain anti-social and hate how we do this.
MEMBERS
Everyone who registers and is not a team leader will be assigned to a team based on what gear the person already has, level of experience and, uh.. anyone have more thoughts?
WHAT GOES ON
Once teams are assigned and ready to go, we all meet at some public area (like a park), discuss anything that needs to be discussed, and we go.
Depending on the number of people interested, we can break down the stumbling into shifts of <X> hours. This way we can all take part but not burn out (unless you really want to).
Stumblers will roam around different parts of the city looking for Wifi nodes and doing other social type things.
STATISTICS
Each team will be able to upload their Stumbler data to the website. The website will generate a map pinpointing the nodes they found based on strongest signal and GPS coordinates.
We will also generate one master map showing *ALL* of the nodes found.
We will NOT distribute the raw stumbler data, it's up to the individual teams to decide if they want to distribute the data to other people. We've chosen this route because some folks may have ethical concerns over releasing data that could be potentially misused.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Obviousley we'll need to whore this to the rest of the world once the site is sort of working, for now we can use the Wiki or a static page, but it should be easy enough to get a simplistic system in place for a Stumble come the 12th of July.
In the future, anyone who wants to call an event could do so by posting a WALL to the site, and registered members could be notified by Email.
NAMES
The event needs a name, what to call it?
Wiredboy says, "what do you think of the name "MegaDrive"
