[00:00.820 --> 00:09.460]  Yeah, so I'll be presenting our talk, Hacking is a Mindset, Not a Skillset, a Non-Technical Guide to Building Solidarity Infrastructures with Friends.
[00:10.180 --> 00:11.660]  Just a quick background.
[00:12.440 --> 00:13.820]  I am Moshfet.
[00:14.520 --> 00:22.080]  I'm a recovering PhD graduate who works primarily in and around community projects in Tucson, Arizona.
[00:23.040 --> 00:40.260]  You know, when you're up for actually touching a computer rather than grass, I enjoy playing with FPGAs and Yakto, Mesh Networking, as we'll explore in the talk here, movement security and broadly mobile and desktop bootchains.
[00:40.960 --> 00:46.940]  My co-presenter who can't be here today because of some medical stuff, Ayo.
[00:47.160 --> 00:52.220]  Ayo also helps build Tucson Mesh and organizes an autonomous tech camp called Deepmay.
[00:53.000 --> 01:03.440]  Ayo founded Cyborg Support, which is a workshop series dedicated to practical infosec skills for sex workers, movement workers, and those impacted by the surveillance state.
[01:03.900 --> 01:12.040]  And there are just many other folks, a part of all of our projects that, of course, couldn't be here today.
[01:14.220 --> 01:22.860]  But today, you know, you may have looked at the title and seen the word solidarity infrastructures and kind of thought to yourself, okay, solidarity infrastructures?
[01:23.020 --> 01:23.440]  What are those?
[01:25.040 --> 01:34.040]  And as we get into that, I think it would be worth giving some framing of what we're coming, how we're approaching this.
[01:34.860 --> 01:43.240]  And broadly, feel free to kind of shout out questions or things like that throughout the talk and I'll repeat them back for the audio.
[01:43.240 --> 01:47.140]  Otherwise, questions at the end are fine as well.
[01:48.480 --> 01:50.080]  So yeah, some framing.
[01:51.420 --> 02:00.920]  From sort of, at least mine and Ayo's point of view, many modern technical systems we're building tend to be pretty opaque.
[02:00.920 --> 02:07.040]  So the inner workings are quite inaccessible to end users and even many developers.
[02:08.480 --> 02:20.360]  Inflexible, you know, rigid to a diversity of wants and needs for all of the different kinds of users that might want to utilize them in their community organizations.
[02:21.400 --> 02:28.740]  Quite hegemonic, wherein they really want to funnel users towards a carefully crafted experience.
[02:28.920 --> 02:39.580]  And this experience is, in many cases, quite exploitative in the ways that it just looks to extract capitalistic value every single step along the way with that software.
[02:39.980 --> 02:48.900]  And throughout this whole process, you know, part of getting users to accept this is to essentially disempower them and restrict their agency on what they can do otherwise.
[02:49.660 --> 02:53.580]  And, you know, you might kind of see this list and go, well, we know this.
[02:53.720 --> 02:55.100]  We're all hackers, right?
[02:55.180 --> 03:00.340]  Our, like, ethos is, you know, fuck those limits.
[03:00.340 --> 03:01.620]  Let's find ways around them.
[03:01.720 --> 03:04.040]  Let's use systems for ways that they weren't designed for.
[03:04.720 --> 03:24.860]  Um, and it, it gets to, um, a point where maybe you, you feel very, very, um, nihilistic about technology and kind of on one far end, you know, maybe you go, okay, technology and community and movement spaces just isn't something that's going to work out.
[03:25.000 --> 03:34.120]  The, the only way to approach technology is to do like Clodo, the community for liquidation or subversion of computers or the original French title.
[03:34.420 --> 03:53.800]  They're, um, a group in the eighties that did things like, uh, fire rocket pelled, rocket propelled grenades at data centers and throw Molotov cocktails at, at data centers because they were so convinced that there's just no saving this, this system we're heading towards.
[03:53.800 --> 04:09.860]  Um, it's just by design going to lead to, um, uh, a bad time for any individuals and just mass exploitation and surveillance by the state.
[04:10.200 --> 04:14.800]  Um, there are some zines there that you can go to the short URLs for if you want to read more about them.
[04:15.360 --> 04:23.100]  Um, but I would like to kind of, in this talk, go through a little bit less of a pessimistic, pessimistic viewpoint.
[04:23.900 --> 04:40.500]  And I want to think, you know, a lot of, a lot of kind of hacker minded areas, it's maybe like a pretty solitary thing of like, I went off with myself or with kind of a small clique of like-minded hacker folks and did some cool thing.
[04:40.500 --> 04:56.740]  But with, with this, I want to think about what is a hacker mindset enable when it's applied to your full community, to all of the folks that live in and around your neighborhood that maybe don't care about technology or computers or something, but just want to live in a more liberated,
[04:56.920 --> 04:57.500]  freer world.
[04:58.340 --> 05:08.840]  Um, you know, how do we build technical systems that are built explicitly informed by the needs and the desires of the communities in which they're situated.
[05:09.300 --> 05:25.320]  Technical systems that empower people in those communities to work towards their broader goals of social change, social organizing, and collective liberation, that can organically expand, evolve, and decay within the rhythms of these communities' social ecologies.
[05:25.520 --> 05:31.160]  And no one to step back and be like, okay, techno-solutionism isn't the hammer for every nail.
[05:31.160 --> 05:33.560]  We need to take a different approach here.
[05:34.220 --> 05:52.580]  Um, and something that I think really ties this together is this, uh, description from the Mother Cyborg Detroit Community Technology Project, um, where instead of trying to fit our communities to existing technology, we need to reshape technology to fit our communities.
[05:52.900 --> 06:09.560]  It's not just about knowing how to use tech, which we're all very good at, but investigating, teaching, and learning about it, encouraging people to be entrepreneurs in our communities as well as consumers, breaking just the consumerist mindset around usage of computers,
[06:09.660 --> 06:13.680]  and building communications networks that match the social networks in our neighborhoods.
