 Our next speaker is active for Freifunk for a while and I'm looking forward to the next talk we will have here. Imagine you're left out enabling digital participation with Freifunk by Jürgen Wintermatt and Metze. Let's go. Alright, I will also say welcome. My name is Jürgen Wintermatt and Metze and I am indeed active for a while in Freifunk already. On the one side as a user, but on the other side I work at an institution where people with cognitive limitations live but they also have justified interest in participating in life including digitally and they're interested in that and as an institution we had the problem at some point of how we solve this and you have this factor while that this right on participation doesn't really exist. There's an auxiliary paragraph which we can see on the slide. Why is it at all? There are legal requirements for providers as part of the integration help. So we have 120 I think locations in the Rhineland so we're distributed geographically and for us as the provider there is this requirement the rooms of the people who live here have to have the conditions for using telephone and internet and even before this was in this law our institution already considered that we should make a surveil to the people living here and this is now a very weak legal requirement but it didn't exist at the time we still want to do it and as a larger institution when we want to do this it means we have to start some projects and so I did some research and we're not there for that long I think. We put the first area production online three years ago and it was also fired up by the German general court that they have the internet as a basic right including some bandwidth and in our particular case with the people living here you have to imagine that not all of them can freely leave their houses because there is some kind of closed living and they might have some cognitive limitations as well which means they are required to use their own mobile devices which might have limited volume which is used up at some point especially with newer possibilities like YouTube and so on which means without internet opportunity our customers have limited ability to communicate and add to that these people live on a salary below the lowest one with no work which means they can't afford their own internet connection a lot of them also have several limitations and they would like to use therapy offers which requires an internet connection and we thought about how can we implement this whole thing maybe quickly about myself I am working on the IT at this provider and so this is ended up on my desk at some point which I liked and I will talk later about why it became Freifunk or why we chose Freifunk but one short excursion maybe on two slides Lidl Wittmann said at the opening of the CCC that she sees the state as an inhibitor on e-government and digital management and as someone who is in a public institution I completely agree it goes even further in our particular case the availability of internet in this health institution there's the association Finsotz who work socially in IT there it was noticed in November that the digitalization regarding inclusion is almost only concerned with accessibility so it's also an important subject of course that all web offers are available without digital barriers but what is not present is the aspect of people living in this assisted living I think and we had this on the first slide already this law that I mentioned and there's no statement there what does enabling them to participate in digital participation there's not really a right to that which is sad and which also results in as Ms. Wittmann said the state is kind of inhibiting it and for people who want to drive something forward it makes it a lot more difficult and I'll talk later about that it is pretty difficult to work there which I would like to have imagined easier but it goes on it goes further a few of you might know it from teachers lessons so something like digital competence is not expected in social professions and both knowing and teaching this most people just have no idea about it so we work with the pixel labs that are also working with teaching people with cognitive disabilities and our workers we try to teach them the work to work with the cyber from the government and to enable them to teach with that so much with that so maybe a media base so when I got the topic on my table you start with mind maps and project plans and so on and you check what the stakeholders so the interested parties what are the interests of our customers so I talked to them beforehand and we have associations in all of those places and I'll sit down with them and talk to them it's always good to hear from them directly what they need so the customers had a lot of interest in internet and surfing of course no control of no cost in their own room in the whole house and without barriers and without barriers for them meant you might know it from hotels to enter credentials to click every time you want to log in without that so to find out the interests was rather straightforward we wanted to offer them internet access we wanted to have it secure for us traditionally and very very cheap that's what we wanted and me and the IT we would have liked it to have scalable low administration work little support work and of course have a dependable and SLA so a service level agreement so I want to have a number that I can just call when there's a problem that I can just call and say there's this problem I want it solved those were the main interests that came together and we had to bring everything together so the IT had these demands to solve so the connection to the internet it should be free of cost for the customers without barriers without portal that we have to enter credentials independent of the device because many of them only have mobile devices it should be secure before the law because I didn't want to get any letters from lawyers it had to be scalable and we have 120 of these houses in different places