Had a great time at the CryptoParty event yesterday. There were new and existing users of FreedomBox participating in the event. It was a diverse group with different perspectives.
Some of my observations:
- I found that etcher makes a big difference in ease of installation of FreedomBox on a single board computer.
- People might prefer to buy an officially endorsed device with all components included than gathering components and worrying about whether they will work together. The Pioneer edition is a great step forward in solving this. We should continue to always have an easy default option to procure a FreedomBox.
- The Pioneer edition device has a battery included but the router to which the FreedomBox is connected does not. Though this protects data from accidental corruption due to power surges, this does not ensure uptime. This can be solved by making a version of FreedomBox that can also act as a router. We can already plug in a USB dongle to the current FreedomBox but this is not as performant as a regular home router. (TODO: Any advantage in reachability if the FreedomBox is itself a router?)
@haidar There was an idea proposed yesterday that this Discourse forum can be used for regional FreedomBox user groups. I think we can create sub-categories for this under the Community category e.g. Community -> Berlin User Group