Community Building Tutorial

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by Rishabh Chauhan

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Posted on June 6, 2016

#Community

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Introduction

Pre-Requisite Research

Mission

Team

Active Coverage

Prototyping

Showcase

Introduction

With a small group of people it is possible to provide an entire city with data connectivity for things. In a period of 6 weeks the city-wide coverage of Amsterdam was crowdsourced and implemented.

This tutorial will give a step by step instruction on building The Things Network community right from scratch. There are 6 steps in total:

Pre-Requisite Research

Homepage

Find out how the story began in Amsterdam and what is the vision behind The Things Network.

Check out the nearest community from the map and how you can contribute in your area

Wiki

The wiki will give you an overview of the technology and how everything works together.

Specification about different components and other terminology will be explained here.

What is the local mission of the community?

Have a look at our Manifest

The Things Network commits to this manifest and we expect you to do so.

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Team

When kicking off things at your end, the community would rely on diverse team of contributors that would be part of the mission.

Appointing such a team is the best way to assemble the knowledge and breadth required to pull off many of the tasks in building the network.

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Active Coverage

The next step now is to find out about the coverage in your area. Check the map on the campaign page to see which if there are any active gateways nearby.

Area under active gateway will be highlighted in the map. For example in New York

*Check out the local legislation with regards to RF use

If there is no coverage then you can either purchase a gateway or find a contributor/organization which is keen to do so.

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Prototyping

Show your team and community how it all works. The wiki will help you to get started with the live demo.

Frequently occurring questions are documented on Forum, members here are quite active and would be able to help out in case you get stuck.

Make it more relevant by connecting it with your local reality. In Amsterdam the boat-water sensor example was a good way of leveraging from the local use-case.

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Showcase

Now that you are done with all the previous steps it is time to showcase the community to the world. Draft your local story and contact some of the local media that would be interested in covering the project.

Time to organize a meetup and increase the number of contributors and upscale it further. While all of this is happening do make sure to capitalize on the social media buzz. Ensure that the community has an active twitter account with # trend created for the area.

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Contact Us

Feel free to drop a line (community@thethingsnetwork.org) or tweet us @thethingsntwrk.