Mesh

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SudoMesh Node.png

You can read about our progress on our blog. We're in an alpha testing phase, and our monitoring results can be seen on smokeping or cacti.

Check out the Join Us section below for opportunities to help out!

(Maxb December 22nd 2015)

We are an all-volunteer organization building the People's Open Network, a community-owned and operated non-profit internet infrastructure in Oakland.

People's Open Network is a mesh network based out of Oakland, California.

Imagine if the wifi router in your home connected to the wifi routers in your neighbour’s homes and they again connected to their neighbours to form a huge free wireless network spanning the city! That's exactly what a mesh network is, or at least what it can be. Roads and telephone poles are owned government or private interests and laying down cable is expensive but by using wireless signals that hop from building to building we can create a community owned and operated free-as-in-freedom alternative to corporate Internet Service Providers! Community wireless mesh networks are growing around the world, creating local 'internets' that support Net Neutrality and community control of critical infrastructure.

sudo mesh is a non-profit organization consisting of a group of unpaid volunteers who are building People's Open Network. Our mission in building the network is to connect our neighbors, support local businesses, and enable community collaboration and cultural production. In the event of disaster or censorship, a mesh network can be a resilient means of communication and sharing of information.

We are spending a lot of time developing software to make it cheap and easy for anyone to be part of People's Open Network, regardless of technical skill.

Mesh Oakland High Res.png

Join Us

  • Join the email list
  • Follow us on twitter and like us on facebook.
  • Learn more at our general meetings, which are the last Tuesdays of every month at sudo room at 7:30 pm. We have focus groups and we collaborate on different parts of the project - from design to software development, documentation to community outreach and of course, community outreach and climbing rooftops to mount nodes!
  • We have weekly meetings on Tuesdays and weekly hacknights' on Thursdays, 7:30-11:00pm at sudo room, but at these events we do not spend time introducing new people to the project. If you do not feel ready to jump right in and start contributing, please show up for our general meetings (mentioned above) where we specifically take time to intro new volunteers and answer questions :D
  • Chat with us on IRC: #peoplesopen.net (see also IRC Intro)
  • We generally collaborate on meeting notes at each meeting. Look at our archive of past meeting minutes!
  • Contribute to the network by installing a mesh node at your location using our handy Mesh Node Setup Walkthrough. This is especially helpful for those that are within range of an existing node (seen as a wireless SSID named "peoplesopen.net").

How to Help

We need more people on the network to improve the quality of the service. When you setup a node, you improve the service for everybody on the network and give more access to your community. We encourage participants to ask their communities to join their networks and create distributed services for them. We have a user guide to help you get on the network!

  • Check out our action items
  • Support us with a small weekly donation on gittip, here's how we spend it.
  • Send bitcoins to our wallet address: 12RxU4DpLpdWcmEBn7Tj325CCXBwt5i9Hc
  • Check out our wishlist, we have requests!
  • Come to our meetings in Oakland! (listed above)
  • Improve our documentation
  • Talk to your community about joining the mesh

Developers

We need hardware and software engineers to help us with our code. We have an overview of technical documentation that will be helpful in understanding the network.

If you want to immediately help, check out our code or look at our remaining issues for upcoming milestones.

Here are some of the projects that need attention:

Designers

We need artists and designers to make things look nice! We have design schemes we already use, but we're always looking to improve it. We need to improve our presentation content and diagrams too! We've been focused on these areas:

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

  • Challenges - What sort of challenges and problems do we face?
  • Decisions - What decisions have we made, and why?
  • Funding - How the heck do we fund this thing?
  • Legal - How do we use exit nodes, relays and legal structures to protect node owners and ourselves?
  • Hosting - How are we hosting and what does it cost?
  • Backup - How do we handle backups?
  • Server security - How do we ensure server security?

Logistics

  • Checkouts - Who took what gear home.
  • Inventory - Continually-updated inventory of our hardware and gear.
  • Marketing - Inspiration and links to marketing materials in progress.
  • Naming - What do we call ourselves? A lineage of bikeshedding.
  • Purchases - Details on our purchases, made by either individuals or through our crowdfunded money.
  • Taxes - Filed taxes for the sudo mesh non-profit

Research

We need help improving our documentation about the area and other legalities.

  • Legal - we are becoming a 501(c)3 and there are other legalities of wireless networks
  • Interviews - we interviewed other experienced meshers
  • Other documentation - books, articles, wikis, blog posts.
  • Oakland - information and resources pertaining to Oakland community organizations, wireless initiatives, policy and research initiatives
  • Municipal projects - examples of progressive uses of municipal networks.
  • Decentralized FM/AM radio - Bit of research on adding legal FM/AM transmitters to nodes.

Other Firmware and Networks

There are other meshes around the world that have inspired us to make our own network! They use software from these projects:

  • Mesh/Freifunk (germany) - the creators of batman-adv (routing protocol we use) and one of the longest-running mesh networks in the world.
  • Mesh/Commotion - a very well-documented project from the Open Technology Institute creating a simple-to-deploy mesh firmware and setup for small community meshes around the world.
  • Mesh/San Francisco Mesh projects in San Francisco

Web Resources

All Sudo Mesh Wiki Pages

Quick Links (see below for more details)
Documentation Technical Outreach Operations Research External Links
Install Instructions Overview FAQ Minutes User Research peoplesopen.net
Net Topology Hardware Blog To-Do's SF Bay Area network map
Presentations Power How to Help Legal Interviews code on github
History Security Wishlist Inventory Other Meshes DisasterRadio
Press Backup Website Meetings Software Tools BuildYourOwnInter.Net
Firmware Hosting Propaganda Funding Local Services
Mounting Decisions Self-Education
Next gen

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