[06:14.780 --> 06:26.020]  And so, with kind of this framing in mind, um, I think there's a really broad discussion that can be had about the definition for solidarity infrastructures.
[06:26.320 --> 06:43.040]  But what I kind of have pieced together for this talk is that it involves a grassroots approach to building infrastructures where, you know, we're coming in from the ground level rather than top-down.
[06:43.160 --> 06:49.320]  It's guided by day-to-day societal and ecological concerns within our neighborhoods and communities.
[06:49.320 --> 06:57.860]  It's built to act in solidarity with its users, particularly under conditions of crisis, protest, and systemic inequality.
[06:58.420 --> 07:14.160]  And it's really, um, quite closely related to a number of different diverse, uh, areas of, um, intersectional movements and computing, like right to repair, data sovereignty, organic Internet movements.
[07:14.480 --> 07:23.340]  And so, some possibilities for what you might be able to term as solidarity infrastructures could include mesh networks and neighborhood intranets.
[07:23.460 --> 07:35.300]  It could include public hackerspaces, pirate radio stations, community science projects, maybe map-making and crowdsourcing of, you know, police movements at protests or tools to do that.
[07:35.300 --> 07:42.100]  Um, there's, there's really just a, a, a, a wide array of possibilities here.
[07:42.800 --> 08:02.700]  For the sake of this talk though, we're going to look kind of more deeply at a project that I've been quite involved with called Tucson Mesh, which as the name implies is a, a mesh Internet pro or a mesh networking project run out of Tucson, Arizona.
[08:03.640 --> 08:10.120]  Um, so it is a volunteer run collective that, yeah, we are looking to provide community run mesh networks in Tucson.
[08:10.120 --> 08:28.600]  And from day one has been built explicitly as an anti-capitalist project where all of the people building the project believe that these vital services should be held in commons and are best held in commons and should be distributed based on their ability to serve everyone,
[08:28.840 --> 08:30.180]  not the profit motive.
[08:31.260 --> 08:36.620]  Um, so some wonderful pictures of the beautiful Tucson mountains and some people on a roof.
[08:37.800 --> 08:44.620]  And some of the goals of Tucson mesh, uh, broadly are first and foremost, we want to provide network connectivity.
[08:44.620 --> 08:54.060]  That's, you know, what mesh networks do, but beyond that, we want to build educated users along with that process.
[08:54.300 --> 09:01.800]  Um, we want users in the network to feel empowered to take on ownership of this infrastructure that we're building community.
[09:02.480 --> 09:06.580]  Um, and we want to prioritize human connection.
[09:06.780 --> 09:13.820]  We want to break down barriers between being just someone's Internet provider and the users who depend on it.
[09:14.300 --> 09:39.740]  Um, and more, more than that, we want to inspire more communal infrastructure projects where, you know, people can go, oh, if this works for Internet, why can't we do this for, um, repair cafes, for auto repair, for any number of different, um, infrastructures that we all rely on that folks believe
[09:39.740 --> 09:40.680]  should be held communally.
[09:41.520 --> 09:45.460]  And so, who is Tucson mesh?
[09:46.080 --> 09:54.600]  Um, we have a number of different people from a number of very diverse backgrounds that make up the collective.
[09:54.600 --> 10:01.780]  So we're teachers, librarians, some IT professionals, some grad students, some environmental scientists and healthcare workers.
[10:02.240 --> 10:13.460]  Um, all of which, uh, or all of who play a key role in all of the day-to-day and week-to-week organizing of the project.
[10:13.460 --> 10:27.960]  And the project is not a business, it's not a charity, although it is fiscally sponsored by the Blackledge Community Collective, a very rad space that, if you're ever in Tucson, also hosts things like, uh, harm reduction projects, a t-shirt print shop, um, an anarchist library, just a variety of very cool things.
[10:33.940 --> 10:36.180]  Uh, so if you're ever in town, you should check it out.
[10:37.280 --> 10:39.600]  Now, you know, how does the mesh network work?
[10:39.600 --> 10:54.480]  This will be a quick overview, if only one, we're trying to keep this talk a little bit, um, lower level, or non-technical, and to, I'm, we're not the first ones to come up with this.
[10:55.120 --> 11:10.820]  Um, but how we do things is we are able to get, um, high capacity bandwidth directly from an Internet exchange point that is near where our main, um, edge of the network is.
[11:10.960 --> 11:19.060]  The bandwidth from that IXP is distributed through, uh, peer-to-peer, or point-to-point and point-to-multipoint rooftop antennas.
[11:19.780 --> 11:25.980]  Users' personal home routers then connect to a router on their roof that can mesh with the rest of the network.
[11:25.980 --> 11:40.660]  And then all of these routers together, um, are able to form a resilient mesh throughout the neighborhood, um, and throughout the city, uh, giving, you know, strong, resilient connections in the case of hardware failures.
[11:41.520 --> 11:49.940]  And so, you know, we weren't the first of this, the, you know, the, we can't be talking about mesh networks in New York without talking about NYC Mesh.
[11:50.160 --> 11:52.740]  Um, they're, uh, you know, really great project.
[11:53.000 --> 12:05.140]  And in many ways, the, the forerunner of what we've been able to do in Tucson, their documentation and config generators and such were really instrumental in spinning the project up in the first place.
[12:05.640 --> 12:13.400]  Um, but there's also just a number of other mesh efforts that have been going on, for really a number of years now.
[12:13.760 --> 12:25.000]  So there's, you know, in Detroit, there's a mesh networking project going on with the, um, uh, allied media conferences and things like that.
[12:25.120 --> 12:27.180]  There's Philly community wireless going on.
[12:27.520 --> 12:35.860]  And so I think one of the things that makes Tucson mesh special in the context of a lot of other efforts is the way that it started.
[12:36.440 --> 12:49.900]  Um, and so kind of getting into that, we need to, uh, pour one out for comrade COVID that, um, really gave a lot of the impetus to get this project rolling and off the ground.