and it had to be done in a way so it doesn't matter if we have three or 120 houses and it should be cheap that was the main issue so barrier free that was really important because it's both for the workers and for the customers because they were afraid of being interrupted all the time to just help people going online so that was the main task for us having it securely before the law was very important as well so we are supported by the Steamhouse and we contacted them beforehand if they could do it and they were out because of the judicial problems so we needed another solution I started a very big market check to see what's available I'm not showing that here it's too big so I put together the cost and we were talking about half a million euros all in all and for us because we have to finance that ourselves that's a lot of money because we would have to find a way to find it out and yeah we tried to get it cheap or cost neutral so this is difficult and then I set up a summary of all this had to give it to my bosses and they said yeah sure do it and then there was this hot spot office by Wooderphone Telecom then others that offered hot spot solution and I was calculating it for Freifunk which is a German group the name means literally free radio and before I made contact to them I did my calculations I have to say to my shame making contact was only when I had the okay from my bosses so we made contact but basically I started with the one in Düsseldorf but then I contacted them in Leanderland and why I'll tell you later why them that's first of all because of my own background so if you compare the cost by commercial offers then there's a bit difference already but you also have to say we just couldn't have afforded it any other way then the possibility of creating benefits and what was important to me is setting up the infrastructure so setting up the cables setting up and installing the server rooms and servers and that should be independent of the supporters so I could now pull the plug throw out Freifunk and switch to a commercial provider I could do that it's independent and now then everything started for real as I get I told they talked to Düsseldorf first because it's my home city and went to meetings and then it happened well yeah there is also a forum and I entered that became active and then I found Andreas Dörfer and he both works with Düsseldorf but thank God also in Leanderland and in Düsseldorf it fell asleep in a way so they were less active on a doing level so Andreas he helped me a lot so we set up the ecosystem we are using the Fritz box the one we used is not really available anymore so there were these telecom boxes speedboards we are using them at the moment just as a DSL modem then the Archer C7 was recommended because they are very stable then unify APs and switches and they are so nice and host a unified controller in the cloud for us so we have everything in there and that makes our life so much easier but when we came to the real doing level then I really had to learn a lot to really work on a command line on a router I didn't do that for some 10 years as a student and then sometimes in my free time but I had to learn a lot at the beginning I did the whole project myself I had to talk to my colleagues a lot but then talk to Freifunk and that also included before Covid times that I also went to their meetings less than I wanted but yeah during Covid it was hardly possible at all and I hope that soon we can meet again because that's also something I would like to give back Alright I think I can skip the next slide everyone who listens here knows basically how Freifunk works with the VPN tunnel and so on and so forth and then we are at the context of Freifunk already the pros of why we chose Freifunk were in the beginning but it is affordable in this form so I have the material costs and personal costs which we have anyways it is a kind of civil engagement which I also like personally it is often used in a very stable way in refugee homes and other things so it's an established system where I was confident that I can handle it it scales well and the absolute best argument is the legal safety and security so it goes through a VPN so my institution is not appearing in any kind of log file there is no IP that can be associated I will go into this later but if I have issues with Freifunk I don't need to worry about getting any complaints and what's against it is there are different local parties to talk to different configuration and there is more effort on the IT side so Freifunk is always a local association depending on the city or local area and we have offers going down from the Dutch border down to Neuskirchen so I would have had to deal with several Freifunk associations in these different locations but the problem is in many of these areas there is no Freifunk association anymore it just died out because as we will see later it just doesn't exist anymore and we are a major installation already and the Freifunk idea is in my perception that there are these local associations that take care of the technical side offering it for interested people as well as the internet access especially for mesh systems so which means if my neighbour doesn't have an internet connection then they could mesh through my router and could have internet this way and this was not an option for us in this form so I talked with the people from Freifunk in the Netherlands if it's okay for them if they just take us even after we've expanded all the way to the Dutch border and I arranged the systems in such a way that they go to the Freifunk uploader which unifies something from where but each location I offer if anyone's interested I would add another offloader by Freifunk which is capable of meshing and then position it in such a way that people who live close by can mesh with it so there is this offer on each location and the sad thing is nobody has asked for it there were other requests well requests we will come to that as well alright and then we're already reaching the lessons