On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 3:32 PM, Max B <maxb.personal@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been putting this off for a while now, but I think it's important
that I finally come out and say this.

I'm no longer interested in a being a member or in any way involved with
sudomesh. This might surprise some folks, largely because so much of the
dysfunction in this group has been swept under the rug, but I don't want
to continue to participate in the facade of "everything is fine here and
we're building a community mesh network". I don't think it's fair to new
folks or to the community at large.

I'm sad to see you leave the organization. I hope that you will do what many open source projects do when unresolvable disagreements arise and fork() the project such that we can continue to share code and experience and stay inter-operable. Having multiple organizations supporting community networking in the local area while successfully co-existing and peering would be both interesting and beneficial for long-term sustainability. If you go this route I think it would be interesting to share the "brand" peoplesopen.net for the network with some kind of agreement in place for sharing the domain and website. I like how food not bombs have many chapters that are actually completely independent but have a shared name and mission that boost their signal, though it makes sense that each organization should also have their own independent name if operating in the same geographic region. In the end one of the goals of this project has always been to make it easy for anyone to replicate/fork what we've done and I hope that many more groups will use the work of this group and others as a base from which to launch new community networks across the globe.

The ownership and power structures of the organization are choking a
really good idea to death. At first I tried to cope with it, thinking
that it was better than nothing. Later I attempted to take action to
help correct it, but was met with a complete unwillingness. The work is
difficult enough. I no longer feel any need to compound it with the
interpersonal, power dynamics, and bureaucratic difficulties that
sudomesh is burdened with.

For my part I regret not engaging much earlier with conflicts and mediations in a more head-on fashion rather than letting tensions fester until it came down to an ultimatum. If this had happened then at least perhaps the fork (if indeed it is a fork) could have been established under more positive conditions.

As I'm currently the owner and maintainer of the sudomesh exit node, if
people are using a "peoplesopen.net" router and want to continue to do
so, they should speak with someone involved with sudomesh (probably
Juul) to coordinate ongoing functionality. I will continue to maintain
some infrastructure, mostly those nodes that I personally installed. I'm
happy to support folks who I personally met with and helped setup.

We are having issues with digital ocean anyway so I'll set up a new exit node (VPN) and will switch existing mesh nodes over to this new exit node. If I still have access to a peoplesopen.net router/node a week from today then I will issue an update that switches them to the new VPN. If a new organization is established that maintains its own exit node then it should be trivial for either of us to establish peering between them since we use no access control.

I do continue to care deeply about building community owned and operated
internet infrastructure. I'm happy to talk about my future plans with
folks as well as what I think went off the rails here. Obviously there
is a lot of work to be done in this domain and though I'm discouraged by
the situation here, I do think that we can move forwards in positive
directions. Feel free to reach out directly to me if you'd like to be a
part of that.

marc/juul