Welcome to the Telekinesis project
Two users in the same local network who want to communicate and share files is a common scenario, even on a train it's easy to setup an ad-hoc wireless network but then one has to figure out a way of transmitting the desired information without too much hassle.
While there are many solutions to share one or more files, from setting up a Samba share, to a personal directory in a HTTP or FTP server, they have one big common flaw: they do not "just work". As a consequence people often use services relying on an external server (such as email and chat), or removable devices. In some cases it is not even reasonable to do server-based communication, as is the case of meshed networks.
An ideal system should automatically discover other users in the neighborhood, list them and let the user choose who to send files. The system should also work without any configuration, without the need to tell one's IP address, and without requiring any operation from the administrator, such as setting up a server or configuring a service.
The solution being worked on will make use of the technologies developed in the telepathy, avahi, telepathy-salut, and empathy projects: see TechnicalDetails for more information.
This project has been accepted for the Google Summer of Code and is the subject of our final dissertation with the Politecnico di Torino OpenSource Group.
Marco Barisione, sponsored by the Google SoC program, will work on telepathy-salut adding the needed file-transfer capabilities and with the empathy project to develop a graphical user interface well integrated with GNOME.
Emanuele Aina will work to add some security extensions to telepathy-salut that can be used by the upper layers and the he will investigate file synchronization and try to port the whole software stack used by the project to the Microsoft Windows platform.
We are planning to attend GUADEC 2007 so if you want to meet us just send an email! ;)
