Dependency removed: Individual isolation during infrastructure failures - a community with shared capabilities is more resilient than any individual node.
Individual resilience has real limits. A household can run self-hosted services and maintain communications, but community-scale events require community-scale responses. Community resilience is the coordination layer: shared infrastructure, mutual aid, and distributed knowledge that amplifies individual capability.
A community of 10 households where each has basic digital resilience capabilities, and where those capabilities are networked together, is dramatically more resilient than 10 isolated households each at a higher individual level.
- Community infrastructure - shared servers, mesh nodes, and local services jointly operated by a community; governance and maintenance responsibilities
- Mutual aid - formal and informal support networks; resource sharing during disruptions; communication trees
- Shared services - Matrix homeserver, Nextcloud, and wiki accessible to community members on the local network
- Knowledge sharing - community skill inventory; training events; documented procedures shared on the local wiki
| Model |
Description |
Best For |
| Central node |
One household hosts services for all |
Small trusted groups |
| Federated mesh |
Each household hosts their own, interconnected |
Larger communities |
| Cooperative |
Jointly owned hardware, shared maintenance |
Formal community organizations |
| Volunteer network |
Tor-style volunteer contribution |
Broader reach, lower commitment |
- Trust models - who can access what; how trust is established and revoked; handling bad actors
- Community standards - acceptable use policies; content standards for shared platforms
- Distributed administration - avoiding single admin as bottleneck; key escrow; succession planning
- Decision making - how changes to shared infrastructure are approved; conflict resolution
- Map your immediate community: who else in your area has digital resilience interest?
- Identify shared dependencies: what services would be better run collectively than individually?
- Start with communications: a shared Meshtastic mesh or local Matrix instance is low-barrier and high-value
- Document everything: a shared wiki (like this one) accessible on the local LAN is the foundation of community knowledge preservation