Ignite/KC2013

Hacking the Gigabit City
Mar. 22-24, 2013
Register here

Mozilla, in partnership with the National Science Foundation, KC Digital Drive and the Kauffman Foundation would like to invite you to "Hacking the Gigabit City" on March 22-24 in the Google Fiber Space in Kansas City.

Gigabit networks might just be to the 21st century what railroads, electricity, highways and telephones were to the 20th. That future is here in Kansas City, home of broadband and barbecue. Following previous events in San Francisco and Chattanooga, we invite you to Kansas City to come hack the gig.

At "Hacking the Gigabit City", we'll dream, build and hack together on innovative apps that can make a difference in people's lives. Join us for a weekend of authentic BBQ, talented people and a unique opportunity to hack on Kansas City's 1 gigabit-per-second Google Fiber network.

Teams are forming and projects created here could grow into submissions to the Mozilla Ignite Challenge with $250,000 of seed money, mentorship and other resources to help get off the ground.

Apply now for a travel scholarship or simply register for the event. And please tell your talented friends.

This wiki is intended primarily as a place for team formation and idea sharing among teams planning to come to "Hacking the Gigabit City".

App idea / team formation discussion call
Conference Number: 650-903-0800 x92 conf 7614
Toll-free: 800-707-2533 then password 369 conf 7614
Wed., Feb. 13 @ Noon Central
Wed., Feb. 20 @ Noon Central
Wed., Feb. 27 @ Noon Central
Wed., Mar. 6 @ Noon Central
Wed., Mar. 13 @ Noon Central
Wed., Mar. 20 @ Noon Central

For the calls themselves, please use this etherpad to take notes:

HackingTheGigabitCity etherpad

It's a little easier for real-time communication and we will migrate it to the wiki after the meeting:

Apps and App Teams Forming for Hacking the Gigabit City

We're interested in demonstrating innovation in education, workforce training, healthcare, and other public benefit areas. We'll be prototyping using client-side open web technologies (HTML5, WebGL, WebRTC) and a local private cloud. The types of applications we're talking about include:

applications that require high bandwidth (100Mbps to 1Gbps)
applications using huge data sets
applications that take advantage of layer 2 programmability/software defined networking
demonstrations of the above running point-to-point with local anchor institutions (over community fiber or wireless)

Team projects

Here are 3 example team projects from the notes leading up to the Hackanooga 2012 event. This is just to give the KC teams an idea of how to use this wiki and the etherpad. NOTE: Start off adding to the etherpad if that's easier.

Team idea 1: High-Quality Open Source Web Conferencing=

WHO: Fred Dixon (ffdixon .at. bigbluebutton .dot. org), Calvin Walton, Ryan Seys

WHAT: Four hacks on BigBlueButton to leverage high speed networks and HTML5 clients.

====Special experimental Firefox builds for WebRTC==== You can get the "Alder" builds of Firefox nightly, which are those that include the bleeding edge code for WebRTC, from the [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-builds/ Tinderbox downloads directory on ftp.mozilla.org]. These are roughly hourly test builds and are not necessarily stable, so you may have to hunt around for one that works for you. Be sure to get one of the builds that start with "alder-". The others are used for testing other experiments.

Note: For all the following hacks, we want to run BigBlueButton on the Chattanooga's network. We need servers running [http://releases.ubuntu.com/lucid/ Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit].

Hack #1: Standalone HD Video Chat application -- Modify BigBlueButton so it starts up with Video Doc as the main screen. Create a Rails application that lets anyone setup and join an on-line session. Modify the record and playback scripts to create a HD video file showing a checkerboard pattern of all webcams. We should be able to get 16 simultaneous users doing video using BigBlueButton. [Fred Dixon]

NEEDS: Web designers for the rails application. We'll also need a physical server on the Gig network to install BigBlueButton.

Hack #2: Integrated HTML5 client -- We've already created a prototype HTML5 client for BigBlueButton, but it's currently separate from BigBlueButton. We'll be hacking this weekend on the integration, with the goal of demonstrating an HTML5 client joining a live BigBlueButton session by the end of the weekend. [Ryan Seys].

NEEDS: UI designers for mocking up HTML5 interface for web conferencing. We have some initial designs, but it would be great to brainstorm on how to layout the controls.

Hack #3: Output recording to Popcorn Maker -- We already use popcorn.js for playback. Working with David Seifried (popcorn developer), create scripts to export a subset of the BigBlueButton recording (video + slides) into Popcorn Maker for enabling students to create mashups with other web content. [David Siefried]

NEEDS: Ruby skills for extracting and converting the XML data from events.xml into JSON format for integration with Popcorn Maker.

Hack #4: Broadcast audio to HTML5 client -- BigBlueButton uses FreeSWITCH which already integrates with Icecast. Recently, Icecast added support for WebM. This hack will be to extract a live audio stream from FreeSWITCH and broadcast it to the HTML5 client. This will extend Hack #2. [Calvin Walton]

NEEDS: Experience with Icecast and WebM.

