There are plenty of ways you can get involved, as an individual or as a business.
Individuals
Free Australia Wireless is a people powered project. That means powered by you, the community!
You can get involved on multiple levels, including:
- Share your Internet connection with your neighbours at home (obviously), and get to know your neighbours;
- Join a local group, expand the mesh network, or start your own little network in your street or community, or city! We need more Free <your city> Wireless groups around Australia;
- Blog about free wireless internet, write a guest article for this site, write an article for a local magazine or newspaper, or get a local journalist to write an article;
- Start hacking your wireless device, expand its functionality. Write a tutorial for others to follow. Develop a captive portal or a mapping application showing of free and open wireless access points. Lead by example;
- Talk to your local coffee shop owner, and get him to provide free Internet access;
- Get in touch with your local council, evangelize free Internet access;
- If you know of local initiatives we should know about, let us know, write a blog post or leave a comment;
- Anything other way you can think of…
You see, even if you can’t share your Internet connection (because you don’t have a wireless connection set up at home or don’t have an abundant data plan), there’s still lots of ways to get involved and help us out.
Business
Want to grow business? Differentiate your business from your competitors, offer your customers free wireless internet access.
- Customers love to unwind at a coffee shop or bistro, during lunch or between meetings. Quickly sip on a coffee while checking their email. You probably already have an internet connection to do business. Share a portion with your customers!
- Food courts are perfect to combine lunch and read up on new feeds;
- Books stores, magazine stores, music stores. Have internet access at hand for customers;
- Real estate management services, using remote metering over the Internet, could offer wireless internet to tenants;
- …
Local council
Local councils can improve communication with their local community, when that local community can access the Internet for free. But free internet access also attracts business and tourists.
- Libraries are an obvious choice for internet access;
- Cummunity centers;
- Tourist information centers;
- Museums, art galleries;
- Shopping malls, shopping strips, parks, beaches,…
Manufacturers – Distributors
Manufacturers of wireless network devices can help out by giving us the tools we need! Integrate open source mesh networking, configurable captive portals, comprehensive user management,…
We can offer distributors free promotion of enabling technologies. We’d love to see companies import wireless access points like Open-Mesh and help in the ACMA certification.
Sponsorship
We are looking for sponsorship. This can be in different forms, like
- free marketing opportunities to spread the word, like a conference presence (Wireless World 2008 – Web Directions South – thanks again!), newspaper articles, …;
- monetary donations to buy wireless hardware to distribute among the community;
- hardware donations to allow us to test wireless hardware and network configuration.
For more information you can contact us.