=====Meeting minutes 13 July 2026=====

**Present:** Jade, Simon, Rob, Maggie, Wade, Sarah

====Actions====

  * Statements: Jade to pass to Rob. 

====Notes====


===Activities updates===
  * Taiga board – perhaps quarterly instead of monthly?
  * Telematics Trust grant app rejected :(
  * Solarpunks Meetups now got a good system. 
  * Node stewards tend to get stuck at the router / public facing IP steps. Would be good if that wasn’t a step so that it could work successfully locally and then defer the public facing networking. The CGNAT step seems hard and it requires tinkering with home router.
  * Acquiring more RPis; 
  * A good inflow of interest; a fair few people who are interested, trying to coral them towards work, including the working groups. 
  * “Get off big tech sooner” Working Group is burgeoning, looks like it will be getting started with some stewarding on our part. Rach, Lucas; two branches that can hopefully be brought together. 

===Membership questions===
  * Dues, sense of belonging contribution and participation and involvement, 
  * “what’s in it for me” – expectations and responsibilities
  * Membership engagement: how to move into volunteering, make it a bit more compelling.
  * Models that combine volunteering and membership
  * Friends-of groups: e.g. Friends of Merri Creek doesn’t require membership, people turn up and help out. Different to the Friends of Moonee Ponds Creek (less to get involved with, just meetings, boring.)
  * VINC: it’s about the space

===AGM preparation===
  * November seems good. 
  * We could find out what the “members” want to be working towards and want us to be doing.

===Future Activities===
  * Set up servers or partner with others who can run servers for getting non-big tech services? Continue to pursue
  * Should we pursue a partnership with a local org where we can site a node? Probably not: Wade, let’s focus on getting some nodes up and running in stewards homes. Sarah, we could burn out the relationships if unclear how long until something useful. 
  * Rob: could first put up our MBT website and the LRT materials. 

===What can we get volunteers involved in and working on?===

  * Networking. Meshnet clubs – e.g. Melbourne Wifi now pretty much defunct. Meshcore is “winning the battle” from meshtastic to meshcore. But for us the right answer would be to leapfrog to Reticulum, to build across a range of different network interfaces, and means that people can get started without a network. Reticulum: would be a separate project. 
    * What’s missing for plugging P2Panda into Reticulum; is of interest to a lot of people
    * LORA devices will need enclosures: Volunteers needed to do 3D printing, connect them up. 
  * Coding apps for the nodes. There’s also the approach of building interesting stuff to run on Nodes. 
  * Preparing for more people to contribute to the code base. Currently we have a one person coder model, and there’s a lot to do to shift to a community of open-source contributors.  
    * Code of conduct
    * Platforms
    * Decisions about how to deal with AI
  * Shepherding people who are new to the Solarpunk: Digital Lounge pathway?