CRANS is an association of students living in Cachan, France near Paris on the campus of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.
CRANS, which stands for Cachan Réseau @ Normale Sup', first aims at managing and providing a broadband connection to our network to the residents of the campus and, through it, to the Internet. It also aims at promoting free software.
With more than 800 members each year, CRANS tries to manage its network as well as possible. Each year, many new projects are proposed to its members. Recently, multicast TV and secure Wireless connection were carried out thanks to projects like VideoLan or OpenWrt/OpenBSD. In a complement to that deployment of new technologies, CRANS organizes each year at least one install-party {fr} in order to make people discover free software and let them switch their operating system.
CRANS also provides services to the rest of the world, like an official mirror of VideoLan, with the collaboration of VIA, another student association in France, or the MumuDvb {fr} project http://mumudvb.braice.net.
In addition to that, and for over three years, CRANS has tried to fund some projects important to our association. Hence, we have already funded projects like FSF, Debian, OpenWrt and OpenBSD.