That wasn’t my primary point here, but seemed applicable since you did end up back in the same territory and in reflecting that I’d only covered part of your question, it also came to mind that we’d been down this path to a similar destination. If you’d had the chance to email all the 100 or so people you thought would be responding to your Shouts on your trip I referenced above, I wonder what the results would have been other than causing a lot of people to engage in regrets over setting themselves up to get more spam?
I raise this question not to assert that was either your goal or intention, but due to the voluntary nature of the map. Just guessing but like many ways in which people are invited to self-report, participation varies but is typically a fraction of the user base. Adding in a way for random strangers to send everyone an email would I suspect, on balance, render the map less useful in the long term.
It’s important to remember that goTenna Mesh is used by a array of users that span the spectrum in terms of their comfort with security and privacy. You seem to be towards the end of the spectrum that maps to similar comfort to that found around ham operators, outgoing and interested in making lots of contacts.
At the other end are people like one of my fellow beta testers. She has considerable expertise with internet security, with a particular interest in privacy. In her opinion, there are ways in which things could be further tightened in this regard, so I’m pretty sure she’d be aghast at this idea.
I’m probably right in the middle of these polar opposites. I would have no problem doing this with the nodes that make up UMESH, because I can see it as a way to engage with users and garner support for network expansion. If it were an OPTION, I’d use it. But I’m not at all sure that you’d find the results system wide to be what you’d like them to be.
I’m also not sure it would help with what I hope is a trend. Having an established and connected area in the center of an urban area like UMESH is tends to encourage those at its fringes to engage in self-help. They know there is mesh network service nearby, so placing their own node along its edges or within it to either extend or improve its service gives them access to the existing coverage. With UMESH, that effort would be rewarded with a tie into a centrally located network that already covers about 3.5 square miles.
Would it be nice to know who else might be contributing to the mesh? Sure, it would be rewarding as all heck.
On the other hand, even friends and colleagues who have cooperated in hosting nodes aren’t necessarily all that interested in being identified. I tend to locate the node pins within a one block radius of the actual location to help preserve the privacy of the node-host. Others are spot-on. So you can’t necessarily count on the location and your seeming proximity to it accounting for a lack of service. And the independent nodes that are erected in and around the fringe of UMESH could be both a source of additional service and be mistaken, when they go down, for a problem that I need to resolve when I likely know nothing more than what is provided on the map.
Speaking of including your GID as an option, that’s already possible to do in the notes you can add to each node. I’m doing this right now in creating the interactive UMESH map that is screen-shotted in the UMESH thread. I’m sure there are some people who’ve already added a GID to their node description, but the fact that most have not suggests many won’t. Our discussion may prompt some to do so, but this also underscores why it might become only a defined fill-in-the-blank option vs the somewhat low-key option as it currently exists.