[12:49.900 --> 13:00.660]  And the, the way this plays out is folks may remember that during COVID times, there were stimulus checks that came out, right?
[13:01.400 --> 13:10.860]  Um, one of the things that was going around on the Internet during that time, um, was this so-called 1400 challenge.
[13:11.440 --> 13:20.400]  And the core goal of this 1400 challenge is, look, we, we all just got these stimulus checks that are $1,400 each.
[13:20.600 --> 13:24.280]  You know, we can use this to go buy stuff on Amazon or whatever.
[13:24.280 --> 13:27.640]  We can go pay our bills or repair a car or whatever.
[13:27.640 --> 13:41.420]  Or what if we pull these infusions of cash together and build something more, um, revolutionary for our communities collectively.
[13:41.740 --> 13:45.140]  And so there are a number of different, you know, ideas that were going around.
[13:45.140 --> 13:52.100]  Um, there was building pallet houses for $1,400, building a pirate movie theater, mesh networks, decentralized nurseries.
[13:52.600 --> 14:13.820]  And a lot of these are really good in the sense that, you know, looking at the decentralized nursery, it's all of the instructions you would need and the costs for everything and, um, just trying to inspire people to think big with this, uh, opportunity that's kind of come into our communities.
[14:14.320 --> 14:16.520]  Or, you know, the pirate movie theater challenge.
[14:16.640 --> 14:21.100]  Oh yeah, get a projector, get some chairs, get a VPN subscription, pirate a bunch of movies.
[14:21.100 --> 14:24.620]  Um, you know, all, all of the secrets to success there.
[14:25.220 --> 14:31.780]  And so what some folks in Tucson did is they held a community stimulus project proposal night.
[14:32.300 --> 14:41.360]  Um, where a group of 10 friends, uh, I wasn't one of them, I wasn't in the project at the time, agreed to pool half of their stimulus checks.
[14:41.360 --> 14:48.840]  So $700 each and set it aside for some sort of community infrastructure community project.
[14:49.080 --> 14:51.540]  So that then gave a $7,000 budget.
[14:52.580 --> 15:08.980]  So someone proposed a community national network after being inspired at the allied media conference in Detroit, which, you know, we covered a few slides ago with a lot of the kind of motivating factors being, you know, this is a chance to be looking to build parallel infrastructure, to liberate a resource.
[15:10.380 --> 15:18.500]  We can be, you know, uh, giving the middle finger to all the monopolistic ISPs that are in and around Tucson and the rest of the country.
[15:18.500 --> 15:22.820]  Um, we can blow our own imaginations and those around us.
[15:23.040 --> 15:26.720]  Um, we can prove the tragedy of the commons wrong.
[15:27.160 --> 15:42.780]  Uh, we can, broadly speaking, use technology as an enabling force for community organizing and connection and push back against technological isolation that otherwise pervades so many different technology projects.
[15:42.780 --> 15:56.680]  It's, you know, we've all been on countless zoom meetings and countless just being incredibly physically isolated through technology and seeing this as the chance to actually flip that on its head a bit.
[15:56.920 --> 16:09.340]  And one thing that I think is really worth emphasizing here is that none of these 10 friends had any technical background in computing or mesh networking at all.
[16:09.340 --> 16:21.960]  They all just decided that this is a cool idea and they were going to figure out how to do it with the resources that they've been able to accumulate.
[16:22.560 --> 16:34.060]  And so the, the sort of way that this played out was, um, someone would become the shining star, our little shining star.
[16:34.060 --> 16:56.780]  They would all draw names from a hat and the winner or the, the person chosen as our little shining star was able to then get a stipend of $1,167 a month for six months to cover, um, to basically allow them freedom to dedicate 25 hours a week to getting this project off the ground.
[16:56.780 --> 17:01.360]  You know, knowing that none of them had any background, you know, knowing that none of them had any background in knowing how to do so.
[17:01.580 --> 17:10.000]  With the priorities of that person and the rest of the project all determined collectively by their remaining members and the, um, shining star.
[17:10.000 --> 17:30.220]  And sort of the key premise there was that the time, energy and initiative of people that have the means to commit, um, real work on the ground to, uh, cool projects like this is more valuable than the money itself could have been.
[17:30.860 --> 17:41.380]  And so, yeah, you know, you may, um, look at that and go, okay, it's cool that you're able to pay someone for six months, but that was your whole budget.
[17:41.680 --> 17:50.160]  How are you going to buy routers or actually, um, making like physically building the network, even if they figure out what's going on.
[17:50.160 --> 18:03.580]  Um, and there was just sort of a lot of, um, other grant money and things like that flowing around in this weird magical time.
[18:04.420 --> 18:17.540]  And there was a lot of, there was a lot of discussion of so-called mutual aid projects or, um, or related efforts throughout the pandemic.
[18:18.500 --> 18:40.500]  That, that, that caught on, that caught a lot of buzz, um, to the point that there were agencies in an, in Tucson that started actually giving out or accepting grant proposals from non-501c3 affiliated nonprofits, just direct mutual aid groups.
[18:40.500 --> 18:50.060]  So as long as they have something, someone that can sponsor and like hold the money in the bank account, um, there was just kind of money available for that.
[18:50.220 --> 19:09.540]  So literally through the, the community food bank of Southern Arizona, people were able to get $30,000, um, to kickstart the, the, the kind of bank account for all of the hardware related and bandwidth related costs.
[19:09.540 --> 19:11.340]  of this community mesh network.
[19:11.620 --> 19:29.820]  And just those two things together, getting the cash infusion from a remarkably unexpected source, in my opinion, and the ability to fund someone to put in the work of like figuring shit out, um, really enabled them to.
[19:29.820 --> 19:40.820]  to get this project going in a way that I don't know if it would have been able to outside of just, um, yeah, the, the times of COVID.
[19:41.820 --> 19:45.800]  And so that was in 2021 or so.
[19:45.960 --> 19:47.960]  The project has been going for a few years now.
