TL;DR: MemHamWAN will be sponsoring a roundtable net on Brandmeister talkgroup 448 on the 1st Tuesday of the month at 6 PM CT (8 PM ET). We'd love for you to come and talk about your interest in HamWAN next Tuesday.
Hi HamWAN PSDR,
Welcome from the group in Memphis! We're trying to face head-on an ongoing issue of awareness and understanding of the HamWAN project in our community. We haven’t done club presentations lately, and some people in our target audience (more computer oriented) don’t really frequent clubs.
One of the things that we can do is to create a more discoverable and present community. We don’t do a good job of talking about our part of the hobby on the radio! I think a good way to spur that on is to schedule a time for us to have a round table discussion.
We could establish a time every month whenwe light up the local repeaters, converging on popular modes that demonstrate the network’s capabilities like in hosting and linking allstar (analog) and brandmeister (DMR). We light up the repeaters and start discussions on general topics: what’s new with the project, what are some of our sibling organizations doing, and how are we using ham radio in our day-to-day lives. We could leverage Brandmeisters “plant a flag” idea and claim talkgroup 448 (an homage to AMPRNet which makes our project possible, 44.0.0.0/8). If that goes well, next we could investigate setting up a DMR-to-Allstar bridge for analog, and maybe finally a WIRES-X room since so many amateur clubs are using that. This would be a setting for anyone to come and talk about things HamWAN or related topics. It might be an opportunity for newcomers to ask questions, get to know one another, or even plan upcoming work. For people who aren’t invested enough to be on Slack (MEM) or IRC (PSDR), it might be a good time to check in with one another. Most importantly, it would be a way to raise awareness to the project and help inspire new innovations and uses. There’s the matter of cadence. I think we should start low just to avoid burnout since we’ll probably have a repeating core group here. The pace of innovation in the group seems to be about monthly.
While the "problem" identified here is scoped to our local group in Memphis, I imagine there is a good bit of overlap with other organizations as well. There may be some region-specific discussions, but those may serve to inspire oneanother in productive ways! It would also help foster a wider sense of community around users and maintainers of HamWAN, and finally share the burden of maintaining this sort of dialog.
Please join us for the first session on Tuesday, May 4 at 6 PM PT on Brandmeister talkgroup 448 for the first HamWAN Roundtable.
[PS: after the discussion we'd love your feedback!](https://forms.gle/wW7nWTuwNd3KAEZP9)
73,
K0RET
