L TRAIN NOTWORK // A Pirate WiFi Network For Your Morning Commute
Nov 14, 2011
If you're riding the L Train between 8am and 10am any day this week, you might want to whip out your smartphone or another device with wifi capabilities. During those hours, if you're riding between Morgan Avenue and 8th Avenue, you'll be able to connect to the "L Train Notwork," a pirate wi-fi intranet that's being hosted by the creative collective WeMakeCoolSh.it.
The Notwork will include a variety of different features and content, including a live chat room/dating site, curated content from local authors, poets and visual artists, news feeds from popular websites and "a few other surprises."
3rd Ward writing teacher Robin Grearson and her fellow 1441 member Dolan Morgan will be curating poetry and prose by local writers, with new pieces appearing on the Notwork Monday through Friday.
"We like to encourage strangers to talk to each other and this seemed like a great way to do it," say the Matthew McGregor-Mento and Mark Krawczuk of WeMakeCoolSh.it. "When people ride the train during rush hour they are forced to be so close to each other but they rarely interact with each other. We wanted to give people something to talk about."
WeMakeCoolSh.it didn't get any special permission for the project, as they won't be breaking any rules. The battery-powered webserves used to create the Notwork's wi-fi hotspots will be carried onto the train and never left unattended, and everyone involved will have project descriptions to hand out to anyone who is curious. They will also be making all of the project's code available on the open source site Github so that others can experiment with their own pirate networks.
--John Ruscher
