[Mesh] Introduction & community outreach ideas

Hi everyone, I'm Rabbit. I'm a generalist hacker and digital artist without much mesh-specific experience. I can probably help build webapps and monitoring tools and I'd like to learn more about how to maintain and debug networks. The main thing I can offer is a social connection to the cooperative housing scene in Berkeley and North Oakland as early adopters for the mesh. There are 3 big organizations of houses, unfortunately segmented by age: students: the Berkeley Student Cooperative 30 year olds: Spaghetti Night older people: Berkeley Cohousing There are probably at least 50 houses in those groups combined. They would be excited about the mesh for political reasons because it's a non-hierarchical community project. When we're ready to start deploying nodes in that part of town I can get us in touch with them. (However, they're a more privileged group of people in general and I support prioritizing the mesh service & participation for people with less privilege.) Collectively owned businesses could also be friendly to this project and they could give us roof space and publicity / visibility. There's an umbrella organization of them in the Bay Area called NOBAWC -- here's a list of their members: http://nobawc.org/article.php?id=56 I added this all to the end of the Neighborhood Outreach spreadsheet. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao_Q7DQvNFT-dEdhZUJaQ3dDY2plMj… I'm personally excited about the mesh project because it's a way for us to increase our community power and independence by relying less on infrastructure owned by corporations we don't trust. And like Occupy and Couchsurfing, a big successful mesh project would help knit the city's human relationships together with trust and friendliness, and lots of positive things follow from that. Find me in Sudoroom's IRC channel or on Google Talk if you want to chat. I'll come to a Thursday mesh meeting one of these days, I swear. -Rabbit