DWeb Camp Meshnet: A model for bringing communities online
It has already been ten months since the inaugural DWeb Camp took place at the Mushroom Farm near Pescadero, California. Looking back, it’s clear how the event sparked new collaborations between groups and spawned local chapters in cities around the world. Our shared experience of working and camping together was a way to build trust and chart new collective initiatives.
This new website about DWeb Camp’s Meshnet documents how a group of enthusiastic people came together on that farm in California to build our own infrastructure of connectivity for a community of 450 people, and how this experiment may help other communities come online.
Why now? The COVID crisis has exposed the extreme fragility of global society. With so much communication, education, commerce and work now completely online, our social systems are failing many, especially the four billion people without Internet. It has never been more important to build locally resilient support systems for ourselves and each other. We hope this story and documentation of how to build a local meshnet will encourage actions of solidarity during these challenging, uncertain times.
If you have not heard of DWeb Camp, an earlier article by Frances Sawyer Remembering the First DWeb Camp, July 2019 provides an excellent recap and reflection. Many others have shared their personal reflections on this blog and other platforms as well. Here I focus on a particular component of DWeb Camp — the story of its participatory network, the Meshnet at DWeb Camp.
Many events run their own local and Internet-connected networks, so connectivity at a camp can hardly be called “experimental.” But our meshnet was a social experiment as much as it was technical. Our network operations team invited all DWeb Camp participants to learn, build, maintain and operate the network together. This goal of teaching and co-creation was more important than the network’s reliable operation.
What was paramount to us was creating a culture of shared learning to build technologies serving our own self-determined needs. During the event, the process of building infrastructure together reinforced human-to-human trust; it provided a glimpse of how humans can relate to technologies in a way that emphasizes participation over consumption. To accomplish this, we drew from community network practices, which itself has roots in community radio and other forms of community-owned infrastructure, all of which are value-aligned with our aspirations for a Decentralized Web.
So this is why we have published a new website, Meshnet 📡 DWeb Camp 2019, documenting the social, technical and operational design of the Meshnet at DWeb Camp.
On the website, you will find a large section dedicated to documenting the social experiment of running a community network at a four-day event maintained by an organically-expanding global group of Network Stewards. Hailing from Australia and Africa, North and South America, our team worked collaboratively—building, testing and tweaking connectivity for a community on several acres of farmland.
Everything about the design, build, and stewardship of the participatory network is now published on Meshnet 📡 DWeb Camp 2019. You will find hardware lists and configuration scripts, summaries of our social processes, graphical assets and teaching models, notes from our planning stages, details of our successes and struggles, capturing our culture of network learning and building at DWeb Camp 2019. The site describes the unique network design and documents the technical material you’ll need for instantiating a peer-to-peer-protocol-friendly mesh network made up of modularly assembled network nodes.
With this, we hope you will start experimenting, serving your own local communities needs and those beyond. We are happy to answer your questions. Contact us at dwebcamp@archive.org. And we want to thank DWeb Camp’s sponsors, whose support enabled us to create the human and technological systems underlying this Meshnet vision.
