As Nicholas Negroponte said a year and a half ago in a presentation on the OLPC: “people really don’t want to criticize this because it is a humanitarian effort, it is a non-profit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid actually”.

Mesh networks are a type of wireless network. As you'll discover, mesh networking is great for blanketing Wi-Fi in larger areas. They are especially useful in places where the environment changes frequently, such as people and walls moving around in malls, trees and buildings growing around an apartment complex, boats moving around the docks, and trucks coming in and out of stops.

"For viafrica.org I studied the possibility of setting up a wireless mesh network using ubuntu..."

One Laptop Per Child system has limited value on its own. Its most innovative and powerful features lie in its participation in a mesh network with other laptops. So get your neighbors and workmates to buy them too!

RMS: « It is very important to promote peer-to-peer methods of doing various collaborative tasks, because servers cause issues of control vs freedom, and peer-to-peer is the only way to avoid them. »

There's been a lot of talk about the OLPC's cute little mesh networking laptop at Linux.conf.au this week. The foundation is taking its low-cost, robust laptop the XO to underprivileged kids around the world, but it's also funding its work by selling XO laptops to the public. The cool news from the LCA conference was that a local OLPC group is setting up in Australia to help get computers to kids across Australia.

GNU Free Call is a new project to develop and deploy secure self-organized communication services worldwide for private use and for public administration. We use the open standard SIP protocol and GNU SIP Witch to create secured peer-to-peer mesh calling networks, and we welcome all participation in our effort.

"...peer production is about the social production of value, directly through social relations [...] For peer to peer self aggregation to occur, we need distributed infrastructures [...] Peer to peer is about non-rival goods that can be reproduced at marginal cost and abundantly.

"HackerSpaceBrussels (HSB) announces the second Wireless Battle Mesh, which aims to test 3 popular WiFi routing protocols (OLSR, Batman and Babel), in Brussels on Saturday and Sunday 17-18 October 2009..."