If you are interested in learning more about autonomous communications and being a part of a larger decentralized network of community builders, or simply to get creative, or to go on mission-driven local adventures, you may be interested in receiving support from other interested and knowledgeable folks beginning an organized community Meshtastic project. If you don’t consider yourself particularly interested or savvy with technology – there are plenty of other reasons to be excited – creating whimsical enclosures for the hardware, helping your community, connecting with nature, solving exciting problems and responding to an uncertain world.
After some brainstorming between EcoGather organizers and participants, community organizers and scientists, we have decided to embark on a project of collaboratively creating a strategic radio-node mesh that has at least 2 purposes in Vermont (and beyond, non-Vermont folks are welcome too!) – to communicate without reliance on large centralized communication infrastructure, and to monitor and disseminate environmental changes. We would like to begin experimenting with using some strategically placed nodes to monitor stream levels to give us some resilience in predicting and communicating flooding around the state, as well as establishing more reliable and wide-spread regular communication. In this first iteration, the more people that have nodes and understand the basics of how to use them, the more functionality for communication there is for folks to innovate and communicate with one another. Beyond that, we need folks that are excited to go on reverse-scavenger hunts to identify and place key nodes to connect nodes in mesh – basically, hiking up mountains and climbing trees to stash transmitters so that more folks can communicate from further away.
If you are interested in learning more about Meshtastic, how Meshtastic integrates with other forms of communication, simply helping be a connector for communication in your community, mutual aid, disaster preparedness or citizen science, we are organizing an on-boarding session to help folks get their set-ups running and plugged in to a wider network.
To participate in this event, we advise watching our presentation on the basics of Meshtastic in advance and purchasing a basic set-up that works for your needs. In the session, our guides will walk you through getting up and running, as well as brainstorming next steps for getting creative about community resilience projects and other possible applications we might support each other in experimenting with and deploying.
If the cost of purchasing a basic set-up is prohibitive to participating, reach out to be considered for one of our limited stipends or free basic kit set-ups.
Recommended resources for this gathering: