Meeting Minutes

September 24, 2019

We met at 212 Elm this week.

Attendance

• cure
• Rowan
• Stephen304

September 10, 2019

We met at the Democracy Center this week, explained our project to a new-comer, and talked through some new business.

Attendance

• Stephen304
• Lurker42o
• Keegan
• Steve -- first meeting
  • Found us after reading wired magazine profile of a brooklyn mesh

Old Business

• meetup handout and hempfest talk
• smileybone and Stephen304 worked on the builder -- might mean opkg for yggdrasil worked

New Business

• no mesh at hempfest -- maybe we don't even table
• opkg for yggdrasil is fucked -- we can't push forward with out of the box rpi image
• we nedd to finish the meetup handout
• set a date for coop 101
• set a date for Tufts presentation

Assorted Notes

explain our project Technical goals: we want... zero configuration, encrypted end to end, cost effective mesh network.

don't get taken advantage of... join the mesh!

meeting handout working sesh first and foremost we need something for AT the meetings - contact info - tinyurl to the meetup - is our location too finicky to put on the handout? - everything we do for the first meting with people

Our wiki needs work we should organize information by actor on our wiki info for.... activists, organizers, normies - maybe we re-vamp our "getting started" page -- we could link out from here - we need more non-technical pages - rename "recommended reading" to "suplemental information" - use the top section as the layman's area -- i.e. on the devices page, explain what it does, some basic info and link to the product page

lead generation and follow-up maybe replace "request an install" with something else? when we have someone new at meetings, we should get them to talk more first -- be more welcoming! we could have a tear-off section of our handout so that they can fill it out to stay in touch

August 13, 2019

We met at the Democracy Center this week, where we had many more guests than usual. This was a bit of a hectic meeting, so my notes are mainly personal. ([Lurker42o])

Attendance

• Stacey Cordeiro of BCCO(dot)coop -- First meeting
  • Not interested in regular meetings, but willing to help us with coop exploration/planning at special events.
• Nat Taylor (@ntaylor) -- First meeting
• James Graham of CommunityPhone(dot)org -- First meeting
  • Community Phone staff
• @NOVA???
• @cure
• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @Lurker42o

New Business

• After being in contact with Jamie, we were visited by Stacey Cordeiro of BCCO(dot)coop. She is very well versed in cooperative business development, and has offered to give us a Coops 101 class to help us get started thinking about incorporating. Stacey also provided some advice about how we might become a multi-stakeholder cooperative that is partially owned by both consumers and workers.
• Nat Taylor, who was in contact with the mailing list, was also present. We talked about possible ways to utilize a super-node in East Boston. In particular, we discussed the MLCS property at 31 Liverpool St, East Boston, MA 02128.
• We should really think about structuring our meetings with an agenda, and creating handouts. Let's act like a "legit" meetup. [@Stephen304]
• In order to prepare for our coop 101 course, is there anything that we should do? Maybe talking more about what our (core members) visions for the future of the project would be good. How much time are people willing to spend, etc.? [@cure]

Old Business

• Let's get an exit benchmark of the Yggdrasil speedup branch.
• Let's set up dates to talk about specific issues RE: Co-op formation.
  • Setting up a date for a coop 101 course for "core membership" counts as progress for this one.
  • How can we best use the resources that @softag has shared with us?
• All hands on deck for the August 31st field day in Leverett!

August 6, 2019

We met at Industry Lab this week, and spent the two hours in unstructured conversation about how the network works, what our plans are, and various strategic debates. We also spent some time getting a POC working on our new Raspberry Pi 4.

Attendance

• Marina - First meeting
• Dan - First meeting
  • @NOVA
• Keegan
• @cure
• @Stephen304
• @igel

New Business

• How should we bootstrap?
  • If we try to go to free, we may become unsustainable
• if we become eligible communications carrier and offer services to low-income people, we can get access to federal lifeline funds.
  • for-profit companies are getting these grants now, and delivering a very small amount of value with it. They also own the network when they're done building it.
• How to talk with people who want to "sell this as a service?"
  • Just bring them in and try to align our visions. They probably haven't even considered consumer cooperation, and we could use help doing "sales."
• The Raspberry Pi 4 is sweet. It runs OpenWRT and Yggdrasil really well, and even hands out ipv6 addresses. We did a POC.
• When rolling out Libre Mesh setups, we should keep in mind the upgrade to Yggdrasil.
  • Let's get a good benchmark of the speedup branch of Yggdrasil to see if we can start using it ASAP.

