LoRes Mesh

a Resilient, Local internet for the Climate Crisis

LoRes Mesh is a project to provide digital services at local community facilities that meet genuine human needs.

It’s designed to be powered by renewables, run by local volunteers, and to stay up even when the grid goes down.

Our local resilience mesh is made up of LoRes Nodes. Each Node is a cluster of small low powered computers, like the Raspberry Pi.
A hand holding a Raspberry Pi

Nodes run software for local people and community groups, like website hosting, email servers and more.

To do this, we use and contribute to recipes that are part of co-op cloud, a project to develop public interest infrastructure through the combined efforts of digital co-operatives.

foobar

In a local region, each LoRes Node can talk to each other, even when the internet is down.

We’re communicating over a peer-to-peer gossip network powered by P2Panda that supports low bandwidth communication over technologies like LoRa.

The P2Panda logo, a panda riding on a dolphin

LoRes Mesh is not just code.

It’s a recipe for deploying a volunteer-run resilient network in your local community. We’re learning about it by doing.

LoRes Mesh is currently used by Merri-bek Tech, a local group in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). We’re solarpunks, community organisers, coders and activists and we’re aiming to provide services to local community members and groups and iterate on feedback.

We’re open to collaboration with other groups on this project, but let’s all be aware that technology is never apolitical. We’re centering climate justice and solidarity.

Project Status: pre-release

We’re in the early days here, working in the open. There are currently no LoRes Nodes that can be considered to be “in production” delivering value to local communities.

You can follow along by checking our roadmap, or reach out for a chat.