Overview: The Freifunk API provides a mechanism for collecting and sharing decentralized metadata from individual Freifunk communities with other users and applications. Metadata may include details such as the community's website address, RSS news feed, or the Freifunk firmware in use. The collected data enables the creation of applications like the overview map of Freifunk communities or news aggregators.
Usage: Each community makes its data available in a defined format at a location accessible to them (web space, wiki, web server) and registers in the directory. The directory maps community names to the URL of a file containing the community's metadata. The API is not a database for Freifunk nodes or a directory of firmware settings.
Operation: The GitHub project provides a component for entering relevant community metadata in a form and converting it into the required JSON format. A live version of this wizard is available at http://freifunk.net/api-generator/.
How to Contribute: New cities and Freifunk projects use the wizard to generate the required JSON file. Follow the instructions in the Freifunk.net blog for file creation. Upload the generated file to your project's web space and submit the URL here: https://github.com/freifunk/directory.api.freifunk.net.
Origin: The idea for the Freifunk API emerged during a meeting at the Wireless Community Weekend 2013 in Berlin, aiming to relaunch freifunk.net. Inspired by the Hackerspaces API, the goal was to present individual Freifunk communities effectively without centralizing data collection, providing an easy way for communities to update their own data.
License: The calendar icon is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and is part of Font Awesome by Dave Gandy (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome).