Mesh/How to help
You want to help build a mesh network in the East Bay? Great! Here's how you can help:
Participate!
- Join us at our weekly meeting / hacknight.
- Join the Mailing List!
- Find us on IRC: #510pen on Freenode IRC
There's a lot of work ahead of us and most of it does not require any technical skills at all! Here are some examples:
- Getting more people involved and excited about a community mesh!
- Graphic design
- Printing/posting posters / fliers
- Events organizing!
- Mounting routers on buildings (it's easy! we'll teach you how!)
- Grant application writing
- Developing and designing web apps
- OpenWRT administration
- Mesh protocol wrangling
- Electronics repair
Host a node!
Want to have a mesh node on your house / apartment? We're constantly looking for more people to adopt nodes, especially in the San Antonio neighborhood of Oakland!
Hosting a node involves the following:
1. Letting us mount a router on your roof, or on the side of your house, or pointing out your window (they come in different sizes, but even the big ones are pretty small and unobtrusive) and run a single cable to your existing modem / access point / router.
2. Paying for the routers power usage. They use only 8 watts of power, which is less than 5.9 kilowatt-hours a month, which at an average bay area price of 22.8 cents each comes to about $1.35 a month.
3. Optionally paying for the router! $25 to $110 depending on distance to nearest other mesh node. If you buy a nice rooftop router then you'll get a better connection to the mesh!
4. Optionally letting the mesh use part of your internet connection when you're not using it (strongly encouraged!).
If you're interested in hosting a node then add your location to our mesh map! You can use a fake name if you like and your email address will only be visible to administrators.
Help our crowdfunding campaign!
Help us reach our $3,000 goal for our crowdfunding campaign, either by donating or by sending it out to your social network via facebook, twitter, email, etc.
Donate used hardware!
Do you have an old wifi access point or router lying around that you don't use? Donate it! You can leave it at sudo room at 22nd and Broadway in Oakland. It is almost always open in the evenings. Just put a note on the router saying that it's for the mesh group. If we can, we'll turn it into a mesh node, and if the hardware is not compatible we'll sell it on ebay and use the money to fund the organization!
If your access point or wifi router is listed on this page, then it's definitely compatible, and we can either turn it into a mesh node for you to run in your home or for a local cafe or community center.
Donate new hardware!
Buy us some high quality hardware from our wishlist! Let us know if you're ok with us thanking you on our donors page. If you don't specify otherwise then we'll keep your donation anonymous.