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Meeting 8 February 2026

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

At Assemble, Stubbs St

Agenda

  • Membership expectations
  • Working group / working meetings
  • Volunteering pipeline
  • SolarPunk meetup for next week
  • Website updates
  • Update from Wade and Maggie re. working through RPi Node doco

Actions

  • Rob and Simon: get info ready for the March meetup
  • Jade and Rob: prepare call for involvement of volunteers for node stewardship at Feb meetup
  • Maggie: prepare to take signups. Do we want an online list of volunteers?
  • All: for the Solarpunk meetup consider bringing food, or help Jade with catering arrangements - e.g. from Green Refectory
  • Sarah, Jade, Simon: update website to provide up to date info about membership, volunteers and getting involved.
  • Sarah, Jade: continue to pursue joining Coop Cloud federation

Notes

Establishing nodes

  • A key benefit of setting up nodes in people’s homes (rather than organisations) is that it enables building volunteer base; engaged node maintainers. A pathway for hobbyist engagement.
  • Should we aim to find a solution to the challenges of getting a static IP, to ease participation? Not a priority. The CGNAT issue shouldn’t be a barrier. Tailscale or similar may be a way forward

The roadmap (See https://lores.tech/roadmap/ for more detail)

  • Wikipedia is low hanging fruit
  • Static websites would be next
  • Community centre / organisational nodes and home-housed nodes are part of the vision - Then building relationship with community facilities can come later
  • After that need to start investigating the connectivity question and providing other services

Volunteer needs and recruitment

  • Will be a big win for Jade to have someone else maintain our Kiwix recipe
  • Ideally we want about 10 volunteers who can steward notes, requires a moderate level of technical engagement. 1-4 hours per week for the average,
  • Envisaged that some may get more involved; contribute to open source coding to help solve problems.
  • The LoRes website has a technical roadmap but we don’t have a roadmap for personnel and governance.

How do we funnel interest from potential volunteers at the Solarpunk meetup?

  • Sarah suggests light touch approach: website info about what we need, request they email us. Maintain a list with info about what they are interested in doing / learning. Let's dedicate every other Meetup to a working bee, and meet and greet for new / potential volunteers.
  • Jade: we should also add them to our room on Matrix

Volunteer management

  • Can we find someone who wants to take ownership of recruiting and onboarding 10 volunteers?
  • Sarah notes that volunteer management is a tough gig. Ways to make it manageable: reduce, automate, pay someone?
  • Let's reduce it: aim for 3-5 volunteers who can be node stewards. Maybe we'll find one who is willing to take on training or coordination after a few months.

Node setup report from Wade and Maggie

  • Doco currently assumes someone with a bit of technical knowledge and skills; e.g. assumption was that they might already have dual booted Linux.
  • Wade: A lot of the documentation could be a script. A prepackaged image that can be put on a RPi with some config. Or perhaps we can keep with what we’ve got for now for debugging purposes.
  • BUT Blackboxing not ideal because we want people to be familiar with what's going on: node stewards are more important than nodes.

Solarpunk meetup next week

  • Rob and Simon: get info ready for the next meetup
  • We can put out a stronger call for involvement of volunteers for node stewardship Call to action can be stronger at the talk next week
  • Maggie can take signups
  • At the March meeting, the following month we will be hacking stuff: Build your own RPi node and learn how to maintain
  • All: consider bringing food, or help Jade with catering arrangements - e.g. from Green Refectory
  • Sarah, Jade, Simon: website update to provide up to date info about membership, volunteers and getting involved.

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