Use case: one street
Your street already has what you need. A node makes it findable, offline.
On a street, a node runs on radios the neighbours own, with no cloud and no gatekeeper. The people who grow, make and fix things there become visible to the people around them.
This is one use case of Clansurf. See the whole idea.
- Size
- Up to the people in it. Here, about 200 metres of street
- Inside it
- Makers of every kind, with the supporters and maintainers around them
- Owned by
- The people who live there
- Status
- Beta. The first 25 nodes are starting now.
The problem
Eggs from two doors down shouldn’t need a server in another country.
More and more of what people need every day, from food and water to repairs, now reaches them through an app. The app runs on someone else’s servers, decides who appears, and stops working when the connection drops.
Meanwhile the neighbour who sells eggs stays invisible to the people fifty metres away. They start to think nobody wants what they make.
Today
- You
- A data planYou need to be online
- An app accountThe platform decides who’s listed
- A server abroadDown when the network is
- The platformSets the rules
- Your neighbour50 metres away
With a node
- You
- The node radioOn your street
- Your neighbour50 metres away
Same neighbour, same eggs. Nothing sits in between.
We’re not inventing anything. The milk, the eggs and the carpenter are already there. A node makes them easy to find and reach for the people who live nearby.
- Visible
- Everyone in the node can see who produces what, within a few minutes’ walk.
- Reachable
- It runs on small radios that talk to each other directly. No data plan, no app store.
- Shared
- What the node produces stays with the node.
How it works
Everything runs offline. It syncs when it can.
A node has three layers. The first two never need the internet. The third keeps an honest record and publishes it whenever a connection turns up, so anyone can check what happened.
- Up top: a public copy of the record, reached only when there’s a connection (the dashed line)
- On the roofs: radios relaying messages to each other (1)
- On the street: makers, supporters and maintainers (2)
- On the middle roof: the governance node, signing the record (3)
-
Offline
Hardware
Small LoRa radios carry messages across the neighbourhood, each one repeating for the next. People can discover and reach each other with no mobile data at all.
The kit belongs to the locality outright.
-
Offline
Community
The node itself: the makers, the supporters who use what they offer, and the maintainers who keep it running. The people who live there decide who joins, who leaves and who leads.
Clansurf never decides who belongs.
-
Syncs
Governance node
The device signs every delivery and receipt and adds it to a local record nobody can quietly change. When a connection is available, a copy goes to a public record that anyone can check from anywhere.
It records each delivery and who made it.
If the connection is gone for a week, nothing stops. The record is just a week late.
Built to last
No cloud, no gatekeeper.
A platform is only as reliable as its servers. A node belongs to the street it serves, so it keeps working when they fail.
| An app platform | A Clansurf node | |
|---|---|---|
| Needs the internet | Always | No. Radio across the street |
| Who decides who’s listed | The company | The people who live there |
| Where the record lives | Company servers | Local devices, with a public copy anyone can check |
| If the company folds | It’s gone | Nothing changes. The kit belongs to the locality |
During a blackout
The lights are out and the network is down. The node radios keep running, and the street still knows who has water.
Questions
The things people ask first.
There are already apps for finding people nearby.
Those people existed long before the apps. The apps didn’t create the carpenter or the milkman. They put a uniform on them and built a gate in front. A node makes them visible and leaves them independent.
So is this a hardware project?
No. The radios are a tool. What really goes into a neighbourhood is governance: who belongs, who maintains the node, what’s public and who decides. The hardware lets all of that run without anyone’s permission.
Is a street the only kind of node?
No. A street is the first use case we’ve written up. A node can also be people far apart, linked by what they own and offer. Say, someone in Norway whose own server helps someone in Mauritius. See the whole idea.
What does Clansurf do for a node?
We help choose the kit and set up the node. The people in it write their own rules, and we train the maintainers until they don’t need us. Then we step back, and everything belongs to the people in the node.
Where can I read the details?
The working paper covers the radio bands by country, the governance rules, how the record works offline and what happens in a blackout. It’s at paper.clansurf.com.
Work with us
Start with one street.
We help a community set up its node, then step back once it runs without us. We’re looking for the first places and people to build with. Write to us if you are:
- in a neighbourhood that could host a node, or maintain one
- someone who has run a LoRa mesh in the field and knows what breaks