Mario Behling Application 2015

About Me

Mario Behling is a German born technologist who is working with communities around the world to spread free knowledge. Mario is the person behind the blog of the Freifunk Community Networks in Germany. He has spend over 10 years in Asia with projects like OLPC Afghanistan and FOSSASIA and founded a company providing Open Source solutions in Vietnam.

Contact

Jabber ID mariobehling@jabber.ccc.de

e-mail address: mb@mariobehling.de

Blogs: blog.freifunk.net, mariobehling.de

Background

I met Arc Riley of the XMPP community at the Google Summer of Code Reunion and we talked about the use of XMPP in community networks. To facilitate cooperations and keep the conversation going he suggested to join up our efforts and participate in the foundation.

Community

Freifunk is an initiative for decentralized community networks in Germany founded in 2003. We are working with partners around the world and engage in the development of firmwares, OpenWrt, routing protocols such as OLSR and BATMAN. There are over 120 local networks and thousands of nodes. Many communities are connected through VPN and Wifi links countrywide and internationally. We organize and participate in regular meetups and conferences like the annual Wireless Community Weekend [1], the Battle of the Mesh (where we compare different routing protocols) [2], the International Summit on Community Networks [3] and the OpenTechSummit.

Goal of Decentralized XMPP service

An important goal for many members of the Freifunk community is to offer decentralized services in local networks - P2P sharing, chat, streaming, VoIP and more. The adaptation of Internet technologies to the needs and requirements of local networks, e.g. to function efficiently with mesh routing protocols has been an ongoing effort since the beginning. Regarding XMPP and decentralized chat there have been a number of efforts to run serverless chats with Avahi. As community networks in Europe grow to thousands of nodes, the scaling of chat solutions is an issue.

Plan on working with XMPP

I would like to work together with the XMPP community and renew efforts for decentralized serverless communication with XMPP in community networks. I would like to bring core contributors together in events/meetups and work on a sample implementation to set up serverless XMPP in large local networks. In order to make this widely usable I will bring together contributors to document best practices.