The OpenBTS project was by ‘Camp Papa Legba', named after the Haitian Loa.
“In Haitian Vodou, Papa Legba is the intermediary between the loa and humanity. He stands at a spiritual crossroads and gives (or denies) permission to speak with the spirits of Guinee, and is believed to speak all human languages. He is always the first and last spirit invoked in any ceremony, because his permission is needed for any communication between mortals and the loa – he opens and closes the doorway. In Haiti, he is the great elocution, the voice of God, as it were. Legba facilitates communication, speech and understanding.”
Openmoko™ is a project dedicated to delivering mobile phones with an open source software stack. Openmoko is currently selling the Neo FreeRunner phone to advanced users and will start selling it to the general public as soon as the software is more developed.
Phi Beta Iota: We've had our say on “Open Everything” GNOMEDEX and again at “Open Everything” UNICEF, and it just keeps getting better and better. The cell phone is the principle device for Hacking Humanity, in part because it enables micro-everything including directed micro-giving and micro-trading with Open Money.
Below are two related items:
Updated Chart on Mobile Phone Applications (by sunset eastern)
EXCERPT: Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that's revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. Where do you want me to begin?
“We make GSM look like a wireless access point. We make it that simple,” describes one of the project's three founders, Glenn Edens. The technology starts with the “they-said-it-couldn't-be-done” open source software, OpenBTS.
This excellent piece aligns with one of the most important evolutionary dynamics I've been studying with Michael Dowd, Connie Barlow, John Stewart, and others. That dynamic, which has operated since the Big Bang, is this: In evolution's drive towards greater complexity — that is, towards greater wholes comprised of more densely interconnected parts — the breakthrough dynamics have always been those through which the self-interest of the parts becomes aligned with the well-being of the whole.
This offers some obvious places to focus our efforts to transform our global civilization:
* Internalize economic externalities. Incorporate the true costs (ecological, social, etc.) of a product or service into its price in the marketplace. When this is done, products and services that produce social and environmental damage cost more than comparable products that are more benign. This totally reverses the current destructive dynamic that makes the “free market” so toxic — the current ability of producers to pass on the costs of their toxic activities to nature, taxpayers, future generations, etc. When those costs are “internalized” into all prices, the natural inclination of self-interested consumers, corporations, etc., to seek a low price “magically” (i.e., systemically) aligns their behavior with the well-being of the whole. One familiar example is carbon taxes, which reduce people's fossil fuel consumption while generating both funds and markets to develop sustainable energy sources.
Right now the Categories include, in this order: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, Music.
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this in all languages, available on the cell phone, as an educational tool that also harnesses the cognitive surplus–the distributed intelligence–of the Whole Earth. Our view of YouTube is now such that we consider it more important than Google.
The Internet Archive, one of the fastest-growing digital libraries in the world, has migrated its massive amount of content into a new Sun Microsystems-built portable data center loaded with 60 Sun X4500 Thumper arrays that each have 48TB of storage capacity. Sun staged a launch event at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters on March 25.
“It's amazing to think that the whole Web collection, which is about 2PB compressed and from 4PB to 5PB uncompressed, can live in a 20-foot-by-8-foot-by-8-foot shipping container, which, from our standpoint, is a computer,” Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, told eWEEK.
The archive, which employs the equivalent of only three system administrators, goes back to 1996 and stores more than 150 billion Web pages, Kahle said. It is accessed 500 times per second. Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings, Kahle said. “It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.”
Phi Beta Iota: Don't miss the eight-shot slide show above. Brewster spoke at OSS '92–we have wasted the past twenty years, he has not. Now imagine this combined with the C Drives of participating members of the Global Game, and all the insurance data, and true cost information overlain on all credit purchases…..