[19:48.400 --> 19:52.720]  Um, we can kind of look at a quick status picture of how the mesh is looking.
[19:53.300 --> 19:58.300]  This map shows, um, let's see if I can get the, I wonder if I can do the pointer.
[20:02.100 --> 20:03.140]  Doesn't look like I can.
[20:03.520 --> 20:09.140]  Well, this map shows the, um, the current set of all of our installs.
[20:09.140 --> 20:15.140]  There's about, uh, 20 or so 20 to 30 nodes.
[20:15.320 --> 20:17.480]  There's a little bit of overlap in the dense areas.
[20:17.660 --> 20:26.480]  This black spot in the middle is where our main, um, three 120 degree sector routers are.
[20:26.480 --> 20:34.960]  And, you know, we'd be happy to chat about the, the, the more technical details of like what the network architecture and stuff of the mesh is.
[20:35.300 --> 20:40.960]  Um, but if you're familiar with any of the NYC mesh stuff, it's quite similar in nature.
[20:41.580 --> 20:44.660]  Um, and then all of the purple nodes are where we have active installs.
[20:45.580 --> 20:55.440]  Um, you'll notice that it's a somewhat limited radius that we'll kind of get into in a, in another minute when we're talking about maybe some lessons learned.
[20:56.720 --> 21:02.980]  Um, and then some of these purple dots down here or this one in particular is actually just a completely isolated node.
[21:03.100 --> 21:11.920]  This is just some cool folks that said, we want to share our current Cox, um, connection with folks that live in the park out near here.
[21:12.120 --> 21:15.780]  So that there's a, uh, a Wi-Fi hotspot for them to connect to.
[21:15.900 --> 21:17.100]  And we were like, yeah, we can do that.
[21:17.320 --> 21:21.240]  Um, and that was maybe the second install the mesh ever did.
[21:22.200 --> 21:24.320]  Um, and so.
[21:25.440 --> 21:39.600]  One of the big things that limits or that, that defines this red circle of essentially where we're able to reach at the moment is Tucson is a very geographically flat city.
[21:40.500 --> 21:43.360]  Um, almost all houses are single story.
[21:43.560 --> 21:45.560]  There's a few double, you know, two story houses.
[21:45.560 --> 21:50.060]  Um, the building we're on is, uh, a commercial space.
[21:50.240 --> 21:55.900]  That's maybe, um, tallest point is 25 to 30 feet.
[21:56.080 --> 22:01.360]  And then we're able to put, uh, a 25 foot telescoping mast on top of that.
[22:01.540 --> 22:09.040]  There's just only so far we can reach when we're dealing with wireless mesh technology that relies on line of sight.
[22:09.540 --> 22:14.040]  Um, because you just trees, other buildings, things just get in the way.
[22:14.460 --> 22:21.060]  And so we're always looking for, um, tall buildings, essentially.
[22:21.240 --> 22:24.880]  There's not that many in Tucson that are above maybe 10 stories high.
[22:24.880 --> 22:33.120]  But if we can get on, uh, a decent 20 story building or so, we could see a very significant part of the city.
[22:33.300 --> 22:38.540]  And so we've been in talks with a few different, um, a few different entities.
[22:38.840 --> 22:41.140]  The first being kind of right over here.
[22:41.440 --> 22:47.260]  There's a really large public housing, uh, uh, uh, building.
[22:47.260 --> 22:54.840]  That is a, is a converted hotel, um, about to go and undergo a huge number of renovations.
[22:55.500 --> 23:02.120]  And we've been in talks with them for about, you know, a year and a half, how, how bureaucracy goes, things like that.
[23:02.600 --> 23:12.140]  Um, on getting some equipment up on their roof, which if enabled would let us see for miles and miles and miles with this stuff.
[23:12.140 --> 23:15.880]  And then, also, just a little bit to the right here.
[23:16.160 --> 23:20.840]  Um, you can't probably read it from the screen, but that is the University of Arizona.
[23:21.100 --> 23:28.900]  So, the main college campus and really kind of like the center of, of Tucson.
[23:29.200 --> 23:30.880]  Very, very close to downtown Tucson.
[23:31.160 --> 23:35.140]  Very centrally located, sort of, for other projects in the area.
[23:37.000 --> 23:43.940]  Um, and they also have a number of tall buildings that if we can get on top of those, wow, we would be able to see for, for quite a ways.
[23:44.200 --> 23:49.960]  And so, with those kinds of things in mind, you know, we can be thinking about like, what does the future of the mesh look like?
[23:50.040 --> 24:01.560]  Are we going to be able to make the circle stretch out all the way from, this is the Interstate 10 running through town here, you know, out some huge number of miles?
[24:01.840 --> 24:02.680]  I, I hope so.
[24:02.800 --> 24:08.840]  I think we're, um, on the path, on the road there, you know, fingers crossed.
[24:09.640 --> 24:18.740]  Um, and if we're able to see something like this, we might even be able to cover all of the people that have submitted that are currently stuck in what we call purgatory.
[24:18.920 --> 24:21.300]  Because we don't know when we'll ever be able to reach you.
[24:21.620 --> 24:24.400]  And you just have to kind of wait and sit and figure it out.
[24:25.340 --> 24:30.320]  Um, but coming back to some of the challenges we've had as a project.
[24:30.320 --> 24:42.160]  Uh, we've mentioned geography that plays a really big role in, um, in our ability to distribute when we're dealing with radios that fundamentally need line of sight.
[24:42.700 --> 24:49.640]  Uh, there's bandwidth, I'd say in two different, um, two different meanings of the word.
[24:49.640 --> 24:51.420]  The first is literal physical bandwidth.
[24:51.800 --> 25:01.580]  Tucson just isn't as densely connected of a networking hub as larger cities like New York or LA.
[25:01.820 --> 25:10.880]  To the point that it's tougher to find people that have, um, nice high bandwidth connections.
[25:10.880 --> 25:18.780]  And it's even tougher to get them to give us it for free because we're cool and nice and, uh, running the cool community project.
