Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2020

Project OWL brings connectivity to the people, places, and things we care about most. Born out of the IBM Call for Code, a global hackathon focused on developing solutions that can help communities mitigate the impact of natural disasters, Project OWL has developed a hybrid hardware/software solution that can quickly bring online network infrastructure in a place that has lost it. The DuckLink is an IoT device running the “ClusterDuck Protocol” - an open source firmware that will be released as an official Linux foundation project this March. This protocol turns simple IoT devices into mesh network nodes that can be used as communications infrastructure when traditional networks go offline. This session focuses on three stages of open source IoT mesh network firmware development. First addressing the state of IoT and how a recent wave of cost effective devices enable scaled techniques in network connectivity. Second, we explore the development of an interoperable IoT firmware that aligns with the current state of hardware and programming techniques. And last we will discuss how to build a global open source community around these new technologies with eyes on the future.