Community mesh networks aren't a product. They're a posture — a small, friendly, anti-perfectionist bet that a handful of people with $60 radios can build something useful for the place they live. KC Mesh exists because Austin Mesh existed first, and the version of this site you're reading exists because Cascadia Mesh figured out a clearer way to talk about hosted infrastructure.
None of that is proprietary. It shouldn't be. If you're trying to seed a mesh in your own city and any of this saves you a weekend, please take it. The site content here is offered under the same CC-BY-SA 4.0 license Austin Mesh uses — keep it open, share the next version forward.
What you can use
The words
Copy any sentence on this site. Rewrite it for your city, your terrain, your community's quirks. The anti-dogma framing — "15 feet is fine," "indoor sometimes works," "deployed imperfect beats theoretical perfect" — was hard-won over a lot of arguments online. You don't have to relitigate it.
The structure
A homepage, a Get Started, a Host a Node, a Discord, a coverage map. That's the whole thing. You don't need a forum, a wiki, a Substack, or a 501(c)(3). Keep it small. Keep it scannable. Let the Discord carry the real-time stuff.
The host-a-node ask
The framing on our Host a Node page — businesses with rooftops, ham operators with repeater sites, billboard owners along interstates — works in any metro. Swap the highways and city names. The pitch is the same: "you already have what we need."
The code
This site is a small Astro app, public on GitHub under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Fork it, gut it, swap out the city name and the highway list, and you've got a working starting point. There's nothing in there worth gatekeeping.
Who we stole from
Credit where it's due. This site is a link in a chain.
Where this whole posture comes from. Austin Mesh runs their site under a CC-BY-SA share-alike license — they explicitly want other cities to copy it. The welcoming tone, the prosumer framing, the quarterly meetings, the running list of partner meshes across the country: all theirs first. If you can only read one other mesh site, read theirs.
The current refresh of this site is built on what Cascadia is doing — the Backbone Initiative framing, the host-a-node ask, the 'a billboard owner outside Mayfield' kind of storytelling. A lot of the language on the Host a Node page is a direct descendant of theirs.
Before you start one — find your nearest mesh
Two cities don't need two meshes. If there's already a community within an hour's drive, join theirs first — show up to a meeting, learn how they operate, and build a chapter or a partner mesh instead of a competitor.
Austin Mesh maintains the running list of partner meshes in the US (Bay Area, SoCal, Chicago, Colorado, Nashville, Birmingham, Asheville, Charlotte, North Texas, South Texas, Hawaii, Ohio, Wisconsin, Northwest Arkansas, OkMesh, Philadelphia, and more). Start there.
Austin Mesh: Similar NetworksBeyond the website: actually growing a community
The site is the easy part. Growing the community is harder, and Austin Mesh has already said most of what's worth saying. The condensed version:
Have regular meetings
Quarterly works. Sometimes 30 people show up, sometimes it's three of you at a bar. The point is that anyone who misses one knows there's another coming. Cadence beats turnout.
Start a Discord (or Slack, or Telegram) and an email list
The Discord carries the day-to-day. The email list catches people who don't want to live in Discord — which is a lot of older operators, and they're the ones with the towers.
Talk to your local ham radio clubs
They know radio. They have access to towers and rooftops. They are often delighted to be asked about anything that isn't 2-meter repeater drama. Go to a meeting. Bring a node.
Talk to local mutual aid and disaster relief groups
Red Cross, ARES, neighborhood preparedness groups, community emergency response teams. They have buildings. They care about resilient comms. The emergency-comms framing opens doors that the hobby framing alone won't.
Brag in public when something works
Solar node up? Post it. New router on a billboard? Post it. Somewhere two suburbs over, someone has a node sitting on their desk — they didn't see traffic, so they stopped checking. Your post is what gets them to turn it back on.
Fly a node, once a week, if you can
Anyone in the community with a drone coordinates a weekly time, lifts a node to altitude for a few minutes, and a separate node on the ground (set to client_mute so it doesn't clog routing) blasts a few messages inviting people to the Discord. Most of the people you reach this way are folks who bought a node, didn't see traffic, and left it on a shelf. They may not see your message right then — but they'll see it in the coming days or weeks. In larger meshes (200+ online nodes) the airborne node can be configured as ROUTER. (Borrowed straight from Austin Mesh — they wrote it first.)
Almost all of this is borrowed, in spirit, from Austin Mesh's "How to start a similar network" guide. If anything here is useful, go read theirs in full — it's longer, more specific, and more battle-tested.
If you're just starting
Deploy one router before you build the website. A real node on a real roof gives you something to point at. Without it, the site is just a manifesto.
Start the Discord on day one. Even if it's empty. The network is the people, and the people need a place to be. Mesh-on-radio is for messages; Discord is for figuring out what to build next.
Resist the urge to centralize. No bylaws. No officers. No membership tiers. The minute it starts feeling like a club is the minute the most interesting people stop showing up.
Tell the truth about what doesn't work. Every mesh has dead zones, dropped messages, and nodes that quietly fall off the network for weeks. Honesty about that earns more trust than another glossy coverage claim.
Say hi
If anything on this site inspired you, drop us a line. No agenda — just curious where the next one is going to be, and happy to share whatever's been useful here.