Solarpunk social hardware with Scuttlebutt

Here we are in 2020, another trip around the Sun complete! This update marks approximately one year since @glyph joined the PeachCloud project and started working with @Mikey to bring solarpunk social hardware into being. We will continue working hard to complete the initial version of the PeachCloud system in the months ahead. The excitement to share is ever-growing!

Development:

@glyph completed 35.5 hours of work in December and 36 hours in January. Development in January was hampered by rolling blackouts in Cape Town (where @glyph is currently based) and multiple breakages in one of the undersea internet cables linking South Africa to Europe. Such systemic degradations serve to highlight the importance of the Scuttlebutt protocol and related offline-first, mesh-capable technologies. With further collapses on the horizon, we feel more motivated than ever to bring PeachCloud into being and to share in the work of deploying the bright futures we envision.

The focus of our work over these past two months has been developing a pattern library for the web interface, as well as improving the peach-network microservice and writing the network-related UI / UX for web. peach-network has grown into a feature-rich service for interacting with wpasupplicant (including the ability to add, remove, select and disable WiFi networks).

Further highlights of our technical progress include:

• Bug fixes for peach-network (scan_networks & get_rssi RPC's)
• Refactoring of peach-patterns (improved grids and class names)
• Improvements to peach-web (WiFi list, network traffic rendering, network detail view with security protocol etc.)

Community:

In community-related news, @glyph has been supporting the newly-emergent Community Infrastructure Learning Group (CILG). Originally envisioned and activated by @austinfrey (aka @punkmonk), the group aims to support the deployment and maintenance of p2p infrastructure in an inviting and accessible manner. The learning group will collectively produce scripts, documentation and tutorials - with the aim to make it easier for folx of all knowledge levels to engage with p2p sociotechnologies. Meetings are held every second Saturday and attendance has been excellent (approximately 9 attendees on recent calls). Visit the Toronto Mesh Events page or subscribe to the #community-infra channel on SSB to keep up to date. Meeting minutes and other documents (including a roadmap) can be found in the CI-LG GitHub repo.

Of relevance to PeachCloud, the CILG is currently compiling a report on the first ever SSB Pub Operator Survey (understanding the resources required to run a pub). There are also plans to collaborate on Debian packaging for relevant services - a goal shared by PeachCloud, Toronto Mesh and the CILG.

That's enough of an update for now - back to work we go. Thank you so much for supporting our work and helping to make this project possible. Until next time, much love from the PeachCloud team!