Wireless community networking gurus working with civil society groups met at the Tactical Tech offices in Amsterdam last month. This included practitioners from Indonesia, Senegal, North America and Europe. The meeting was co-organized by The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Tactical Technology Collective (TTC) with cooperation from The Association for Progressive Communications (APC).

There were two main goals of the gathering, the first was to connect the leaders of projects that are promoting community wireless and training people in how to build networks. The second goal was to work as a group in preparing training curricula based on the groups experiences on the ground. These materials will be developed using the APC Multimedia Training Kit methodology (MMTK).

The group defined a common goal - of providing techies and decision makers with access to knowledge on wireless community networking and alternatives to internet access - which they then worked around during the meeting.

Through the workshop a full curricula outline for community wireless networking training was developed as well as two units, a map of all the projects people are involved in was drawn out (this map in a graphical form will be soon included here), as well as an outline of where the gaps and needs are of in the area of community wireless networking from the perspective of civil society organizations (this list will be also available soon). The group is now working on a proposal to complete the content of the curricula, which will ultimately be released under open content license.

People involved in the meeting were:
Adel El Zaim Connectivity Africa - Acacia, Cairo, Egypt
Ann Tothill - APC Itrainonline, MMTK, Sydney, Australia
Ann Fieldman - APC London, UK
Bruno Roger - ESMT/DI Dakar, Senegal
Kyle Johnston - freelance, Toronto, Canada
Mahamadou Arabani Saibou - ESMT/DI, Dakar, Senegal
Marek Tuszynski - TTC, Amsterdam, Holland
Onno Purbo - IDRC/Institute of Technology Bandung, Jakarta, Indonesia
Sasha Meinrath - Independent Media Center, Urbana-Champaign, USA
Sebastian Buettrich - wireless.dk, Wireless Roadshow, Copenhagen, Denmark

Outcomes of the meeting are available on the moderated wiki

More about the event from the interview with Sasha Meinrath on April 28th in the wifinetnews