🧭 September Recap: Systems Thinking, Eight New Nodes, and a Home for Our Docs
📅 Wednesday, September 2, 2026 📍 Kent/Thomas Room @ Unitarian Universalist Church, Concord
Twelve of us turned out for September — our biggest gathering yet, and a room full of new faces alongside the regulars. The evening ran from big-picture thinking about AI straight into the nuts and bolts of antennas, rooftops, and RF interference.
🧠 Community Assembly: Systems Thinking for AI Success
Presented by Sam
Sam made the case that the most useful way to work with an LLM is to stop treating it as a chatbot and start treating it as a system. He walked the group through his own tips for putting systems theory to work, using examples of systems drawn from history to show how the same patterns keep repeating.
If you want to go deeper, Sam pointed everyone at one book in particular: Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows. It is the short, readable foundation for everything the talk built on, and worth your time whether or not you ever open a chat window.
📡 LoRa Working Group: Coverage Is Growing
The LoRa group had the fullest report of the night. About eight new nodes have been built and deployed around the Capital area in the last six weeks, and the coverage map is starting to look like a network.
- Carter Hill is now our first node in a semi-official capacity — up near the summit, and no longer hidden away on a pole in the middle of the orchard.
- Ken has deployed several more at private residences.
- The group has an eye on an area around Broken Ground that could extend coverage along Route 106.
- Seth has offered his roof at the top of Loudon Road as a host site.
It is not all clean signal, though. RF interference in crowded areas is still a headache — and so is interference from what the group has started calling “monkey hands.” Tuning work continues, and current coverage maps get posted in the CRM Signal chat.
There was also a good discussion about whether to configure regions on nodes. The short answer: region configuration is opt-in, so the default stays wide open, and anyone who wants to limit range has the option.
Finally, four Rattlesnake nodes are almost ready to go. They need new antennas — and, more importantly, they need somewhere to live. If you have a rooftop, a tower, or a well-placed attic, this is your moment.
One idea did get set aside: an antenna on Pat’s Peak turns out to require a monthly lease at a price well beyond what CRM can carry.
🌐 Reticulum Working Group
The weekly Reticulum net on Mumble is up and running. The group is looking for volunteers to serve as net control — a low-barrier way to get involved if you have been looking for one.
🤝 Members’ Council
- The node-host form letter is done. Adam, Jason, Tyler, and Ken brought the finished draft to the Council, and it looked fantastic. It gives us a real tool for approaching property owners about hosting mesh infrastructure.
- Alex found a better answer than Box. Instead of a subscription service, he stood up a self-hosted Filebrowser Quantum instance with SSL on his home server, now living at
filebrowser.capitalmesh.net. Access setup is in progress, with a read-only guest account as the next step. CRM’s documents will have a home we actually control. - Sam proposed that CRM keep booking the Kent/Thomas Room at $75 a month, and the proposal passed. The room is ours for the foreseeable future.
- The group kicked around a parallel idea for real-time communication as an alternative to Signal — possibly by standing up more nets.
- Eric is still working to get his confiscated nodes back.
🛠️ Working Session
No formal working session this month. With twelve people in the room and a Council agenda that ran deep, the conversation kept going on its own.
🌱 Looking Ahead
October’s Community Assembly is “Running Local LLMs,” presented by Alex — a hands-on look at getting your own AI setup running on hardware you own, and why local models are far more accessible than most people expect.