Information without a price barrier is essential for the operation of a democratic society. Publicly-funded dailies are one remnant of old-world media that I fully back as solving (partially) this problem.

As we start to rely on the internet, in a non-centralized manner (see NowPublic's coverage of the Boxing Day tsunami as an example of grassroots citizen journalism), it's fairly obvious that newsprint isn't going to keep up with the pace of our world.

How do we address this problem? Enter the geek-cool minds around the Bryght space, and we have affordable (for businesses) mesh networking being made publicly available all over Gastown for consumers (for free).

The magical devices powering this overnight transformation are from a company called Meraki. The secret sauce is in how easy they are to deploy; plug them in (or run powered ethernet), and they deploy. It took literally a minute for Outcome3 to get setup. This means that coffee shops, bars, and convienence stores now have a way of deploying low cost wifi without requiring an IT department. Score!

As an aside, they have a really cool pay-as-you go option that lets businesses charge for wifi access. It's great to see a packaged service-on-device that gets the needs of small business.

Afterwards, the devices all ping home with usage stats, maps, and other cool tools that make observing this new network being formed fun.

The implications extend beyond free net access for all. While Tor is one solution to anonymous surfing, by leveraging cloud-connectivity we can bring anonymity back to the online space.

Glad we can be a part of this little experiment. Special thanks to Boris Mann and Kris Krug for publicizing all of this. HUGE thanks to Mike West for importing a bunch of the devices.