Sudo Mesh is a people-powered project. That means that anyone can join the network if they're willing to contribute by reporting bugs, improving software, fixing hardware, setting up a node, installing rooftop nodes, telling your friends about us, joining for a workshop, bringing pizza to a hack session, donating equipment/money/Bitcoin, learning with us about how the internet works, or just being patient if something is broken :)
Interested in learning more and exploring? Check out our Join Us section. You do not need to be technically skilled to be part of this project. We need people willing to mount gear on rooftops, folks who want to do public outreach, graphic design artists, film-makers, documentarians and so much more! Show up at a monthly general meeting and get involved!
Imagine if the wifi router in your home connected to the wifi routers in your neighbours' homes and they again connected to their neighbours to form a huge free wireless network spanning the city! That's exactly what a mesh network is, or at least what it can be. Roads and telephone poles are owned by government or private interests and laying down cable is expensive, but by using wireless signals that hop from building to building we can create a community-owned and -operated, free-as-in-freedom alternative to corporate Internet Service Providers. Community wireless mesh networks are growing around the world, creating local 'internets' that support Net Neutrality and community control of critical infrastructure.
We are spending a lot of time developing software to make it cheap and easy for anyone to be participate in cooperative communications infrastructure, regardless of technical skill.
Who are you?
sudomesh is a group of volunteers operating out of the sudo room hackerspace at the Omni Commons - a collective of collectives stewarding a large community space in Oakland, California. We develop software and assemble hardware systems to help build open community networks like the People's Open Network, a community-owned and -operated non-profit internet infrastructure in Oakland. We are all unpaid volunteers building open technology that helps to connect our neighbors, support local businesses, and enable community collaboration and cultural production. In the event of a natural disaster or state censorship, community mesh networks can be a resilient means of communication and sharing of information.
Long Range Wifi - Info on the longest-range wifi connections ever made.
Adafruit's Web IDE built for Raspberry Pi but probably good for editing code on any device and ensuring it is managed with a code repo. By default it uses bitbucket.org but it could probably be configured for Github.
Our Projects
Building a community-owned and -operated wireless mesh network in Oakland, California and beyond! Disaster-resilient communications network powered by the sun. Instructions for building your own internet, plus a global directory of community wireless mesh networks.
Upcycling retired/donated laptops to those who can't afford them.
How To Participate
If you want to join the mesh you'll need a mesh router at your home! Currently the best way to get one is to show up at our monthly general meeting as described above. We need more people on the network to improve the quality of the service. When you setup a node, you improve the service for everybody on the network and give more access to your community. We encourage participants to ask their communities to join their networks and create distributed services for them. We have a user guide to help you get on the network!
Come to our weekly Tuesday meetings in sudo room. The first three Tuesdays of the month are hack nights where we work (often in parallel) on everything from pamphlets to maps to code. This is a good opportunity to find someone familiar with the ins and outs and ask questions. The last Tuesday of the month is a more structured recap meeting, where we follow an agenda, get updates on what progress was made in the last month, and plan for the next month.
We generally collaborate on notes at each meeting. Look at our archive of past meeting minutes!
Contribute to the network by installing a mesh node at your location using our handy Mesh Node Setup Walkthrough. This is especially helpful for those who are within range of an existing node (seen as a wireless SSID named "peoplesopen.net").
We need hardware and software engineers to help us with our code. We have an overview of technical documentation that will be helpful in understanding the network.
We need artists and designers to make things look nice! We have design schemes we already use, but we're always looking to improve it. We need to improve our presentation content and diagrams too! We've been focused on these areas:
Mesh/Presentations - Past presentations, talks, workshops, tutorials and videos
Diagrams - Diagrams outlining the network topology and technical stack
Design - Website & logo design; swag for enthusiasts; and marketing inspiration.
Please note that all contributions to Sudo Room may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Sudo Room:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
