Île Sans Fil or ISF, is a non-profit

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 community wireless network that provides free public wireless Internet access to mobile users in public spaces throughout the island of Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

, Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. They use open-source software

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 and inexpensive off-the-shelf Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...

 hardware to share broadband Internet connections. The organization works with cafés, restaurants, bars, stores, community organizations, and individuals to provide free Internet access in public spaces. As of April 2010, the network has over 140,000 registered users (1,000+ users daily) and over 212 live hotspots

Hotspot (Wi-Fi)

A hotspot is a site that offers Internet access over a wireless local area network through the use of a router connected to a link to an Internet service provider...

. The organization is headed by Laurent Maisonnave.

Île Sans Fil advocates creative use of the technology to bring people together and foster a sense of community. In pursuit of that goal, Île Sans Fil uses its hotspots to promote interaction between users, display new media art, and provide geographically and community-relevant information. The group is entirely volunteer-based. It depends on the goodwill of graphic artists

Graphic designer

A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...

, webmasters

Webmaster

A webmaster , also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites...

, GNU/Linux sysadmins and developers

Software developer

A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...

.

In addition to the deployment of these hotspots, a group of developers inside Île Sans Fil are leading the development of the captive portal

Captive portal

The captive portal technique forces an HTTP client on a network to see a special web page before using the Internet normally. A captive portal turns a Web browser into an authentication device. This is done by intercepting all packets, regardless of address or port, until the user opens a browser...

 suite WiFiDog

WiFiDog Captive Portal

WiFiDog is an open source embeddable captive portal solution used to build wireless hotspots.WiFiDog consists of two components: the gateway and the authentication server. WiFiDog was created and conceived of by the technical team of Île Sans Fil....

. This open source software was originally conceived for Île Sans Fil's internal use, but quickly gained international recognition. More than 30 community wireless networks outside Montreal are using the WifiDog solution: New York

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

, Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, Vancouver

Vancouver

Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...

, Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Quebec City

Quebec City

Quebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...

, Sherbrooke, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Brest

Brest, France

Brest is a city in the Finistère department in Brittany in northwestern France. Located in a sheltered position not far from the western tip of the Breton peninsula, and the western extremity of metropolitan France, Brest is an important harbour and the second French military port after Toulon...

 and Marseille

Marseille

Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...

.

WiFiDog

The WiFiDog project is an open source, embeddable

Embedded system

An embedded system is a computer system designed for specific control functions within a larger system. often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including hardware and mechanical parts. By contrast, a general-purpose computer, such as a personal...

 captive portal solution. It uses the physical limitations of wi-fi as an advantage to encourage hyper-local social interactions through location-based content and location-based services. Some of the content shown to users is in the form of location-specific images via Flickr

Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community that was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to...

. Users can send pictures to the portal pages of specific ISF hotspots by using the appropriate tag; WiFiDog will grab them via Flickr's API and present them on the portal page

Web portal

A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....

 to subsequent users. Another source of dynamic, interactive locative content is the use of any RSS

RSS

-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...

 feeds, from either the owner or other local sources.

The WiFiDog project was started by Île Sans Fil and is now in use by over 30 communities and businesses across four continents. It can also aggregate and present other content in addition to that from Flickr and RSS.

HAL

HAL is a new open source platform to distribute audio and video content to wi-fi network users. HAL assists Montrealers in discovering local artists and media producers by making their works available via wireless jukeboxes located at select Île Sans Fil hotspots. HAL provides high-speed streaming

Streaming media

Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...

 of video and audio together with location-relevant media.

Sonic Scene

Using the ISF hotspots in Montreal, Sonic Scene explores and creates personalized, mobile audio, video and textual experiences of the city. Working with artists Michelle Teran, Kate Armstrong

Kate Armstrong

Kate Armstrong is a Canadian artist, writer and curator with a history of projects focusing on experimental literary practices, networks and public space.-Biography:...

, Michelle Kasprzak, Alex Bell and Tobias C. Van Veen (Project Lead), Sonic Scene is an artistic intervention into both the physical and wireless city that aims to develop experiential, cultural content for public wireless reception. A fragmented artwork (sound, video, text) is distributed across a selection of ISF hotspots, encouraging the user to drift from hotspot to hotspot to experience the totality of the work. Each fragment is unique to its hotspot, developing a relation between wireless art and its physical space—one must travel to a certain hotspot to experience a particular fragment. Conversely, the casual user will encounter art on various ISF hotspots alongside information and Net access, thereby encouraging the creative use of wireless networks. This project is supported through partnership with the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN).

