Fluid Networking for Activists

A bit of a teaser about a current project of mine…

I’m working on a mobile phone application that allows activists to surreptitiously pass messages amongst Bluetooth-enabled phones. It came out of concerns I had watching events in Lebanon last summer, and Burma and Pakistan this fall, where the networking infrastructure was destroyed or shut down, eliminating regular communication channels. The project was also a response to currently-prevalent network views of reality, suggesting ways in which we can view the world as much more fluid and lacking-in-structure, using that to our advantage.

I don’t have enough time right now to go into all of my conceptual thoughts about the project. But you can look at a paper written for my networking class for some of my present ideas. Since the paper was written for a CS class it doesn’t have all of the theoretical work that I would present had it been written for a different audience. (It’s also not the best thing I’ve ever written, but that goes without saying!)

But here are some screen shots of early versions of the user interface. I hope to release a stable version of the code within the next month or so, and provide links to the source. If anyone is interested in working on the project with me, drop me a line.