07-12, 21:00–21:50 (US/Eastern), Marillac Auditorium
You don't need to have tech skills to build a mesh network! In this talk, moshfet will share how he helped spawn an anti-capitalist mesh network in Tucson, Arizona with just a bit of
COVID stimulus money and a wish upon a (shining) star. His goal is to inspire the possibility of building infrastructure in common in local communities - like mesh networks - to push
back against the corporatization and monopolization of critical infrastructures more broadly.
In the presenter's words: "We didn't choose to work on providing Internet access because we're tech experts (we're not!), but as a demonstration to ourselves and our community: if
complicated technologies such as the Internet can be given away at cost by a network of volunteers, what's to stop people in Tucson from doing the same thing with cellular service?
Libraries of Things? Repair cafes?"
moshfet is a recovering graduate student who is regaining his footing within the community and social collectives in and around Tucson including, but not limited to, Tucson Mesh. When he does touch his computer, he enjoys building Yocto distributions for FPGA-emulated embedded systems, obsessing over boot-chain security and integrity, and telling everyone else in Tucson Mesh that the false-positive LibreNMS outages are actually resolved this time.
