It’s important that nodes are able to connect to a region in a decentralised way. There shouldn’t be any single point of failure for this. We’ve using a peer-to-peer technology for communications like this, so to connect into a region, you only need to know the details of one other node.

As a first pass, there’s no consensus or authentication needed for this. You say that you’re in a region and you’re in it.

That’s not going to work in the longer term, as bad actors will just join a region. For a more detailed approach, we’re waiting for the next release of the P2Panda library, scheduled sometime in October, as it will implement group access control as outlined in this blog post.

To reach testing stage we need

• Nodes can “create” a new region
• Nodes can specify a region, and another node, and join that region

To be production ready we need

• Nodes can request to join a region
• Some sort of consensus approach to allowing a node is needed (a certain % of existing nodes needs to agree perhaps)