Hello to everyone and sorry for not answering the list sooner. I'm still in Brazil for another ten days and just spent the last four days in the jungle. I am highly motivated to help this project fly, but most of the work will have to wait until I'm back in my cold country from 3rd of December onwards.

I think the name Community Networks is more of a household name, so in that sense it might be catchier for the masses. On the other hand, DC3 is a catchier acronym than DCCN. Community Networks and Community Connectivity both suite our purposes as I understand the reason for creating this group, which is to create a source of knowledge to help people build their own networks that can be again linked to each other. At the very least, it should have information on the engineering perspective of those networks, both hardware and software, and collect the best practices on the DC3 website. Like somebody already put it, it's not the name that counts, but what we do for it.

This group should start with the engineering, because it is a more accurate science than the other mentioned areas, that this group could be doing. It seems more concrete and the results can be easily measured. Other areas like the legal framework for individual countries' allowed radio frequency should probably follow fairly soon. I feel that the engineering part is the biggest threshold stopping people from creating their own networks and it is something that we should ask for help from groups like IETF and IEEE to decide what those best practices would be. I have an impression that a lot of technical geniuses work in them.

The website could be mirrored and hosted in different countries so that it's as accessible as possible, and it'd be important to be able to pull all the available information for offline reading too. I can help in making the website front-end and coordinating things, for I'm not technically that talented. I still want to participate because I think this project can make an immense impact for the connectedness of all mankind. There are also gains in privacy and availability of information to circumvent totalitarian means that obstruct the flows of information. Just the project for a Pirate, and our global political movement can help to push this project forward and start building networks in over fifty countries.

We need at least two profiles for the website, rural and urban, but there might be reasons to make more, to differentiate best practices for metropolis-size cities and smaller townships. The equipment should be as cheap as possible without damaging the quality of the network and I think governments could actually chip in to boost the building of robust and resilient networks for their citizens. I've heard rasberry pi is enough to have a node in a MESH-network, but correct me if I'm wrong. It would also be useful to be able to use old computers, because they can be acquired freely and it prolongs their lifespan.

I hope I didn't rant on too much, but I wanted to blurt out all the thoughts I've had on this project for many years already. I'm totally in favor of learning some engineering skills for this and I've wanted to setup a MESH-network in Helsinki for a long time already. I'm probably unemployed for quite a while now, so I should have quite a bit of time on my hands. I am really looking forward to working with all of you.

Raoul Plommer