Hi y'all,

So I've been out of touch for a little while. During my trip, I had a lot of time to clear my head and talk with people outside our little bubble in the Bay. Specifically, I had the good grace to meet with some of the folks working on TOmesh in Toronto. They had lots of great ideas and an interesting perspective on what it means to be a "mesh network project", I'm excited to get back to Oakland and try to share some of their thoughts.

Anyway, one idea from TOmesh I really liked, was the their mission to make all of their hardware, software, and code entirely ship-able. It's an idea that has bounced around our group a number of times under the nym, "mesh-in-a-box". For us, we are so far along, that we would have to completely rethink, or at least simplify, our project to make it fit in a box (quite literally). TOmesh has the benefit of being a younger project, but also they started, from my understanding, with different base assumptions. That is, they did not assume that everyone has access to (or knows how to use) git or can reach openwrt packages or fulfill docker's strange dependencies (an irony considering docker's raison d'etre). So they have assumed positions as educators, teaching the skills and concepts related to networking, privacy, and security with a limited focus on the real, physical implementation.

Then I saw the recent difficulties with building the firmware. This all got me thinking about the way we share knowledge and collaborator with one another. It has also has encouraged me to propose a project that has been mentioned countless times. I would like to try building a firmware building machine. I realize some of the group might see this as constructing big-bad centralized-server that controls all the firmware running on the mesh. However, I encourage you to read my proposed requirements or add your own to the issue or by responding to this email thread.

I've previously worked on similar projects (albeit in a Windows environment), and I think I'll have a good amount of time to work on it come November(post-disaster radio proposal). We'll be needing help with hardware selection, *nix sys admin knowledge, and content creation and documentation writing.

Key to this idea, is that it should not be seen as centralized solution to a decentralized problem, but rather a way of off-loading some of the knowledge currently centralized in a few individuals.

Hope everyone is doing well in the Bay, I look forward to getting back.

Thanks,

-grant_____(@paidforby)