[Battlemesh] WBMv5 in Athens/Greece at the horizon

[Benjamin Henrion]

On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Marek Lindner <lindner_marek at yahoo.de> wrote:
> 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.

Any reason to organise it in March?

-- 
Benjamin Henrion <bhenrion at ffii.org>
FFII Brussels - +32-484-566109 - +32-2-4148403
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