Local Community On-Boarding

April ssb-grants proposal for making the ecosystem more inclusive and ubiquitous for local communities around the globe by paving the road with easy to deploy mesh network kit and a development ecosystem for SSB that is friendly for new-comers, non-english speakers and non-devs.

Team

Me

Goals

• We organize essential ssb docs, make them easily translatable, and start with Portuguese.

• We create Mesh Kits with scripts and instructions for meshing single-board-computers and Open-WRT compatible routers on at least layer 2, for running ssb applications freely.

• We create app seed to run on Android phones with the goal of being friendly for new developers using GraphQL and React-Native.

• We create an app hub application serving as entry point to the ecosystem of applications and their repositories, for as easy as possible contribution even from non-developers.

• We make a social experiment in Moinho implementing the above and document the whole process of setting up the network and trying to include more and more the native quilombola people in the process.

Back-story

I've been living in Moinho since January of 2014 and was one of the first the get access to internet thru a radio internet provider in a place where there isn't even cell phone signal. Since then I've been helping the neighbors to acquire and share broadband in hopes of democratizing access to information. But the hard truth was that people used it most uniquely for Facebook and Whatsapp, and I began feeling like a drug dealer who helps people get what won't do them no good.

About two years ago I started to organize my initial ideas from what I was learning in NodeJS, crypto and my experiences in Moinho into something that could be used as an alternative to corporate applications. This path led me to discover some awesome protocols including ssb. Finally it all became #moinho-mesh, which has grown into an attempt to create an #open-app-ecosystem that runs a in a layer 2 mesh.

There has been a lot of talk about pubs as entry points to the ssb ecosystem, and they are for sure the best option for short term. But I believe that local network discovery is the most sustainable long term way for joining and cultivating a healthy application ecosystem.

Most of the work for the Android seed has been done in mobile-p2p-boilerplate and I've began the work for the mesh kit at meshpi. I'll keep working on them despite the grant, but I would need the grant to buy the necessary hardware to start the experiment, so I would dedicate $1000,00 for it and would spread the rest in 3 months of work, since I won't be able to work every day because I'm also building my house and planting.

In case anyone wants to know more about #open-app-ecosystem there are some slides here where I presented about what I had learned and some sketches of what the App Hub could look like:

hey @Luandro this looks pretty ambitious and exciting. Can you give us a sense of the priority on which you're going to work on these ? e.g. were you thinking to start at the top and see how far your get through the bulet points, or perhaps do them all in parallel (which might mean we get for 80% of each road).

Hey @mix, thanks for asking.

I usually work on things in parallel, so while I rest on something I can work on another.

• I'm pretty sure the translations won't be a big deal, and they are something I can do while gathering inspiration for other tasks.

• We're starting to get some traction in this issue, so I believe we aren't to far from meshing Pis and Libre Mesh routers, which is my objective for the Mesh Kit. This is the part I have least knowledge on, so I'm counting on people from mesh communities from around the globe to help me out, and they have been amazing.

• In the current state I believe I already have the app seed at 80%, with SSB and GraphQL working well together. I'm currently working on ssb-graphql-server and a plugin ecosystem to make everything as easy as possible for new devs.

• With the app seed working, the App Hub shouldn't be too difficult to build for mobile. I made the proof-of-concept a while ago as a cli app.

• The experiment is the part I'm most excited about, and I've been planning it for at least an year now. I've talked to a few neighbors and they are pretty open to it, and some have even volunteered to help out with the setup. I plan on visiting #altermundi in Argentina first to learn before jumping into something I've never seen working before, and based on what I learn there, buy the hardware to start the experiment here in Moinho.

In a way there's no priority, since everything (but the translations) need to be working for the experiment to start. I set the goal for 3 months, and I think it's enough time to get everything at least in prototype level. But based on the progress we've made in the past 3 months I think we'll be able to accomplish quite a lot.

Thank you once again for asking, please don't hesitate in asking more questions, I'm missing those in order to validate my idea