[Battlemesh] WBMv5 in Athens/Greece at the horizon

[Marek Lindner]

Dear BattleMesh enthusiasts,

as previously announced, Nico and I have traveled to Athens on a WBM 
reconnaissance mission in order to establish contact with the locals and 
investigate whether we have enough support on the ground to ensure a 
successful event. Roger and Pau also managed to join & support our mission for 
a couple of days.

Alexandros, in the OpenWrt realm also known as acoul, kindly offered us a 
place to stay and helped big time organizing meetings and social events with 
the Greek hacker & open source landscape. Too much happened to squeeze it all 
into a single email, therefore we are going to concentrate on the highlights. 
A more extensive report might follow later.

Saturday evening (24th of September) we were invited to the Athens hackerspace 
[1] to explain what the BattleMesh is and what we would need to make it 
happen. During our presentation, we showed the promo videos (excellent work 
Saverio!), the slides Nico has already published and demonstrated how much fun 
the BattleMesh is. We had a mixed audience consisting of AWMN (Athens wireless 
community) members, *LUG activists, hackers and other visitors.

On Tuesday (27th of September) we had a meeting with ELLAK (GFOSS : Greek 
Free/Open Source Software Society) [2], where we basically gave the same 
presentation again. ELLAK has known experience in hosting events and contacts 
to universities in Athens which might be willing to provide a location for our 
event. They also offered to help managing with the bank transfer / receipts if 
necessary.

On Wednesday (28th of September), we had a last-minute meeting with Demokritos 
(National Centre for Scientific Research) [3], where we gave the presentation 
once more, in front of a limited (due to a massive strike) academic audience. 
We got positive feedback, but parties there were more interrested in what 
outcomes & results the academic / research communities could expect from this 
event. We might want to think about that :)

Among the various interested parties and supporters, we have identified a 
number of particularly motivated people which we named the "local organizers 
committee" (LOC). Those are:

* Alexandros / acoul from OpenWrt
* Vasilis / acinonyx from OpenWrt & hackerspace.gr
* Nefeli from hackerspace.gr
* Panos / xrg from linux.gr
* Nikos & Panagiotis from ellak.gr

These will be our main contacts when it comes to the organization of the 
event. Obviously, there are many more people willing to help / to get involved 
but we spend a lot of time with this group, so that we are confident they 
understand our needs / requirements.

Next steps:
* We will need to finalize the dates of the WBMv5 to book a suitable location. 
We were told to better avoid March 25th as it is a national holiday. The rest 
of the month looks fine from the Greek perspective.

* Meanwhile the LOC will be gathering hosting options which fit our 
requirements. Towards the end of October, we should agree on one of these 
options.

Links:
1. http://hackerspace.gr/
2. http://ellak.gr/
3. http://www.demokritos.gr/

Cheers,
--
The WBMv5 Explorer / Recon Team