Team Idea 2: 3D videoconferencing

WHO: Andor Salga and Bill Brock
WHAT: 3D telepresence/videoconferencing using Kinect sensors for capture.
NEEDS: WebGL wizard

Discussion: Why not just use Kinect with Zigfu and either 3.js or Unity? (WebGL would likely make this impossible to complete within the hackathon period.)

===Team Idea 3: Chattanooga Public Library===

WHO: Nate Hill, Chattanooga Public Library
WHAT: Imagine an immersive, interactive information environment where a map of the city of Chattanooga is projected onto the floor. Looking and walking around the map, you orient yourself. First you find the street you live on and step over to it. You tap your foot twice and zoom in. Cool! You scuff your foot to the left and zoom back out. Next you find the location of the art museum and the piece of public sculpture you love. You tap your foot once on an icon, and another projector lights up the wall with information about this piece of sculpture. A life size photograph of a Tom Otterness bronze is displayed, along with biographical information about the artist and suggestions of other similar works nearby or in other cities. Links to resources about Otterness, bronze casting, and public art from the library catalog and across the internet are displayed as well. The Otterness sculpture is actually a part of a larger exhibition, a tour of public art in Chattanooga. When you discover this, you tap again and all of the other items on this tour light up on the floor around you.
This is a proposal to create an interactive digital map of the city of Chattanooga that would be projected on the concrete floor of the fourth floor space in the Chattanooga Public Library. The map would make use of projection mapping technology, gig-speed wireless connectivity, Esri GIS data, and Open Street Maps to create an inverted augmented reality space. This map would be an exhibition space, an urban planning tool, and an educational asset for Chattanooga. In addition, the map could link to other gig-speed communities featuring similar compatible geographic interfaces and exhibitions.
NEEDS: Development help. I'm rallying some folks from the Chattanooga area, but expertise hacking this together would be fantastic.

Discussion: It's cool and feasible, but not sure how this utilizes a Gigabit network. (Yosun 21:01, 24 August 2012 (PDT))

@Yosun I was trying to tell the story of an inspiring, immersive geographic interface, knowing that it's one implementation of something that could be much bigger. If you simply wanted to make this interface leverage the gig, you'd have location based videoconferencing. I step on a point that has an active user, *blip*, I open a live channel with that user. Done. Hopefully, this is an idea that I hope has hooks, an idea that is extensible. If you had an immersive location based tool like this, what would you make it do?

Video-conferencing alone is feasible already on non-gigabit networks. VIdeo-conferencing with many many users simultaneously could use a gigabit network, but then, there would be too much cross-talk in the lag, for regular-connectivity users. It seems a "walking-based" interface would rely on a much too expensive setup for precision -- Kinect doesn't do well for precision, so you would end up needing an array of mounted IR detectors (6 digits). What about a touch-screen interface (Yosun 18:47, 2 September 2012 (PDT))

===Team Idea 4: High performance distributed research

computing (for science, business, etc)=== WHO: Proposed by Roger Pincombe (OkGoDoIt), but very open for suggestions and discussion

WHAT: Projects like Folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu), Seti@Home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) and LHC@Home (http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/LHCathome/) enable researchers to harness spare computing power to do insane amounts of distributed number crunching. There are even commercial efforts like CPUsage (http://cpusage.com/) and Plura Processing (http://www.pluraprocessing.com/). One of issues with massively distributed computing is that the network overhead limits the types of tasks that can be effectively distributed: tasks that are easily broken into separate chunks that can be worked on independently. The software clients download a data set, process it, and then upload results.

With the power of gigabit internet, massively distributed computing could be applied to a much wider set of scenarios. Perhaps systems that require constant communication among the workers or where data sets cannot be broken into reasonably small sizes for computation. I'm no expert in distributed computing and I don't have a specific idea yet, but this is an area I think will be hugely empowered by the rise of superfast internet. I encourage us all to discuss possible scenarios where this could be applied, or even methods to allow arbitrary computation (like less expensive AWS EC2 spot instances for data processing) without compromising the security of the end user. Maybe even client software that can run on smartphones (at night, when charging and connected to home wifi). Millions of surprisingly powerful smartphones are idle for a large portion of the night. With "big data" being the buzzword that it currently is, I imagine there is a lot of potential here.

I can add some specific ideas here soon, but I wanted to get the discussion started and see what you all think.

NEEDS: This is less of an idea and more of a starting point for idea discussion. It would be great if people more familiar with distributed computing and "big data" can add their thoughts.

DISCUSSION: (your thoughts here...)

Team 5: New Opportunity for Community-Based Public Media-casting

Partner with other nonprofits/businesses. · Enter into “content sharing” arrangements with partners in addition to the sharing of other resources. · Assume a leadership position to develop a Community Media Center. Leverage deep digital library and high quality production assets. · Share/rent its content production capability with other nonprofits/businesses and New Media ventures that need multimedia support. · Develop new revenue streams based on marketing this community resource. More deeply engage social media platforms. Develop a mobile App that functions as a “content aggregator” for local content produced not only by WTCI but others. NEEDS: Seriously talented coder(s). We have an active volunteer board and professional staff eager to support this effort in a wide variety of ways.