High Desert Institute
2025-03-07: Exciting News about Cyberpony Express Partnerships and Upcoming Workshop
We have just confirmed the date and time for our first big partnership project! We are hosting a Cyberpony Express workshop at Burning Man global headquarters on March 13th at 7pm!
This workshop will be a collaboration with Burning Man, Burners Without Borders, The Multiverse School and Liz The Developer to present the status of the technology and the project. We will also discuss the High Desert Institute Lorekeeper’s Guild’s efforts to deploy Cyberpony Express nodes at community gardens in order to empower them to serve as communications and resource hubs for disaster preparedness and response.
The network we are building will be free and public, enabling anyone to communicate securely without needing to use the internet or public cell phone networks.
This project began as a discussion around a campfire at a land project in Tennessee, where people discussed how we could build an off-grid internet to enable secure, off-grid text messaging between intentional communities without using the public internet or other fragile infrastructure.
It was immediately obvious that this would also be enormously beneficial for things like disaster preparedness and response.
Further conversations led to the idea of hosting the nodes of this network in community gardens which are already hubs of communications and resource distribution.
The Cyberpony Express was born!
LoRa
The technology we are using for the Cyberpony Express is called LoRa or long-range radio. This is an open-source technology which uses a free, open-source software stack called Meshtastic to enable secure, end-to-end-encrypted communication between devices across distances of twenty miles or more.
Additionally, it natively supports mesh networking, meaning you’re able to reach people several hops away across multiple nodes. A city like San Francisco is only seven miles across, meaning this technology is enormously powerful in terms of enabling secure and resilient communications, especially during disasters.
Next Steps
The High Desert Institute is partnering with Burning Man, Burners Without Borders, and The Multiverse School to throw an initial workshop at Burning Man Global Headquarters on March 13th at 7pm. This will cover the plans, the technology, and the partnerships we’ve been working on developing so far.
We are also launching a GoFundMe to accept restricted donations that can only be spent on installing Cyberpony Express nodes, and an online store where you can buy assembled nodes, stickers, or stickers which sponsor the installation of a node.
Consider Sponsoring the Installation of a Node
You can give a restricted donation via GoFundMe which can only be spent on the cost of installing nodes…
https://www.gofundme.com/f/cyberpony-express-free-and-offgrid-communications
Here is a flyer for the upcoming workshop which you can share on socials:
