I had the pleasure to chat with Robin Chase last evening. Earlier in the day I snuck past security at the Connected Urban Development conference to meet her following her panel discussion on Connected and Sustainable Mobility. I felt like a KT Tunstall groupie slipping back stage after the show. Overtly, I wanted to understand her experience as a Facebook Platform developer, and see whether and how Sun could help her company, GoLoco, prosper. Covertly, I wanted to find out what she'd been up to with mesh networks since her TED Talk last March. We agreed to meet at the end of the day.
One of the first things I learned about Robin when we sat down at at Cafe de la Presse in San Francisco is that she is a connector within the mesh networks community. Despite her successes and notoriety with Zipcar and GoLoco, she has bigger fish to fry with Mesh Networks, and is working hard to build the (social) network to change personal transportation and the way we access the net.
She is making the case that mesh networks can help solve three major socioeconomic challenges. The first is encapsulated in one sentence from her TED Talk, "If we started today [replacing every car with a fuel efficient one,] ten years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%." Basically, she is saying that no amount of efficiency built on top of a combustion engine will reduce our carbon emissions quickly enough to avert disaster. The second is the deterioration of our transportation infrastructure at the hands of tax cuts and neglect at the federal level. The third is the lack of free and ubiquitous access to the Internet.
Her vision is an open source model for building decentralized, ad hoc, peer to peer networks by distributing simple mesh network transceivers in every car. Once these devices are sufficiently deployed they work as sensor networks to enable congestion pricing and road use pricing models, plus they will provide ubiquitous and free wireless Internet access.
Obviously, some engineering will need to be done in order for her vision to be realized, but she claims it's already well underway. Maybe Sun can help her in a more fundamental way than just scaling up her Facebook app efficiently. Afterall, Sun knows a little bit about Open Source models and has already delivered devices that can form sensor networks. I hope I can help bring another degree of connection to her network.