[25:19.300 --> 25:36.420]  And then bandwidth in terms of availability of, um, other members to kind of reliably and continuously be, uh, putting work into making the project grow.
[25:36.420 --> 25:44.340]  Um, which just naturally kind of comes with, you know, the, you can't pay people to dedicate time to the project anymore.
[25:44.340 --> 25:57.360]  So then the project has to slow down a little bit and we're not going for endless kind of growth, uh, from a, from a, uh, capitalistic growth perspective.
[25:57.360 --> 26:02.540]  So it's just, it's just sort of accepting that projects like this can move at a different pace.
[26:02.540 --> 26:14.580]  And then third is sort of engagement, um, engagement of community members and living up to a lot of those, uh, those ideals that we kind of described before.
[26:14.840 --> 26:24.320]  Where you may have a lot of people that want to get on roofs and do installations or configure routers or do all those things.
[26:24.320 --> 26:33.140]  They may have IT backgrounds and be really excited about finding something to apply their knowledge to that has a community impact.
[26:33.460 --> 26:49.160]  Um, but if the radius that you can reach is sort of so small that the, um, availability of installs is once a month or, or so.
[26:49.160 --> 26:58.260]  It's, it's hard enough to, it's very hard to coordinate all the timing to make that happen and be like, oh, you reached out to us a month ago.
[26:58.500 --> 27:00.080]  Do you still want to come on a roof?
[27:00.220 --> 27:02.440]  We have one roof available for you now.
[27:03.340 --> 27:11.800]  Um, so I, I, I think all of these are just sort of broad problems with a lot of community projects and things like this.
[27:11.800 --> 27:19.680]  Um, but it's, it's all things that are still worth keeping in mind as legitimate challenges we've had along the way.
[27:19.900 --> 27:27.100]  And you'll probably face some, um, variant of if you look to do this yourself.
[27:28.320 --> 27:38.520]  Um, but I think with those in mind, there's still, there's still a really, really fun set of opportunities and ways that we can grow left to explore.
[27:38.520 --> 27:42.260]  You know, we can be looking beyond five gigahertz wireless.
[27:42.460 --> 28:03.860]  One of the big, um, areas that I'm personally very excited about is trying to see how could we tie open-source cellular systems like SRS-RAN into a project like the mesh and leverage software defined radius with open-source 4G LTE stacks or something.
[28:03.860 --> 28:14.420]  Uh, to, you know, we, we, we know technically that, that cellular has broader reach than, than these five gigahertz wireless systems.
[28:14.600 --> 28:28.240]  Or can we be doing long range links to solar powered battery backed up relay points in the mountains using, you know, 60 gigahertz air fiber links or something like that.
[28:28.240 --> 28:40.380]  Um, we can be exploring what can we do with this infrastructure once we've built it because it's not just, you know, a lot of people may connect to a mesh network and just want Internet access.
[28:40.380 --> 28:54.620]  But there's really a lot of untapped potential in, you now have a community owned resource that connects you with all of your neighbors.
[28:55.200 --> 29:04.420]  Like the people that physically live actually near you, not the rest of the, not just the rest of the world, you know, connecting to the rest of the world is almost trivially easy now.
[29:04.540 --> 29:05.820]  It doesn't, it lost its luster.
[29:06.500 --> 29:24.600]  Um, but there are just certain things that we can do when you say, oh, we, we actually, in addition to being able to connect to the rest of the world, can, uh, share files, share, uh, local knowledge, share things with the neighbors down my street.
[29:25.540 --> 29:35.860]  Um, and so a lot of key to that or a lot, a key aspect of that is we have set up infrastructure for kind of community hosted BPS services and, you know, maybe you don't want to do digital ocean.
[29:36.060 --> 29:39.240]  You don't want to do, um, you know, anything like that.
[29:39.420 --> 29:48.340]  You want to run something that you can go physically and look at the computer for and say, look, this is a service that provides things to me and my neighbors and that's it.
[29:48.340 --> 29:55.120]  Um, we can be putting on more technical classes and hack sessions than we've been able to do up till now.
[29:55.260 --> 30:02.300]  You know, we can, we've already been able to put on networking workshops and networking one-on-one kind of classes and things like that.
[30:02.380 --> 30:17.240]  But just, there's always room to grow there, um, in ways that I think are pretty exciting and broadly just adding fuel to our local makerspace and hackerspace scene, um, I think is a, is a great direction that things could be going.
[30:17.880 --> 30:23.560]  But broadly, I, I kind of want to leave, um, yeah, we'll be ending the talk a bit early.
[30:23.980 --> 30:33.820]  Um, but I want to leave things with a question of like, what can we build when we build for our neighbors rather than the whole world?
[30:33.820 --> 30:36.280]  We've kind of had this as a, a technical question.
[30:36.420 --> 30:59.300]  A few of the different people in Tucson are going like, what things can we build that uniquely exploit the, the feature, not limitation of being local to our neighborhood and being local to our ways of life, our ways of, um, organizing in our communities?
[30:59.300 --> 31:08.660]  What can we empower people in our communities to do and make and, and change in and around, uh, where we live?
[31:09.100 --> 31:22.740]  And so kind of getting to the, um, the, this talk was called a guide and I do hope that it is able to act that way in some manner, if only through example.
[31:23.560 --> 31:39.600]  Um, but I'd kind of like to also, yeah, throw some questions out here of what projects do you want to do with your friends, you know, beyond just mesh networking, you don't need to come away from this and go, oh, we, you have to build a mesh network to do solidarity infrastructures.
[31:39.600 --> 31:59.080]  No, the, the core tenets are just building, building infrastructure that can act in solidarity and is aligned with the goals of where your community wants to move towards collective, physical, and political change.
[31:59.080 --> 32:14.920]  And how can you work together with what you have, you know, like, if, if, if people can start a mesh network with no mesh networking experience, maybe you can start a biohacker project with no biohacking experience.
[32:14.920 --> 32:19.780]  Maybe you can do kind of a repair cafe when you don't know how to solder.
