Purgatoria

Purgatoria is a multi-layered community and open collaboration ecosystem focused on Amateur Radio, communication resilience, technical literacy, and public readiness through producing accessible technical documentation and training skilled operators.

At its core, it exists to build and maintain decentralized and off-grid communication infrastructure and agile ad-hoc systems in a state of readiness for high-stakes environments, especially for disaster relief, emergency response, and degraded-network operations.

In routine times, Purgatoria provides collaborative environments and services where Amateur Radio operators and RF enthusiasts can work together, foster cooperation, and educate individuals on fundamental RF concepts and Amateur Radio practices.


Who is Purgatoria?

Purgatoria is a diverse collective of Amateur Radio enthusiasts and volunteers from many nations, ranging in age from 12 to over 80, encompassing a vast array of expertise including engineers, academics, software developers, public officials, law enforcement officers, corporate leaders, legal and medical professionals, emergency responders, educators, and students.

Alongside them stand volunteers dedicated to learning and teaching open-source, decentralized, and off-grid communication systems, as well as the fundamentals of RF.

Despite this professional and cultural diversity, Purgatoria operates on a foundation of absolute equality; regardless of age, occupation, nationality, or professional rank, every member stands on the same level, united by our shared identity as Amateur Radio operators.


What are Purgatoria's values?

Purgatoria’s core values are non-negotiable structural constraints that govern every layer of our ecosystem.
They are embedded directly into our governance architecture to ensure long-term integrity and purpose:

What is the purpose of Purgatoria?
Purgatoria operates on a dual-vector mission that seamlessly integrates physical infrastructure with human capability.
In our strategic framework, neither vector is subordinate to the other, true communication resilience requires both sovereign networks and skilled operators.

By unifying resilient technological deployment with individual empowerment, Purgatoria creates an ecosystem where decentralized networks are sustained by the capable operators who build, maintain, and operate them.


How is Purgatory governed?

Purgatoria operates under a community-driven Open Governance framework based on absolute equality, active collaboration, and open access.
All organizational decisions, policy updates, and project management processes are conducted publicly within the Purgatoria/Association repository.

How does Purgatoria stay accountable?
Purgatoria practices Radical Transparency and Cryptographic Auditability. All official actions, documents, and financial records are cryptographically verifiable, with key organizational members using YubiKey harware security modules, OpenPGP keys and Purgatoria's own certificate authority (PurgatoriaCA) to sign and authenticate records.

Financial activity is tracked openly through a public ledger system covering expenses, grants, sponsors, and partners, and continuity is safeguarded through protocols such as the −1 Trust Policy, Dead Man's Switch etc. ensuring the organization remains resilient and answerable even in the event of leadership disruption.

For more information, please read the relevant sections of the Purgatoria/Association repository.


Why is Purgatoria here?

Purgatoria chose Open Collective primarily due to the platform's established credibility, high reputation, and widespread adoption across the global open-source ecosystem.

Selecting the Open Source Collective (OSC) as our official fiscal host stems from this same foundation of trust, aligning us with many respected communities and projects we know and work with.

Operating through a fiscal host defers the administrative burden of forming a traditional physical association, providing us with the operational agility required for open research and deployment.

Most importantly, Open Collective and OSC align completely with Purgatoria’s foundational commitment to Open Governance and Radical Transparency:

You can support Purgatoria through financial contributions or in-kind donations.

We offer one-time donation options as well as recurring monthly sponsorship tiers ranging from 1$  to 100$:

Providing services or donating hardware directly accelerates our R&D, infrastructure expansion, and agile ad-hoc network testing:

In truth, Purgatoria will continue to operate even without external financial support.
As we have done since our inception, our core maintainers will personally fund the necessary infrastructure to keep Purgatoria and its essential functions running.

However, relying strictly on self-funding locks Purgatoria into a narrow financial bottleneck.
This constraint inherently limits our operational scale, preventing us from undertaking higher-impact projects and extending our services to a much broader audience.

To scale rapidly and mature into a fully equipped, resilient organization, Purgatoria needs community backing.
Your support directly removes these financial limitations, accelerating our R&D roadmap and enabling us to accomplish significantly more in far less time. 

As an open-source, community-based collective, our primary ongoing costs are directly tied to server infrastructure and domain management for our community members.

We rely heavily on several open-source projects and networks, including:

To run and support these, we rent dedicated servers, mainly hosted in Germany and France, along with associated domain names and network resources.

The domains we maintain for various operational needs include:

In addition to these, we provide communication services for amateur radio operators located in Turkey and neighboring countries (or those wishing to join).
These include the Purgatoria SIP server, through which we assign extensions, the standard community email system PurgMail, and the pMail email system, which operates over radio links.

Beyond this core infrastructure, we are also developing our own open-source tools, such as PurgTopo a topological mapping system; and PurgPro an RF propagation mapping system, which likewise depend on this server infrastructure. 

Our baseline goal of 100$/month fully covers the dedicated server infrastructure and operational requirements that power Purgatoria's core stack, including servers for AREDN, TAK, OpenMANET, Reticulum Network, Meshtastic, Meshcore; as well as websites, domain renewals, and static IP allocations.

Achieving this goal secures our core operations while generating a modest reserve buffer.

Any funds collected beyond this monthly baseline are treated as surplus funds, governed strictly by community consensus. 

Every surplus allocation is subject to transparent community voting. The community holds final discretion over whether surplus capital is deployed, saved, or reallocated.

 Where can you trace your funds in Purgatoria?

In line with our principles of Open Governance and Radical Transparency, every single contribution made to Purgatoria is publicly logged in the Purgatoria/Association repository.

Additionally, you can track all real-time financial flows, incoming funds, and expenses directly on this Open Collective page.

Our ledgers are designed to be both human-readable and machine-optimized. You can audit our financial records yourself by reviewing the raw .md or .csv files in our repository, or by feeding these structured files into AI models for automated, independent auditing.


Important Note for Our Supporters: When making a contribution, it is essential that you use your Amateur Radio callsign (if you are licensed) in your profile or contribution note.
Missing callsigns create recording discrepancies during our public logging and ledger archiving processes.

As a Community of Communication, there are naturally multiple ways to reach us.