DigitalCities

As public space, digital networks offer new opportunities for public participation, dialogue and intervention. This project will create a network database

Database

A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...

 to support MDCN projects as well as conduct research with sensors in the urban environment. We will prototype a series of low-cost, task-specific wireless sensors capable of capturing and measuring urban stimuli by sending text, sound, and image over the internet to a newly established urban database, TRANS.ACT 1.3. The database will house a range of media objects contributed by users that can modified be in relation to the data collected by the sensors and used to trigger events in the database that will activate zones of public dialogue and exchange. This project is supported through partnership with the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN).

CitySpeak

CitySpeak is an investigation of how data acquired from an urban environment’s virtual networks can be used to investigate the same urban space’s physical environment. Using the Île Sans Fil hotspots in Montreal, CitySpeak will select several locations in the city that are rich nodes of both virtual and real-world traffic and sample the geo-encoded

Geocoding

Geocoding is the process of finding associated geographic coordinates from other geographic data, such as street addresses, or zip codes...

 data related to these particular locations. The dynamic qualities of the data will be processed using a database called Next Text to construct "texts" that interpret the data and to determine how the texts will be represented visually. The resulting stream of text will be layered back onto the locations using both very intimate (PDAs

Personal digital assistant

A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

) and very public (large-scale projections) technology. This project is supported through partnership with the Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN).

In-Site Montréal

In-Site Montréal is a collection of site-specific art presented on the portal pages of five wireless internet hotspots in the Île Sans Fil network. Artists Nicolas Fleming, Maria Legault, and Virginie Laganière have created artwork that can be viewed simply by logging in to the Île Sans Fil hotspots shown on the In-Site Montréal map. These playful works respond directly to the hotspots that they are situated in, so the users are treated to a creative and innovative viewpoint on the local environment they may not have expected. Curated by Michelle Kasprzak, a new media curator and Ile Sans Fil volunteer, this project is supported through partnership with Year Zero One.

Terminus1525.ca

Île Sans Fil, Wireless Toronto

Wireless Toronto

Wireless Toronto is a volunteer non-profit community wireless network in Toronto. Wireless Toronto began in 2005 and has been setting up no-cost public wireless Internet access around the Greater Toronto Area and exploring ways to use Wi-Fi technology to strengthen local community and...

 and ZAP Quebec users are being introduced to art by young Canadians when they use any of the 125 free public wireless hotspots operated by the three groups. terminus1525 is a project that provides free virtual studios to young Canadian artists. Using the terminus1525 studios, artists can network with each other whilst also promoting their work to the general public. By showcasing the work of the terminus1525 artists, Île Sans Fil is expanding their potential audience even further, and enhancing the knowledge of the latest trends in emergent art for its users.

Elections07 - Quebec

Election07 is a collaborative project of Île Sans Fil and ZAP Quebec with the goal of using the two groups' free wireless service to engage and inform their users about upcoming elections.

News items are automatically collected from all political parties

Political party

A political party is a political organization that typically seeks to influence government policy, usually by nominating their own candidates and trying to seat them in political office. Parties participate in electoral campaigns, educational outreach or protest actions...

 and automatically displayed on the portal pages of ISF and ZAP Quebec so as to be immediately and conveniently visible to all users. The news items are also collected and displayed at CivicSense in order to be accessible to non-wireless users.

CWIRP — Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project

The Community Wireless Infrastructure Research Project project brings together an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers and community and government partners to perform in-depth case studies of public/community-based ICT initiatives, in order to document and assess various models, best practices and benefits of public ICT infrastructure provision in Canada.

CRACIN — Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking

CRACIN brings together community informatics

Community informatics

Community informatics , also known as community networking, electronic community networking, community-based technologies or community technology refers to an emerging field of investigation and practice concerned with principles and norms related to information and communication technology with...

 researchers, community networking practitioners and government policy specialists from across Canada to document and assess the achievements of community-based ICT initiatives.

LabCMO — L'Université du Québec à Montréal

LabCMO is an academic partnership with L'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) created to explore, employ and investigate the many applications of computer-based communication to modern networks and society.