🌐 Connecting Community and Infrastructure
Our fifth Capital Region Mesh meetup brought a strong mix of new faces and returning contributors. This month marked a shift toward the social foundations of our work — how we organize, how we support one another, and how those principles shape the mesh we’re building together.
The evening paired that grounding with the first major technical milestone of the year: the LoRa Strategy Working Group’s initial regional deployment proposal.
🤝 What Is Mutual Aid?
We opened with an accessible introduction to mutual aid — what it is, what it isn’t, and why it matters for a community‑driven communications network.
The presentation explored:
- Mutual aid as a practice of solidarity, not charity
- How decentralized, bottom‑up structures mirror resilient mesh architectures
- The importance of shared responsibility and distributed decision‑making
- Ways CRM already embodies mutual aid principles in its workflows and culture
Participants reflected on how these ideas inform everything from onboarding new members to planning deployments to maintaining long‑term resilience.
📡 LoRa Deployment Strategy: First Draft
After a short break, the LoRa Strategy Working Group presented the first draft of a coordinated regional deployment plan — the most comprehensive proposal to date for how CRM’s LoRa layer will take shape across the Capital Region.
Highlights included:
- Recommended node types and placement patterns for early coverage
- A phased rollout strategy for spring and summer
- Integration with MeshCore rooms and community workflows
- Testing and validation plans for new hardware
- Opportunities for volunteers to participate in field deployments
This proposal represents the first cohesive roadmap for turning months of experimentation into a functioning regional network.
🧩 Working Session: Feedback & Next Steps
The final portion of the evening shifted into collaborative planning. Attendees contributed feedback on the proposal and helped identify priorities for the next phase of work.
Key themes included:
- Identifying high‑value early deployment sites
- Clarifying volunteer roles for field testing and documentation
- Collaboration opportunities with the broader NHMesh group
- Establishing shared expectations for maintenance and monitoring
- Preparing for spring hardware builds and installation days
The discussion reinforced the community’s commitment to building a mesh that is both technically resilient and socially grounded.
🌱 Looking Ahead
March’s meetup deepened our shared understanding of why we build this network — and how we’ll build it together. With the LoRa working group’s proposal now in hand, the next steps involve refining the plan, preparing hardware, and coordinating the first wave of deployments.
April’s session will continue this momentum with a hands‑on Mesh Open House and a look at emerging LoRa 2.4 GHz voice capabilities in Meshtastic.
Full details are available on the April 2026 Meetup page.