The community/governance challenge!

[djkranic]

Posting as a follow-up to Follow-up from SalishMesh/SWBC experiences: How to deal with large, saturated, congested meshes?

How can we build community and governance in a space that’s fundamentally scattered and open?

Here in BC, @VA7MCZ’s below comment applies:

@VA7MCZ

So we have 2.5 user classes here on BC West Coast and a 3rd class in USA as part of Cascadia mesh.

Class1 - general users, until a few month back I’d say that was a large part of the net on this side of the border, people doing community stuff together for one reason or another

Class2 - Emcomm/Ham radio focus groups

2.5 - a mix of class 1 and 2

Class 3 - USA based, Large number of users and repeaters, lots of general users and lots of control level folks like Jade somewhere between Class1 and 2

The overall problem is heavy load from USA repeaters causing congestion and reduced capability on our side of the border. It’s a reason sometimes it takes 2 or 3 attempts to get a group or direct message to be successfully delivered, or be able to reliably access the admin or telemetry page for a remote repeater.

How can we create joint governance between the various separately administered meshes in a way that does encourage interoperability?

I personally see different meshes on different radio channels as inevitable to meshes picking up density.

How can we collectively create/maintain infrastructure that people become to depend on in the areas that we service?

How do we build community around that we’re not going to get in the way of each other or the wider community?

And especially in the context of resilient communications?

[anarcat]

I think there are different communities, with different ways of organizing.

In Montreal, there are already multiple groups: some are on Matrix, Discord, Facebook, Telegram, Mattermost, just like some are on Meshcore, Meshtastic or Reticulum, and here is a many-to-many relationship on those (although I’d be surprised to see much Reticulum activity on Facebook for some reason ;).

At first, I tried to federate everyone under the same umbrella.

But I don’t think it’s possible, nor is it desirable. We’re just different people, with different goals, locations and work ethics. Trying to join everyone in one big mob is bound to fail.

What we need to focus on are good communication channels, delegation, and documentation. I’m working on (re)building the Réseau Libre community here. We have our own way of organizing that’s aimed more at free software and open processes than others: e.g. we don’t like Discord or Facebook, and we publish everything we do on Git repositories, have meetings with minutes, meet in person and so on.

But that’s just us. We’re a small group and we don’t claim to represent even the whole Montreal area! What matters is that we’re friendly, we’re open, and we participate, cordially, with everyone involved, as much as we can.

I think having a more neutral space (like here!) with the lowest bar of entry (in this case, "a web browser that can register to a Discourse website, which typically means having a valid email address) goes a long way. But we can easily get lost in bikeshedding instead of actually trying to build consensus.

It’s truly ironic if our movements fail because we fail to build proper communication platforms when the whole purpose of Meshcore is to create communication systems.

But the trick is creating a medium is only part of the battle: a community doesn’t exist in a void, it needs to be architectured and thought of, just like a mesh.

And i think this place here is a great start for that.