New America’s Open Technology Institute Releases Version 1.1 of the Commotion Networking Toolkit

Washington, DC — New America’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) announced today that it has publicly released the latest version of its groundbreaking community networking and infrastructure toolkit, Commotion. This version represents the culmination of a months-long effort to improve the stability and usability of Commotion as a platform for resilient and distributed networking.

Commotion 1.1 is an open-source toolkit that provides users with software and training materials to create decentralized mesh networks with common wireless devices so they can connect and share local services. A mesh network can function locally as an intranet, but when one device connects to the Internet, all users will have access to it as well. Commotion is freely available and can be installed on a variety of commonly available wifi routers.

“The focus of the Commotion project is on taking existing, open-source technology that is otherwise only accessible for engineers and make it approachable for the average user,” said Josh King, Lead Technologist at OTI and Commotion’s lead developer. “By making Commotion even easier to use, v1.1 builds on the success of our 1.0 release so that networks can be created by even more communities.”

Commotion v1.1’s features Include: - Reduced memory usage. - Better input validation and error checking. - Improved reliability of announcing applications on the local network. - Upgraded core software. - Updated and additional user documentation. - Official support for 3 new devices.

Commotion has been deployed by communities throughout the world, including in Dahanu, India; Sayada, Tunisia; Brooklyn, NY; Detroit, MI; and in Abaarso, Somaliland. For more information about Commotion, please visit: https://commotionwireless.net/about/