Notes on ManchLUG, 28-Sept-2010, maddog and Project Cauã

[Ted Roche]

Eighteen people attended the second ManchLUG meeting, held at "Wings
Your Way" on Elm Street in Manchester. Early attendees to the meeting
enjoyed good food, beverages and camaraderie.

It's never easy to summarize a maddog presentation :). Maddog had a lot
of interesting materials to cover, and provided a lot of depth and
background to his main thesis. Briefly, Project Cauã is based in Brazil
as the center of its first pilot and rollout, but intends to be
worldwide. There's a strong ethos of openness and transparency in hopes
the project will be duplicated elsewhere. It is an effort to distribute
computing power and internet connectivity to as many people as possible
as cheaply as possibly, but using the power of capitalism and business
to drive the project, rather than some completely free charitable model
that would be trying to fight the entrenched interests. There seemed to
be an emphasis on sustainability, both for the project and the world,
and the principles of Open Software.

The infrastructure would consist of very-low-power (10-12 watts)
mini-machines, a small fanless thin-client box with USB3 and gigabit
ethernet connectivity, wired into large servers centralized in
neighborhoods or apartment building basements. The machines would be
manufactured as greenly as possible and built for long term service
(6-10 years).  Small businesses would be established and trained
(cheaply over the internet and/or with DVDs) to service the machines.
The thin clients would rent/lease for a target price of $6/month. To
avoid vendor lockin or obsolescence, the thin client design would be
open, designed by the University of São Paulo and distributed/licensed
freely to the many SMT (Surface Mount Technology) assembly facilities
available within Brazil (import duties of 100% on finished goods, versus
a 6% surcharge on raw components, means that in-country assembly is
economically feasible, driving local employment). The project intends to
use the network to provide free metro-wide Wifi. Some vendors have
expressed an interest in providing free internet band width in exchange
for idle CPU power. There's lots more to the project of course: finding
the proper motivations to financial institutions to provide the seed
money the many small startups will need, certifying and bonding the
local computer experts, designing and integrating the hardware,
software, networking, etc., but maddog only had a little over an hour to
present. More can be learned at http://www.projectcaua.org and maddog
promised he'd be further updating the site soon.

Thanks to maddog for the presentation, to Kenta Koga and Chip Marshall
for coordinating the meeting, to Wings Your Way for the facilities and
good food, and to all for attending and participating!

More related links at http://blog.tedroche.com/?p=3571

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com