makew0rld
commented
5 years ago What I want from Toronto Mesh (excerpted from cryptpad)
There was a lot of talk in the Funding matrix channel (a while ago) about tomesh becoming a meta-org, where we just act as a gathering place for projects and even orgs that align with our goals. One of those projects may be mesh deployment, another may be a general funding org, whose whole purpose is to generate revenue and manage money for the other projects. In this way tomesh becomes the Toronto Network Commons, or something similar. As a meta-org, we would help out these projects and groups, and facilitate communication and synchronization of ideas between them. This is a bit unwieldy as a vision statement though, and so beyond the meta-org, I'd like to see tomesh provide decentralized services in Toronto, bringing Web 3.0 to our city. This can include things like workshops, outreach, IPFS, Scuttlebutt, cryptocurrency, and of course, mesh networks.
My new thoughts
Tomesh might be too small to become a meta-org. From what I've seen in this group, there is a lot of experimentation and proof-of-concept and messing around with tech that happens, which is important and fun, but hinders us from reaching a specific goal. We don't have one clear goal, probably because there are many different opinions within the group about what should or can be done, and so we fall back to experimenting and each person for the most part doing their own thing. Ideally, we become a meta-org so each person can explore their own interests and opinions, but realistically I don't think we have enough people to sustain multiple initiatives, and so we would fall back to what happens now. And what happens now is great, but there isn't a solid goal being reached, and a big part of me really wants to see something happen, mostly mesh deployment with offline-first, decentralized apps. This would be something with many fronts: legal, software, hardware, financial, design, outreach/education, marketing, etc -- and that's why it's so hard to pull off, especially when there are differing ideas. The solution is not to pick one specific goal that most people end up being unhappy with of course, but I think it would be nice to have a general goal like the one I mentioned above, and the details can be figured out over time.
With that said, if our goals are much more relaxed, that what we've been doing now is great, with demonstrable progress with prototype-cjdns-pi, all the demos we did at the mesh picnic, the workshop, etc. But I'd prefer something more focused, what has to be debated is what we'd lose in doing that.
benhylau
dasanchez
dcwalk
See issue #92 for reference.
I formatted the CryptPad contents for Markdown and fixed a few typos, but left the message untouched.
I would like to give everyone else an opportunity to share their thoughts before we move forward with identifying priorities and common goals.
Post your input below and I'll append it!