Foundations of Amateur Radio

During the week, prompted by a protest on popular social media site Reddit, I rediscovered that there are other places to spend time. It sounds absurd now, but until then much of my social interaction with the world was via a single online presence. This didn't happen overnight. Over the years more and more of my time was spent on Reddit engaging with other humans around topics of my interest, amateur radio being one of them.

As you might know, I'm the host of a weekly net, F-troop. It's an on-air radio discussion for new and returning amateurs that's been running since 2011 and you can join in every Saturday for an hour at midnight UTC.

In addition to the net, there's an online component. It captures items of interest shared during the on-air conversation. It's intended to stop the need to read out web addresses on-air, create a historic record of the things we talk about and allow people who are not yet amateurs to explore the kinds of things that capture our interest.

Since 2014, F-troop online was a website that I maintained. After the announced demise of the service in 2020 I explored dozens of alternatives and landed on the idea to move to Reddit, which happened in March of 2021.

At the time of selecting Reddit as the successor to the website, I wanted to create a space where anyone could add content and discuss it, rather than rely on a single individual, me, to update the website every time something was mentioned. During the net these days you'll often hear me ask a person to post that on Reddit.

This to illustrate, at a small scale, how the F-troop community shares its knowledge with each other and the wider community.

With the realisation that there are other places to spend time, comes an uneasy feeling about how we build our online communities, and how resilient they really are.

Before the Internet our amateur radio community talked on-air, or in person at club meetings, or shared their interests in a magazine, or wrote letters. Today we congregate online in many different communities. If one of those fails or loses favour, finding those people elsewhere can be challenging, especially if those communities prefer anonymity.

For quite some time now I have been thinking about how to build a radio amateur specific online community. The issues to surface, address and overcome are wide and varied. I created a list ... hands up if you're surprised ... I will point out that I'm sure it's incomplete, your additions and comments are welcome.

Funding is the first item to consider. All of this costs time and money. Amateurs are notorious for their deep pockets and short arms, but they're no different from much of humanity. If this community needs to endure, it needs to be financially sustainable from the outset.

Authentication and Identity is the next priority. If it's for amateurs, how do you verify and enforce that and what happens if an amateur decides not to renew their callsign, do they stop being an amateur? Should this community be anonymous or not?

Moderation and Content is next on the list. What types of content are "permitted"? What is the process to regulate and enforce it?

Is this forum public and accessible via a search engine, or private? Can people who are not yet amateurs benefit from the community and use it to learn?

How do you set rules of conduct and how do you update them? How do you deal with rule infractions and how do you scale that?

Who is this for? Is it decentralised across each callsign prefix, across a DXCC entity, or based on some other selection criteria?

Can you have more than one account, or only one per person, or one per callsign?

What about machine accounts, like a local beacon, repeater, solar battery, radio link, propagation skimmer or other equipment?

What about bots and APIs? If that doesn't mean anything, a bot, short for robot, is a piece of software that can do things, like mark content as being Not Safe For Work, or NSFW, or it could enforce rules, or look-up callsigns, or share the latest propagation forecast or check for duplicates, scale an image, convert Morse code, check for malicious links, or anything you might want in an online community. The way a program like a bot, or a mobile client, or a screen reader, or a desktop application talks to the community is using an API, or an Application Programming Interface.

Incidentally, the protest at Reddit is about starting to charge for access to the API, something which will immediately affect software developers and eventually the entire Reddit community, even if many don't yet realise this.

What about system backups and availability? How seriously are we taking this community? Is there going to be a Service Level Agreement, or are we going to run it on a best-effort basis? How long is it acceptable for your community to be inaccessible?

What about content archiving and ageing? Do we keep everything forever, do we have an archive policy? What happens if a topic that's permitted one year isn't permitted a year later?

And those are just to start the discussion.

There are plenty of options for places to start building another community, but will they last more than a couple of years, or be subject to the same effects that a Coronal Mass Ejection causes on HF propagation, being wildly random and immensely disruptive?

At the moment I'm exploring an email list as a place to store our F-troop data and I intend to discuss archiving it in the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.

Where is your online community and how resilient is it really?

I'm Onno VK6FLAB