Project Byzantium

Project Byzantium is a rapidly deployable, improvisable mesh networking environment which people can use to communicate and collaborate during times when the telecommunication infrastructure is unavailable or has been compromised. Project Byzantium aims to help solve the Egypt Problem (telecommunications are unavailable or heavily filtered, as in the case of Egypt in January 2011) as well as the Katrina Problem (a natural disaster such as a hurricane or blizzard knocks out large portions of the infrastructure). Byzantium will implement a mesh network which requires minimal effort to configure which any wireless enabled device can make use of whether or not it is running mesh networking software. Byzantium mesh nodes will run F/OSS software that turns them into mesh routers which are also capable of making collaboration services available to users (including but not limited to microblogs, wikis, chat servers, media streaming servers, and gateways to the Internet in the event that not all connectivity is knocked out), along with the necessary support software to make use as fast and simple as possible (including DHCP, DNS, and service announcement and cateloging). Initially, Byzantium will be implemented as a live distribution of Linux; later, easily installable and mirrorable metapackages will be made available for a number of Linux distributions. Full documentation for setting up and configuring a Byzantium node will be freely published, as will step-by-step instructions for recommended improvised communications devices. Development sprints are held monthly at HacDC.