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May 21st repeater meetup

We will hold a Mesh Montreal repeater meet up at room C-9019 of Lionel Groulx wing of Université de Montréal on Thursday May 21st from 19h to 21h.

Important

Note that this is not at Polytechnique as previously indicated. It's close to Université de Montréal and Côte-des-Neiges métro! The exact address is 3150 Jean-Brillant (Google Maps link).

We invite everyone who currently operates1 a relay in the greater Montreal area, whether it is Meshcore, Meshtastic, or Reticulum, to join us to talk about how we organise.

Context

This is the first time we hold an actual meeting for the Montreal Mesh in some form in over a decade. Those familiar with history know that we used to have regular meetings and we believe the time has come to start meeting again.

We have had a few informal meetups at Mesh night (and there is Mesh Day coming up) but this event is different.

We have lots of people excited about the mesh, setting up Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum devices all over the city, yet we barely know who to talk with when there's a problem.

We have communication channels all over the place: Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Mattermost. We have two, maybe three websites.

We don't quite know who we are, or how things work.

Let's organise this.

Agenda

Here is a tentative agenda. We realize that it is an ambitious goal and that we'll likely not review all of those points.

That's fine.

The main objective of the meeting is to break the ice and isolation; create a regular space where those kind of discussions can happen.

  1. Welcome: translation, agenda, facilitation, minutes, timing
  2. Round table: name, pronoun, call sign / nick, relay description
  3. Who are we? Réseau Libre? Montreal Mesh? Quebec, Canada Mesh? Operators? Anarchists?
  4. How do we organise? Informal, affinity groups, council, committees, non-profit? vote, consensus, elections?
  5. What do we do? Infrastructure? Hacking?
  6. Platform choices:
    • communications: Matrix, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, etc?
    • web: montrealmesh.ca, lora.reseaulibre.ca, meshcore.ca?
    • LoRa: Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum?
  7. Next meeting

This first meeting is held in person, to solidify the physicality of the Mesh. But future meetings could be held alternatively in person and online, to facilitate participation from people further out from the city.

Notes

Notes were taken in the meeting, in french, see the notes.

  1. For now, we consider a "relay operator" to be a person who is currently responsible for the operation of a device which repeats signal for other devices. This includes essentially every Meshtastic device out there, Meshcore repeaters, and Reticulum transport nodes. But intent matters: we're happy to welcome you if you haven't setup your Meshcore repeater or Reticulum transport node just yet but are almost there, but we're less interested if you're "just" experimenting with Meshtastic to connect devices in your backyard. But defining this is exactly why we need to have that meeting. So for now, we're bootstrapping on "operator". ↩