learned so this really really steep learning curve buying something that might not be able to be delivered so I'll skip all this you can probably imagine this already and let's go to what we really learned during the project number one is it's always about the people who are acting there on both sides and point two and three everything it is always about the people working there so to say it very clearly if the people in Freifunk in the Netherlands Andreas Stefan and what they're all called if they fall away then the association would probably also dwindle away and I would have to look for something else so the firmware is going to keep running for some more time but eventually it won't and at the time we chose it despite knowing this there is no serving level agreement I don't have a hotline there if I send an email to Andreas that he emails in real time that is due to Andreas being a wonderful person but if he doesn't want to do it or can't do it anymore at some point then I will start running into problems which is the reason why I have the infrastructure in such a way that we can still switch to a commercial provider in an emergency I don't want to do that but I need to have a fallback so we need an active association with active people taking care of things and so I'm very happy with Nyandafunk in this aspect because it works well there and I'm also glad to participate in their open tables even if it doesn't happen at the moment but these associations need stamina and they need to be competent and if this wanders away because people get older or they get children, they move away or whatever then these things can start to slide down because it's all voluntary and there is no... and nothing you can demand of them and this is something you have to be conscious of on the business side and I also learned which we will come to in lessons learned at the company but we learned what this means and the next thing I just mentioned is there is no service level agreement there is no service level agreement there is no 24-7 guarantee and this is something very important we have to communicate to our board and to our customers because if the system breaks then you can guarantee that it's going to happen on Friday afternoon when I don't have any time to pay a visit so those are the things I had to learn painfully inside the company it was even worse the things I had to learn so here as well it's always about the people who are acting and doing things and I assume if there aren't people like me who are doing it it still wouldn't exist so you need people who drive something and this is something I've learned in all areas of my life so far interestingly we had a lot of resistance along the staff so the people who take care of their customers locally in the form that there came these questions can anyone join this? can they watch U-Porn and so on and so forth and our answer was yes they can watch U-Porn yes anyone can log in there was sabotage through employees which you have to imagine that there are people there who think they know what's best for other people and then they think you have to sanction the internet access if someone didn't act well for instance which means that devices are unplugged and eventually tickets were opened and I went there and I noticed that the devices were unplugged and I was not amused but by now we have resolved this and discussed it but also just made some threats and resolved it this way I had in one case problems with residents close by so we have a setting where one of our institution is on the grounds of a youth home and I installed it in such a way that our Freifurg Offer also reached the signal reached the area outside where I thought the youth would also be interested in having internet and then eventually there were complaints because the kids always were hanging out in front of the house and so this was the exact text of the complaint and if it was my private installation I would have just kept it this way because in my opinion that's how it is but because it's a business installation and the colleagues locally had to have these fights I changed it so that the Freifurg Wi-Fi doesn't the signal doesn't reach that area anymore I'm still sad about that but I just did this on behalf of the colleagues so that I didn't continue this fight there's a lot of support effort there isn't a lot of support effort thanks to Andreas and others by using the right devices if you don't use device of a certain provider that I missed technically it's fairly simple what we are learning now that we've scaled up is that running this infrastructure with two people next to their normal tasks is difficult so we always have to drive out to the location which takes a while and I got an offer yesterday from some cloud provider the provider called The Cloud and we had a monthly difference of 8,000 euros and so that's really the employee equivalent of a full-time employee with their own car so if we are not including our working time we're still more profitable I have to take the clock all the time so what goes through the wires? we are quite stable somewhere around the 400 more or less there's a rather stable volume of course in the evenings there's more and on the weekends there's more and I have to say the offer is very well received we just have 40 of the houses supplied sorry so far and it's more demand than we can satisfy so the firmware is there the devices some of them I can't buy so I can't provide that and manpower we are also at our limit with Freifunk we then had an agreement that we don't just use it as a hotspot but also we are paying a point fee and many of the houses many of the people in the houses also became members of Freifunk then we also have and just to show it so it's not just using a hotspot so I also have to comment to say good things about them they created a firmware just for us that's also signed with SSH keys so I could do it remotely I could work with it remotely and that's really great and that's something that came by chance more or less because I just