[32:20.120 --> 32:22.340]  Just these things can be done now.
[32:22.560 --> 32:37.900]  You don't need to wait for the technical expert or the, the person that has years and years of, um, you know, Ivy League technical training to, to make the changes you want to see now.
[32:37.900 --> 32:42.040]  Um, and yeah, I just kind of like to leave it there.
[32:42.220 --> 32:50.380]  If you want to, uh, reach out to me, I'm moshfed on the hope matrix or, uh, at rise up there.
[32:50.520 --> 32:59.180]  And then the, my co-presenter IO, um, is also on the hope matrix as well as, um, IO's cyborg support links.
[32:59.640 --> 33:07.540]  Um, but with that, uh, open the floor for, yeah, kind of any discussion and questions folks would like to have.
[33:14.600 --> 33:15.920]  Uh, thank you very much.
[33:16.060 --> 33:21.020]  Uh, this actually came in right after another, uh, talk that was on solar punk.
[33:21.400 --> 33:28.580]  And the conversation ended in an interesting place where it's like, how can we build locally?
[33:29.420 --> 33:35.840]  Well, I mean, it's not the exact question ended on, but like, what is a solar punk future look like?
[33:35.840 --> 33:44.280]  And one of these, the thing, the ideas that came up is, is a local, like local first infrastructure, at least that's how I imagine it.
[33:44.880 --> 33:51.880]  Um, and so I think that that's, um, I think the question is, um, the question you had asked three, three, four slides ago.
[33:51.960 --> 33:52.320]  What was it?
[33:52.480 --> 33:54.780]  It was, uh, yeah, yeah, there you go.
[33:55.040 --> 34:00.420]  It's, it's, it's building, it's building infrastructure that brings us closer to the people we actually live around.
[34:00.420 --> 34:02.760]  I think that's, uh, that's interesting.
[34:02.980 --> 34:08.340]  And then the, the whole, uh, buy and for, you know, buy us for us, right?
[34:08.800 --> 34:12.000]  Bring us closer to the resources we use on a day-to-day life.
[34:12.280 --> 34:19.520]  And, uh, well, I think that reduces chances of having those resources taken away or co-opted in a way.
[34:19.520 --> 34:27.060]  Um, so there's that, um, there, and, um, that's what prompts me to want to share a project I've been working on.
[34:27.080 --> 34:42.740]  And it's, it's, uh, uh, like a platform co-op, uh, which, uh, what, what, what that is, is essentially you take the, you take the features that you get from Google drive, Google forms, or any other platform.
[34:42.740 --> 34:52.520]  And you implement it yourself for your immediate community and a co-op model, that is to say, the users are also the owners.
[34:52.860 --> 34:58.420]  So that's one, one way, one model that's been experimented in different places around the world.
[34:58.420 --> 35:12.540]  And that's where I'm at experimenting with, uh, how we can, uh, really build infrastructure that aims to serve its users rather than its users being seen as some kind of a resource to be mined.
[35:12.540 --> 35:13.120]  All right.
[35:13.580 --> 35:15.960]  Um, so thank you very much for sharing.
[35:16.560 --> 35:18.400]  Um, I did have a question.
[35:18.520 --> 35:18.640]  Right.
[35:18.760 --> 35:19.540]  There's my question.
[35:20.040 --> 35:27.700]  Um, there, in your project, there seems to be in y'all's project, there seems to be a big component of popular education.
[35:28.340 --> 35:28.940]  Of what?
[35:29.100 --> 35:30.300]  Popular education in that.
[35:30.420 --> 35:32.620]  I mean, the fact that you're here, you're sharing this knowledge.
[35:32.820 --> 35:34.600]  I mean, this is time that you're taking, right.
[35:35.060 --> 35:37.140]  Uh, that you could be doing towards hacking something.
[35:37.320 --> 35:37.400]  Right.
[35:38.000 --> 35:40.200]  Um, what other ways.
[35:40.200 --> 35:43.680]  Do, do y'all do to share that knowledge?
[35:43.840 --> 35:47.860]  I saw workshops somewhere in there and what other ways, what are techniques approaches?
[35:48.900 --> 35:49.420]  Yeah.
[35:49.720 --> 36:01.720]  So I think, um, so some of the ways that we, we, we set a goal in our project of having one community, one completely open community event per month.
[36:01.720 --> 36:21.160]  And that can be a, a very open-ended ask that can be, um, you know, we've been able to put on in the past, actually over the course of one month, four week workshops in computer networking for, you know, anyone that just wants like, okay, here's the deep dive of like week one physical layer and,
[36:21.260 --> 36:23.740]  you know, Ethernet headers and stuff like that.
[36:23.740 --> 36:27.640]  That week two IP routing week three security week four.
[36:27.920 --> 36:33.040]  Oh, let's actually play with SDRs and talk about how data's physically encoded wirelessly.
[36:33.380 --> 36:36.620]  Like, um, modulation schemes, things like that.
[36:36.800 --> 36:38.740]  But beyond that, it can just be, oh.
[36:38.740 --> 36:41.780]  We are having a potluck.
[36:41.920 --> 36:50.680]  We are having a movie night where we watch a movie that someone put on the mesh infrastructure.
[36:51.200 --> 37:13.520]  We just want to keep community involvement at a level where people who are users on the mesh, even if they don't necessarily want to pick up a laptop and dig into router configs or whatever.
[37:13.520 --> 37:18.540]  It can just come and be in community with us and with each other.
[37:19.240 --> 37:28.220]  Or getting users... Sometimes the goal isn't even to get users to chat with us and they just want to use their network or whatever.
[37:28.580 --> 37:32.100]  Sometimes maybe the goal is to get them to meet their neighbors, right?
[37:32.400 --> 37:34.680]  And then they're like, oh, we both have mesh?
[37:34.880 --> 37:35.380]  Oh, okay.
[37:35.540 --> 37:40.220]  Well, if I'm ever having problems with my connection, do you want to help me troubleshoot it?
