Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

Summary

Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications. Unfortunately, the necessary changes are risky and expensive, which means they won’t do it until a crisis is already here. However, small groups of volunteers with a little bit of time and money can provide crucial initial leadership to bootstrap recovery. An Internet Resiliency Club is a group of internet experts who can communicate with each other across a few kilometers without any centralized infrastructure using cheap, low-power, unlicensed LoRa radios and open source Meshtastic text messaging software. These volunteer groups can use their radios, technical skills, and personal connections with other experts to restore internet connectivity. This page is a quick-start guide to forming your own Internet Resiliency Club. You can also join a mailing list for general questions and discussion about internet resiliency clubs: https://lists.bowshock.nl/mailman/listinfo/irc About the author I am Valerie Aurora, a systems software engineer with 25 years of experience in open source software, operating systems, networking, file systems, and volunteer organizing. When I moved from San Francisco to Amsterdam in 2023, I started looking for ways to give back to my new home. In addition to systems consulting, I am a special rapporteur for the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act, serve as a RIPE Meeting program committee member, and speak at European technical conferences. Why Internet Resiliency Club? One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work, and when I turn on the emergency radio (if you have one), all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat. As a recent immigrant to Amsterdam, I began to realize that this nightmare was increasingly likely. Russia regularly knocks out communicat...