met them because of geography and because those people I met are very very good what I would like to do in the future and what was planned back then so we have these houses and we have housing office so there's all the seminar rooms community rooms and my idea back then was that we could use it for local networking as well ultimate volunteers people working in the houses and so on but that was a very naive idea that was before I knew the structures of Freifunk that's not about the ones we are working with in Neanderland but the other ones Kleber-Niederrhein at some places there is no Freifunk and there is just no one I could bring into our house and yeah we will another thing is to teach media competence to our customers because there is a risk that they do criminal things in the internet by accident just because they don't know for some time we had these talks in the evening what to take care of when you are on the internet but we just don't have time we want to build up the options for digital digitally taking part so with the cyberfeeble together and the pixel networks we want to bring that to the places and wherever there is active Freifunk people who are not necessarily in Neanderland so we can offer them that they can use our structures our rooms that we are willing to sponsor access points or access and yeah I would really like to not only take but also contribute this benefit I imagined it bigger naively at the beginning so the benefit of what I can give back and whenever I talk to people living in our houses that wherever we manage to do it people really like it and really soon they are also using smart TVs and so on especially during covid you have to imagine if one of these houses one of the 24 has covid then the whole house is under quarantine for 10 days so you can't go out anymore and if you just have a just a normal phone contract and you stream on YouTube that lasts for 3 days so they are very thankful for free internet offer and I think since 3 years we are productive with this and the quality of hardware and software also firmware is fantastic I have to say it so with professional devices what I see they die a lot more often and a lot quicker in my experience so you can notice that it is on the basics of hobbyists but it's very high quality both the recommendations and also the things they provide themselves so we are very happy our customers are very happy and what we can see the throughput, the bandwidth it's really in high demand so if something goes down we have our own monitoring of course but we get a call quite quickly as well and for us it usually means if we can't solve it remotely that we so we do have remote access so we can reboot things but sometimes we just have to go there 50 kilometers pull the plug sometimes just a cleaning lady unplugged it and forgot to plug it back in that happens and if we are there for other reasons anyway then okay so if we are there anywhere for other reasons where we don't have Freifunk but they know that we offer that they are friendly but they are intense in their demands to get it as well so in my experience after three years in production is that outside of Freifunk I couldn't have done this it would have been too expensive and I'm very very happy to have met those people I met I'm able to work with them and we have benefit we can give back and after COVID we can open up our houses as well who wants more information can write me an email or phone me on my work phone the number is on the screen if there are further questions or wants to know certain specific implementations or wants to help or for all of these points am I within my time? yes but there are also the options for questions let's start with the first question why exactly did you choose the Archer C7 because there are cheaper ones so the colleague of Andreas Dalfa recommended C7 to me and I'd google it a bit and the C7 has in this area I think I can get it for 50 euros at the moment it doesn't really matter to me because the important thing is it has to be put there and then can't go out anymore and then I'm ready to pay a bit more money for this and I don't have to pick the cheapest option and the R7 has a better equipment and the experience is that you can't break these things we've put those up we've turned them on and since then I haven't visited them anymore and that is there's a small price difference there's only 30 difference it doesn't really matter that much to me if it saves one trip back to the institution and it's already great so this was in the end a recommendation by Andreas Dalfa I looked a bit into it a bit more is it reserved by the does it have reserve capacity and we've been very happy with it the power is working well it doesn't have problems with power spikes or something we've hosted with some other models if we have them in the same room with other things then it's not always clearly decoupled we also had routers that just turned themselves off or something since we have the C7 that's not a problem anymore and we don't have to look into the electro techniques so that's why we use that one and because it's well available on the market another question if you would have to decide again would you choose Frankfurt again yes, definitely definitely so with both private one and also with a professional one even if I usually look into service level agreements and like to delegate things I would have chosen Freiburg Freiburg here again because it's scalable and I still hope to have these benefits when corona is over and it's a simple way to support civic engagement and it's great to see it works I'm still very happy when I look into the management I would do it again perfect, there are no further questions for the moment but I think you just had your contact info on screen if people are curious they can contact you directly thank you very much for the very informative talk after the stream you can also provide feedback give feedback to the speakers otherwise thank you very much and also thank you for your attention from the translation booth