[37:40.720 --> 37:47.680]  Or, you know, because we're both on the mesh, we had never chatted before coming to one of these events or something.
[37:47.840 --> 37:51.320]  And now we just share recipes with each other or whatever.
[37:53.600 --> 37:56.600]  There's potential for projects like this.
[37:58.540 --> 38:06.900]  I guess like the infrastructure part of solidarity infrastructures, you know, infrastructure can kind of go two ways.
[38:06.900 --> 38:23.620]  You can have some people that really are like, like, like, I want to know how that infrastructure works and like have the on ramps to bring them into the project where they take on more of an ownership role in maintaining this resource for themselves and their neighbors.
[38:23.760 --> 38:32.480]  Or it could just be that the infrastructure in a lot of ways becomes invisible to people who don't really feel the need to know or care.
[38:33.340 --> 38:54.780]  So I think there's kind of paths for both of those things and trying to keep the door open to make sure that we're not losing sight of all of the non-technical people who just want to go to michaels.com or whatever.
[38:55.460 --> 39:04.480]  Um, which for a while didn't work on the mesh because of, uh, uh, some sort of, um, Akamai configuration on their end.
[39:04.580 --> 39:09.460]  I think they thought we were a data center IP because that's what our IP range looks like.
[39:09.580 --> 39:10.460]  And they were blocking us.
[39:13.280 --> 39:14.800]  Um, but yeah,
[39:18.420 --> 39:22.600]  uh, the question for the online stream is how does it perform in high winds?
[39:22.840 --> 39:24.940]  It does pretty well in high winds.
[39:24.960 --> 39:30.480]  We did have, um, one person's router blow over.
[39:30.780 --> 39:33.840]  Um, but that was, they installed it themselves.
[39:33.840 --> 39:36.820]  They're one of the core members of the project and it was early on.
[39:36.940 --> 39:38.340]  They only used three of four screws.
[39:38.480 --> 39:39.280]  They didn't use...
[39:39.280 --> 39:42.280]  We've, we've come a long ways since the beginning.
[39:43.440 --> 39:48.520]  Have you looked into finding a decommissioned antenna mass tower?
[39:49.140 --> 39:52.380]  Uh, the question is have we looked into finding a decommissioned antenna mass tower?
[39:52.620 --> 40:09.840]  Actually, right before I left town for a road trip a few weeks ago, someone that comes to one of our other regular community dinners, um, that we host in the same space that contains the mesh, said that they live on a property with a decommissioned ham tower of some kind.
[40:09.840 --> 40:14.820]  that when I get back, that's going to be one of the, one of the leads I'm following up on.
[40:15.200 --> 40:15.680]  Yeah.
[40:15.880 --> 40:19.120]  So I think building something like this in my own city would be really cool.
[40:19.500 --> 40:21.880]  I'm struggling with where to start.
[40:22.060 --> 40:30.620]  I'm lucky I live in a higher floor building, but my window points the opposite direction of my friends, which feels like the logical place to start.
[40:30.900 --> 40:39.100]  Uh, and I'm kind of at a loss of what to do other than start knocking on like, across the, the street apartments and being like, can I plug this into your router?
[40:40.500 --> 40:41.800]  That's a valid way to go.
[40:42.160 --> 40:51.860]  Um, it really can be, um, let's see.
[40:52.080 --> 40:55.600]  I, I think that's actually a pretty valid approach.
[40:55.820 --> 41:10.960]  Like the, this equipment, this, this equipment all scales very, very well to the point that, you know, all you need to do is put up a single, a single router and then get like one other person somewhere in range.
[41:11.100 --> 41:11.240]  Yeah.
[41:11.700 --> 41:17.160]  To also install that router and boom, you've got a mesh network and, you know, you can be doing things with that.
[41:17.940 --> 41:34.060]  Um, I don't know if I have other advice for that, but I, it, it is, I think one of the, the most interesting parts of the project is figuring out all of those kind of like geographic issues and remembering that infrastructure is physical, even when it's computers.
[41:34.660 --> 41:35.160]  Thank you.
[41:36.460 --> 41:38.180]  Um, I think, oh.
[41:41.300 --> 41:42.980]  You can connect them together first.
[41:43.220 --> 41:43.540]  Sure.
[41:44.000 --> 41:44.260]  Yeah.
[41:45.660 --> 41:51.440]  The comment was, uh, if it's plural friends, you could connect the friends together first and join in later.
[41:55.190 --> 42:05.410]  So when we talk about a network as a shared community resource, I can't, I can't, what comes to my mind is, uh, municipal Wi-Fi.
[42:05.850 --> 42:15.770]  Um, and there's been, you know, some effort in that direction, but also some sad stories of ISPs coming in to, to kill those projects.
[42:16.470 --> 42:20.990]  Uh, what, what do you, what do you think of make of, of municipal Wi-Fi projects?
[42:20.990 --> 42:26.850]  How do they compare with what you guys are doing and, what are the pros and cons of those two approaches?
[42:28.450 --> 42:47.970]  I think, um, the, the first thing that comes to mind with municipal Wi-Fi projects to me, is, there's sort of a, a distinction, you know, it might depend on the, the specific project, and this is speaking in generalities of course, but, um, I would assume that many community,
[42:48.490 --> 43:04.110]  or, municipal Wi-Fi projects, you still can't like, go to a, a monthly potluck, and kind of become buds with the people, that run it, and then kind of take on, ownership of, of running it yourself without, applying for a job or something, and, kind of,
[43:04.270 --> 43:18.570]  it, it leaves that, that barrier in place, in some ways, and, and I think more broadly, it's, it's, very rigid and formalized, just, in a way that makes it an easier target for ISPs.
[43:19.810 --> 43:39.710]  Because, like, we are, if you want to, install, bill, install some equipment for a mesh network, and like, connect some friends together, that's not, you don't need to form a, a corporation, you don't need to form a legal entity, of some kind, that can be like,
[43:39.890 --> 43:48.930]  targeted by, ISPs, as, being competitive in, some weird way or whatever, you don't even need to be, claiming to provide a service at all.
