Hi,
creating and building a community consists to a large extent of finding all possible community members in a region, contacting them and building the community together. The second aspect is currently not supported by the missing function in the TtheThingsStack Community Edition. This leads to discontent in numerous communities, which is made clear by various forks (Chirpstack etc.) or inactivity.
In order to build up and expand the local communities in a consistent and targeted manner, we urgently need some features that were available in v2/ of the old community homepage, but unfortunately are no longer available.
There are exactly two functions.
- The linking of the gateway operator
For all gateways, if the operator activates this option, the name or the link to the operatorâs member profile should also be displayed.
Whether this feature is only visible to logged-in community members should be considered from the perspective of the GDPR, but is not relevant for the purposes of community development. 2.
- The mail form in the member profiles
This form is the only way to contact operators of new or misconfigured gateways and is therefore of fundamental importance for building and maintaining communities.
Furthermore, this form can be used to ensure communication without having to know the mail address of the individual members. Access to this form can be restricted to registered users of the console.
Why do communities need this function?
- Numerous, especially new operators of gateways set this up, struggle alone for a certain length of time, lose interest and the gateways disappear from the map again. If it is possible to invite these new operators into a community in this way, the chance of strengthening TTN as a whole is significantly greater.
- New gateways with incorrect GPS coordinates or GPS factory settings, e.g. the Dragino factory in China, regularly appear. So far, the local community has usually taken care of such gateways, which is not possible now.
For this last topic, we would also like to have a way to contact the operators of gateways that have set the visibility to private. In order to meet the requirements of the GDPR, however, this should only be done in the form of concrete notifications to TTN and then by TTN directly. Concrete and verifiable reasons should be defined that allow TTN to intervene.
I have also opened an issue on this topic in Gitub and look forward to a constructive discussion of the topic here in the forum. Here the Link to Github
Steffen Gray
Initiator TTN Mitteldeutschland
This topic was discussed in advance with the following communities or their initiators, who support the content:
TTN Apeldoorn
TTN Halle-Saalekreis
TTN Harz
TTN Kiel
TTN MĂźnchen
TTN Osterland
TTN Paderborn
TTN Passau Freyung-Grafenau
TTN Rhein-Sieg
TTN Stuttgart
TTN SĂźdschleswig
TTN Westsachsen
TTN Wiesbaden