Old Business

• Let's set up dates to talk about specific issues RE: Co-op formation.
  • How can we best use the resources that @softag has shared with us?
• All hands on deck for the August 31st field day in Leverett!
• Progress w/r/t fiscal sponsorship is slow. More information to come.
  • It sounds like PWGD may not be able to accommodate us until they have a part time administrative employee. We may just want to explore incorporating on our own after all.

July 30, 2019

We met in @cure's office this week, and mainly hammered away at gateway configuration. There was some talk of in-mesh services as well.

Attendance

• @cure
• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @jokeefe
• @Lurker42o

Old Business (Next steps carried over from last meeting)

• Let's set up dates to talk about specific issues RE: Co-op formation.
• All hands on deck for the August 31st field day in Leverett!
• Progress w/r/t fiscal sponsorship is slow. More information to come.
  • Open Collective seems like a great platform, but may restrict our organizational options and/or introduce too many complexities to buying club formation.

New Business

• Have a "Yggdrasil services" hacking party?

July 23, 2019

We were in Diesel Cafe this week, as none of our consistent meeting places were available. The meeting began at 7:00, and lasted for two hours. During the first hour, we had an open forum about our organization's future. Notes from that portion of the meeting are below. We spent the remaining hour having break-out conversations and getting some testing done.

Attendance

• Chris -- first meeting
  • found through WOM green rainbow party
• Keegan
• Yeron
• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @jokeefe
• @Lurker42o

Co-op Discussion

• How do we define membership? is it workers, users, node providers, etc...
  • Who owns hardware?
  • Could be several levels of membership
  • Who decides what our direction is overall?
  • Liquid democracy
• What's in scope/out of scope for what the coop handles?
  • We need to provide technical support to interested consumer coop founders AND evangalize them too.
  • In-mesh services???
    • Distributed search engine???
    • Splash page bulletin board???
      • Concerns about spam
      • What about nazis?
    • We could defer this whole thing to people on the network, and not put anything at all on the splash page.
    • It's a bit weird to build in a bulletin board/directory service on the mesh nodes.
• How is value created by the coop shared?

Fiscal Sponsorship Discussion

• Who will be our legal firewall, if anyone?
  • How do we minimize our legal risk, personally?
    • Should talk about LLC or the like in order to limit our potential risk.
    • We need to make a lawyer friend.

Next Steps

• Let's set up dates to talk about specific issues RE: Co-op formation.
• These meetings ought to be in person.
• We should break out questions we have in itemized lists.
• We should also foster self-organization of our membership in some way. It would help if more people were involved in coordinating meetings.
• We should start recording more of our interactions, whether it's in photos, videos, or audio clips.
• All hands on deck for the August 31st field day in Leverett!

July 16, 2019

Attendance

There were 7 people present, two of whom were with us for the first time.

• @Stephen304
• @igel
• @Lurker42o
• Micky Metts of Agaric(dot)coop
• Anne
• Hailey -- First meeting
  • Foreign exchange student visiting for the summer. Found us through our website. Searched "internet freedom."
• Keegan -- First meeting
  • New to Boston. Javascript and Ruby developer. Heard about us through word of mouth.

Takeaways

• We have to identify neighborhood captains that will be willing to do things like coordinate meetings, stay in contact with dev team, and potentially handle billing? Basically, we need at least a few people who are willing to be more engaged than pay a membership fee.
• We need a better idea of what buy-in entails.
• Good financial and organizational integrity 'ought to be part of our value proposition.
• Our supply chain for this could be comprised of cooperatives, as is the case with Agaric(dot)coop. They contract an accounting coop for their books.
• OpenCollective(dot)com may be a good platform to utilize for even more radically transparent finances.
• We should connect with RoundSky(dot)coop about advice on becoming a successful cooperative.
• We should connect with People Who Give A Damn about fiscal sponsorship.
  • I already reached out to ben(at)agaric(dot)coop, and we're setting something up for this week. I'll share a URL and time when I get confirmation. :)