🏠 August Recap: Home Assistant, a New Secretary, and Node-Host Outreach
📅 Wednesday, August 5, 2026 📍 Kent/Thomas Room @ Unitarian Universalist Church, Concord
Seven of us gathered for August’s meetup — a smaller group, but a productive one. The evening covered a home automation deep-dive, some organizational housekeeping, and the launch of a new working group focused on growing the mesh.
🏠 Community Assembly: Home Assistant
Presented by Alex
Alex walked the group through Home Assistant, the open-source home automation platform, sharing how he uses it day to day and demoing some of its features. It was a practical, example-driven session — less theory, more “here’s what this actually does for me.”
One detail got people’s attention: someone in the broader community has already built a MeshCore integration for Home Assistant. For a group that spends most of its time thinking about mesh networking, seeing it show up as a plug-in for home automation was a fun surprise — and a reminder of how much is already being built around these tools.
🤝 Members’ Council
The Council covered a good mix of organizational and technical updates:
- Becky volunteered to serve as Secretary and proposed that CRM start tracking expenses and donations formally. The group agreed to run this as a 3-month trial.
- The group talked through hosting documents — including meeting minutes — somewhere other than Google. Alex volunteered to look into a Box subscription for a CRM knowledge base.
- There was discussion of ways to make it easier to accept donations, including whether something like Buy Me a Coffee would be a good fit.
- The Reticulum and LoRa working groups each gave informational updates on where things stand.
- A new working group is spinning up to draft a form letter for reaching out to potential node hosts — folks willing to host mesh infrastructure on their property. Adam is coordinating, joined by Jason, Tyler, and Ken. They’re aiming to bring a draft letter to the Members’ Council in September.
- Adam is now hosting a weekly voice net, Thursdays at 7pm, in the CRM room on his Mumble server at
home.tobias.im.
🛠️ Working Session
Rather than a separate working session, the evening’s momentum went straight into standing up the new node-host outreach working group — Adam, Jason, Tyler, and Ken got organized around next steps for the form letter.
🌱 Looking Ahead
September’s Community Assembly will be “Systems Thinking for AI Success,” presented by Sam — a look at applying systems theory to working with LLMs and agents, and why it offers a more fruitful path than the default chatbot-style interaction.