Question: I am new to the community, where do I start?

yala is asking a question about general
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by yala | May 02, 2018 20:53 | #16283


Best Public Lab community,

I have been loosely following their activities within the last decade and just sign up to this community space.

Coming from a site-reliability engineering perspective with ecobytes.net and allmende.io, we have since produced software artefacts with wiki.libre.sh, transformap.co and further commons-producing groups.

Now we want to get involved with hardware hacking, learning more about mesh networking wherever it may be suitable.

Can you help, do you know of anything fancy that one could deploy in a small size town of ~ 15.000 inhabitants, distributed across several villages in different valleys. In this area mostly ecological agriculture is practiced and its vibrating dynamics conglomerate in community-supported agriculture, two food coops, a transition town house, several farms and an in-depth network of informal relations and mouth to mouth exchanges. People often despise technology for what it stands for, and retract from investing too much attention too it. Therefore the machinery of attention economy wins and people spend a lot of time with using proprietary messaging systems, and, more autonomously, e-mail.

How could one imagine a scenario where little environmental monitoring and presentation in a virtual learning environment about the region could help increase the public recognition for alternative reproductive systems?

Thanks in advance if you've seen some site like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q564827 before, and may it only be hypothetically \o/

Jon




1 Comments

Hi @yala, nice to meet you!

I know there have been plenty of folks working on different projects relating to mesh networking (especially as they relate to decentralized data)-- you can find some links to some things that touch on aspects of mesh networking here: https://publiclab.org/search/mesh . We also partner with EDGI, which is an organization involved with decentralizing and archiving environmental data.

Additionally, there are plenty of people in and around Public Lab also have a lot of experience working in spaces like those you've described. I personally know more about use of mesh networks in underserved urban neigborhoods-- for example, the Detroit Digital Community Network , the Red Hook Initiative and The Point -- all organizations that partner with youth in underserved neighborhoods to set up and maintain mesh networks for use by the community.

That said, this is a great (and nuanced!) question, and there's a lot in here! You might consider breaking this up and posting a few more questions about the different facets of your work-- that way people can respond a little more to specifics, and I'd enjoy hearing more about the project you're hoping to embark on!

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