Networld was founded by Alex Oberhauser as meta project that provides the needed infrastructure for real projects. There were, and are, different types of ideas that were exploited and that have reached different stages of maturity.
Currently Networld is used as incubator project. The main reason for the branding with an unique name is to share the needed infrastructure and knowledge. Another advantage is the possibility to fall back to another project if the main project fails. This structure is a good foundation for knowledge transfer between the projects and keeps them organized.
This section includes only members that are directly involved in this meta-project. For team members of a single project consult the related project website.
Alex Oberhauser
Founder
Alex Oberhauser is the founder and currently the only member of Networld.
He initiated and pushed most of the projects.
For new projects the lightweight virtualization docker is used. The plan is to substitute all other virtualization mechanism that are in use and build a PaaS (Platform as a Service). This simplifies the fast prototyping and proof-of-concept development in the scope of Networld.
The projects are hosted on a Debian Xen server with a daily backup strategy to an external cloud storage. All other technologies are dependent on specific projects and are adapted over time. Currently for web development Ruby on Rails and for persistent storage MongoDB are used.
Additional to the public server, Networld runs a few local, private servers with different virtualization technologies, such as KVM and Xen. This servers with slow connection to the internet are used for testing and exploitation. It supports the development process and simulates a production environment.
Networld was not always an incubator project for software projects, previously
it was a BitTorrent Tracker with a lot of additional features. Additional to the
obligational IRC channel, Networld had an own IRC server, a moderated radio channel
with quiz shows from time to time and much more stuff.
After closing of the BitTorrent Tracker, Networld was used as platform for different software
projects. In the beginning the projects were more exploitation
work and quick hacks. The change from this small projects to more serious
development was started by the creation of the MokSec project (a security framework
for the OpenMoko platform) and was continued with the Crises Information
Platform Sigimera. Each subsequent project, was until now, more advanced as the previous
one. This underlines the success story of this meta-project.