[43:49.410 --> 44:04.870]  It could just be like, yeah, where there's nothing illegal about, putting an antenna on my roof, and my friend's roof, and, you know, you might be, you might be violating terms of service of your, of your ISPs connection, if you're using them as the upstream,
[44:05.270 --> 44:12.870]  but, you know, people, have ways of, violating ISP terms of services, and, for other tasks too.
[44:18.240 --> 44:20.140]  First of all, this is a really cool talk.
[44:20.280 --> 44:22.240]  Thank you for, sharing all this.
[44:22.440 --> 44:23.640]  It was really inspiring.
[44:23.880 --> 44:30.480]  But, regarding what you just mentioned, about a legal entity, it's kind of, pertinent to my question.
[44:30.640 --> 44:35.780]  I'm wondering, you said that there's no non-profit, or anything like that, that you used to start this.
[44:36.420 --> 44:52.280]  If, like, the unfortunate, uh, circumstance were to occur, that somebody used the network, for something nefarious, or, some sort of like, bad actor, or, somebody trying to use it, to maybe paint the network, in a bad light, or something like that.
[44:52.440 --> 45:05.580]  Like, how, how do you protect yourself, from that, or protect the network, and the people using it, from, you know, just the, general, lawsuits, and laws, and all that stuff, you know?
[45:06.720 --> 45:22.820]  Yeah, I, this is a question, that comes up, pretty, comes up, and will, I think, continue to come up, throughout, a lot of our, um, meetings, discussing, kind of, of the project, organizational structure.
[45:23.180 --> 45:31.100]  Um, where we, kind of, end up, is, um, there's probably, no perfect answer.
[45:31.720 --> 45:57.860]  And, at a certain point, you, want, to, start, bringing in, or the, the hope being, if, if the mesh truly, is, based in, your, community, that you can, hopefully, pull from the work, of, other people, doing, really great work, in, community accountability,
[45:57.860 --> 46:26.460]  practices, and community, um, kind of, community oriented, justice, uh, processes, to, um, intervene, with, the person, who, is, behaving, unsocially, or, you know, with, within the rest, that you would hope is, someone's neighbor, or someone's parent,
[46:26.600 --> 46:31.060]  or someone's friend, or something, that can be dealt with, with more, um,
[46:34.220 --> 46:41.300]  care, than, just like a judicial, um, punitive, kind of, carceral system.
[46:41.300 --> 46:45.320]  and, so I, I think there's some room for bringing in practices like that.
[46:45.520 --> 46:58.740]  Now, there's still cases that the network is not, um, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and can still get pulled into, things, things like that, from, external, means, or external actors.
[46:59.440 --> 47:06.940]  Um, and, yeah, I think there's just no perfect answer, there, of, of, how to solve it.
[47:07.320 --> 47:23.460]  Um, other than, you know, maybe there are some points where you make a, a concession of like, okay, we'll form an LLC, so that members is, aren't, members aren't individually liable, if something were to happen, or, like, you take some measures like that,
[47:23.460 --> 47:26.320]  but, um, I'm not a lawyer.
[47:29.840 --> 47:33.500]  Uh, just real quickly, thank you so much for this talk, it's very inspiring.
[47:33.840 --> 47:39.320]  Um, as a pastor, uh, I think it'd be great to invite churches, or invite folks to church.
[47:39.680 --> 47:48.260]  Uh, many churches do have, uh, cafe, or kind of parlor-type areas, as well as, industrial kitchens, and we meet all the time.
[47:48.500 --> 47:50.720]  So, you know, get some of your geek friends.
[47:50.880 --> 47:56.800]  My dad, of course, raised me in the Irish Catholic, denomination, and now I'm Protestant.
[47:57.100 --> 48:05.940]  So, there are so many areas, that people who, are across denominations, and across political associations, can, can hop onto, alright?
[48:06.500 --> 48:06.900]  Thank you.
[48:07.220 --> 48:07.660]  Thank you.
[48:11.460 --> 48:28.540]  Um, this is somewhat answered, uh, when you talked about the previous, uh, when you gave the previous answer about, uh, liability stuff, but I was wondering if you, had any, like, details about, what tools you've had to use, to shield from liability, be that,
[48:28.540 --> 48:41.460]  like, the technical tools, that we might use at home, like a VPN, or something like that, or if you've had to, use legal tools, like for being LLC, what, what sort of, challenges like that, that you've, actually used tools to, build yourself from?
[48:41.460 --> 48:51.880]  Um, we, we, we tell people, broadly, in the network, use a VPN, if you're gonna torrent, whatever, that torrenting is.
[48:52.640 --> 49:20.800]  Um, and then we have, just some, hackily crafted, layer seven firewall rules, that, do attempt, to, block, um, just plain text, like, bit torrent traffic, at the, at the, um, egress point, of the network, it's, you know, unfortunate, it's like, uh, unfortunate,
[49:20.820 --> 49:37.900]  sort of, loss of, pure, and complete, net neutrality there, but, until we're, kind of, our own, autonomous system, like, our IP range isn't, under an ASN that we own, and, we want a good relationship with, um, the person, the group that's giving it to us.
[49:38.400 --> 49:41.380]  So, there's, sort of, our hands are tied there, at the moment.
[49:41.880 --> 49:56.860]  Um, beyond that, we actually haven't had, any instances, of, like, really, abhorrent, behavior, come up, to the point that it would need, kind of, community mediation practices, and things like that.
[49:57.480 --> 50:16.440]  Um, luckily, but we have, had a lot of discussions on, um, maybe, like, kind of circle processes, and different ways of community, and, um, reading works from other community, accountability projects, that, I can't remember the names of off the top of my head,
[50:16.780 --> 50:19.880]  but, kind of, in preparation for if that event were to happen.
[50:23.980 --> 50:25.300]  And then I think we're at time.
[50:25.960 --> 50:26.320]  Thank you.