A review of our first weekly meeting

The meeting this past Sunday was short and concise. Sitting over some coffee, we went over some topics that we considered to be our priorities.

Building interest

Meshnets by definition require a community of people to work. For that reason, we all seemed to agree that most of our focus should be on reaching out to our fellow people here in NYC. Mere explanation and talk isn’t gonna get people excited, though; we need to show them that what we’re working towards is significant improvement over the current state of affairs. We thought of two main approaches to do this: providing internet access and getting various web services working.

Internet access

The clearest way to show that the meshnet is useful is to provide access to the Internet through the meshnet. This is a legally complex area, though, so research has to get done. Additionally, some complexities arise in terms of how this Internet access will be provided.

Web service alternatives

Another approach would be to provide working (and hopefully more useful) alternatives to services that exist on Internet. The main benefit of this would be that the services would not require any access to the Internet. This means it is completely free to use as long as you’re connected to the meshnet.

Several such services already exist on the network, including Gitboria (a Git repository), uppit.us (a reddit clone), and socialno.de (a Twitter clone).

It’s important to note that having services sit on the meshnet (as opposed to somewhere on the Internet) is the eventual goal of this project anyway. However, keep in mind that establishing useful and reliable services is a non-trivial task.

Future meetings

In order to keep ourselves productive, we’ve decided to have weekly meetings. We plan to have these meetings on Sunday afternoons. A post will be put up for each meeting with details, so keep an eye out!