2025-11-08 –, Room 145
The Seattle Community Network is a volunteer-based, grassroots, nonprofit community ISP with a small operating budget (currently averaging $10-$50K in grants, donations, or in-kind contributions per year) that installs and provides internet access for homeless shelters; the services we provide to our users is critical infrastructure for their daily lives. This talk discusses some of the core operational challenges we face, the software infrastructure we use to meet those challenges, and its limitations.
SCN uses a lot of free and open-source software (FOSS) in our production network, often self-hosted on hardware we own, which dramatically reduces our operating costs and gives our volunteers access and exposure to more advanced functionality. Our software "stack" is dynamic and evolving, based on volunteers’ interests, capacities, and opinions on how we should operate and organize. Examples range from an internal site management VPN that helps our volunteers conduct remote troubleshooting, to a custom-written Discord bot that allows us to create and manage shared volunteer tasks in a ticketing system. At the same time, self-hosting FOSS comes with risks and responsibilities. For example, maintaining hardware redundancy, disaster recovery procedures, and data backups falls to us, a group of passionate but time-constrained volunteers. We discuss methods for managing these risks, and welcome suggestions and proposals for how to improve our processes.
Our methods will be most useful for other community networks featuring similar organizational styles that seek to minimize operating costs. The time, technical labor, and expertise that our volunteers contribute allows us to save money. As a DIY "community learning network," we collectively enjoy and gain valuable experience from configuring and maintaining SCN's software stack. Doing so, and writing public documentation about it, furthers our mission of contributing technical knowledge and facilitating learning experiences for the broader public.
Esther is a newly graduated PhD turned postdoc in Computer Science at the University of Washington. She is the Director at the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Local Connectivity Lab (LCL). She founded the Seattle Community Network (SCN) in 2019, building DIY Internet infrastructure for digital equity. She has installed community networks in the US and around the world, and teaches technical networking at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB).
Esther's projects tend to center around DIY, empowerment, and pedagogy. For example- building communities of practice to sustain technical infrastructures, and vice versa.