Camp for Climate Action 2008 Extras

Things to do and ideas to explore

To Do / questions?

• look into audio blogging and maybe using it for the info line latest news feature

• research re-purposing asterisk voice mail as a way to do 'latest news' on info line

• see if there are better ways of doing text to speech or should we avoid it?

• can callers send texts to basterisk? and how would that be useful if possible?

• what use can we make of 'unlimited' texts? (something comms might find useful?)

• could we do a 'useful numbers request' text back service?

• phone based access to camp radio stream? is that stupid? (for listening maybe, but not the other way round)

• any way to make conference rooms more useful in our context? (by combing them with text message invites?)

• what can twitter do? can people set up unmoderated twitters?

• how can we asterisk call logging as a tool for dispatch? (using grep and pipes?)

• what can we do with skypephones, 4000 free minutes and skype to sip?

(send it out in the field for free access to blasterisk (via voxeo) for audio blogging/reports?) (use it as a roaming microphone/outdoor broadcast unit for the radio?)

General Ideas

• using twitter to announce important more detailed news on infoline

• twitter announced teleconferencing for working groups / affinity groups

• group voice mail for working groups / affinity groups

• audio blogs for individuals / affinity groups

• automated questionnaire for arrest reporting

• provide a call back service to legal support team / medics

info line specific ideas

• days news summary (different from latest news)

• todays workshops broken down into morning / afternoon

• next workshops and locations

• next meal - planned menus for each neighborhood

• site wish list (useful before people arrive perhaps)

• site job list (useful during the camp itself perhaps)

• audio press statements?

• reporting line guidelines / howto

• tide times and weather

Budget and spending

Total £975 (there must be something missing.... about another £200, what is it?)

Would be good if we under spend somewhere so I can reimburse myself for 3G antenna and other expenses.

The power related stuff was take out of the budget proposal and moved to the power groups budget.

£450 for internet provision

To cover mikes costs of getting the sat truck there, data tarrif etc

£150 for reporting lines telephony

£30 (to £60) - I've signed up for a Solo contract (1,400 minutes, unlimted texts), which has 30 days notice for cancellation so may end up having to pay two months.

£45 - Purchased two GSM Fixed Cellular Terminals (hope they are unlocked!) so that the cheap outgoing calls are available from the on site voip phones. Will need another cheap sim deal, perhaps the 02 simplicity for a bit of network diversity (add another 25 - 30 quid unless we can borrow a contract SIM off somebody).

£70 - On top of that there are two PAYG skypephones which, with a bit of offsite windows magic, I should be able to rig up as two concurrent incoming trunks providing free forwarding from blasterisk.

Total spent or expected to spend... £145 to £175 (depending on cancelling the solo contract)

£200 for media team phones

This was based on last years spending, credit, phones etc. Hopefully it will actually cost less and cover any over spend on the reporting lines budget.

£100 for media pool

This is to cover storage media for the photo and video pool. Looks like we will get two 500gb drives at £50 each.

£100 for sundries, blank cd/dvds etc

Doubt we will really need this much. If we exceed our data transfer caps we could take any additional PAYG 3G top up from this budget (it's a consumable).

Tech Notes

The Phone System

• Asterisk PBX box (Lloyd)
• Six IP phones (Lloyd)
• Two ATAs with FXO&FXS (Ben's Zoom plus one other, Lloyd?)
• Two TELULAR SX53e GSM gateways (Ben)
• Two WP-S1 Skypephones (Ben)

(be useful to calculate power consumption on this lot, aspecially the PBX box)

Offsite, the phone system will also make use of Blasterisk (in Colorado) and two always on windows boxes anywhere with broadband.

The Internet System

• Draytek 2910 VG dual WAN router with Wifi (Ben)
• Haewui E220 unlocked 3G modem with hi gain antenna (Ben)
• Satellite (Mike)
• Switch (BW? Mike? or Ben?)
• Server running squid, apache, LTSP (BW or Mike?)
• 8 thin clients for web suite (BW)
• 4 thin clients for other uses (BW)

Media Processing

• Three IBM Thinkpad X20 (Ben)