RC Tech Admin

• Tools and Resources for Other Groups
• Ridgewood Commons Weekly Schedule
• Ridgewood Commons Upcoming Schedule
• Ridgewood Commons Weekly Schedule (Espanol)
• Using Jitsi
• Meeting Notes
• TechComms Meeting notes 07/26/25
• TechComms Meeting Notes 08/04/2025
• Comms/Tech Meeting 09/09/2025
• Impromptou working session 8 may
• Backdrop CMS Coop Cloud Recipe
• Hosting
• Pricing and integration comparison
• Backdrop/Drupal Calendar proof of concept
• Wiki
• May First reportback
• Bookstack Dev Notes
• Single Type Limited Access UX Experiments
• Misc Dev Notes
• Combo Books/Pages Permissions Testing
• Wiki organization proposals
• Idle thoughts and TBD agenda items
• TechComms problems self-interview
• [brainstorming] how to make an event-specific announcement chat
• Password manager research
• [Sketching] Communications flow for WG feedback loop
• Forms Fields
• Rental Application
• Film Screening Proposal Form
• Programming at Ridgewood Commons
• [Sketching] Email lists
• LP RC announce draft
• Spokes Updates
• 2025-09-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update
• 2025-10-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update
• 2025-12-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update
• Riseup subscription flow
• Ridgewood Commons Media Assets
• Facade pictures
• Textures and Type
• Comps
• Donation platform level images
• General Info Sign
• Funding Support Link Sign Short v1
• Link Sheet - Financial Support, Socials, Nonsocials
• Funding Support Link Sign Long v1
• Link Sheet - Rental and Programming
• HowTo: Membership tracking
• Membership Tracking Overview
• Infrastructure
• Internet
• Comms stories
• June 2026 State of the Infra
• Mediawiki Test Install Documentation
• Backdrop/Drupal based site experimental docs
• Calendar interfaces
• Wiki on Pikapods
• HOPE 26

Tools and Resources for Other Groups

Ridgewood Commons Weekly Schedule

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Monday
	Food Pantry Distribution		8-10 am
	Yoga		7 pm
	Meditation		8:15 pm
Tuesday
	Coworking Open Hours	Free coffee, assorted snacks	10am - 4pm
	Circuit Hacking (basement)	Buy a cheap ($2-5 project to build from us or bring something to repair or work on.	8 pm
	Community Ceramics + Election Results Watch	sliding scale, see: tinyartssupply.com	6:30-9 pm
	Letter Writing to Political Prisoners	Materials provided!	7-9 pm
Wednesday
	Food Pantry Distribution		8-10 am
	Film Screening	“Punishment Park” (1971)	7:30 pm
Thursday
	Writing Workshop		7-9 pm
Friday
	Gym Meditation		9:15 am
Saturday
	CSA		10:00 am
	Youth Tutoring		12:00 noon
Sunday
	Bake Sale	Sweets and savories made by Ridgewood Commons community members.	11am-3pm
	Community Dinner		7:30

Ridgewood Commons
585 Woodward Ave
Queens, NYC, 11235

For socials and support platforms see:
ridgewoodcommons.nyc

Ridgewood Commons Upcoming Schedule

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Sunday, Nov 9
	Bake Sale	Come to gaze upon, buy, and eat sundry savories and sweets prepared by Ridgewood Commons community members. Money raised will help to pay rent and support our continued existence.	11am-3 pm
Tuesday Nov 11			7 pm
	Coworking Open Hours	Free coffee, assorted snacks	10am - 4 pm
	Disengineering Workshop	Make a hacked distortion amp. Disengineering Society’s hardware-hacking workshops emphasize chaos, radical collaboration, electronic screeches, and a devout commitment to combating “planned obsolescence”. @disengineering dis.engineering	6:30-11 pm
Sunday, Nov 16			6:30-9 pm
	Board Game Night		3-7 pm

Ridgewood Commons
585 Woodward Ave
Queens, NYC, 11235

For socials and support platforms see:
ridgewoodcommons.nyc

Ridgewood Commons Weekly Schedule (Espanol)

Lunes
	Distribución de despensas de alimentos		8-10 am
	Yoga		7 pm
	Meditation		8:15 pm
Martes
	Horario de apertura de espacios de coworking	Café gratis, aperitivos variados	10am - 4pm
	Hackeo de circuitos (sótano)	Compra un proyecto económico (de 2 a 5 dólares) para construir con nosotros o trae algo para reparar o en lo que trabajar.	8 pm
	Escritura de cartas a presas políticas	¡Materiales incluidos!	7-9 pm
Miércoles
	Distribución de despensas de alimentos		8-10 am
Jueves
Viernes
	Meditación en el gimnasio		9:15 am
Sábado
	Agricultura apoyada por la comunidad		10:00 am
	Tutoría para jóvenes		12:00 noon
Domingo
	Cena comunitaria		7:30 pm

Este horario en español es un pequeño intento de ayudar a que más personas se sientan bienvenidas e informadas sobre lo que ocurre en nuestro espacio. Tenga en cuenta que la mayoría de los eventos se realizan en inglés, y su experiencia puede variar según el evento.

Para redes sociales y plataformas de apoyo, consulte:
ridgewoodcommons.nyc (Actualmente solo en inglés)

Using Jitsi

List of open instances:
https://ladatano.partidopirata.com.ar/jitsimeter/

You have to run a "test" first, and then will get a list of active open instances.

For shared wireless projector use

Meeting Notes

TechComms Meeting notes 07/26/25

Attendance: LP, P, J----

Agenda

No agenda

Notes

What is the history of communications in space, challenges?

Mailing lists, moved to signal groups (30+ groups)

Groups are mixture of open/closed, some groups developed 2nd chats: Pantry/Pantry regulars, Kitchen/Kitchen 2

Operations chat

Comms issues:

Signal to noise
Shared culture
"Missability" / ease of missing notifications in groups
Discoverability / Invitationality / Lack of way-finding / sense of place

Mention of previous comms work being done by Ella/LP via operations group, inspired by Spanish squat with plaques per group.

Review of gym operations and culture

585 has no...
..bulletin board
..community chat
.."democratic" or aggregation-based broadcast system 

Issue: Information isolated in DMs

Interview groups re: comms problems, within group, with other groups, with greater org?

Why would groups want to talk to each other?

"Comms towards collective culture"

Desire to cultivate vibe sharing & a sense of care about other groups, even without involvement

Minimum set of projects/services to support RC

• Website
• Calendar
• Email
• Mailing-lists
• Donor platform
• Social media tech (registration, credentials, documentation, "workflow")
• Doc store (if only for core spokes functionality)

~~~

• Strategy
• Outside communication

What is actually needed in intra-group comms?

Website

• Explain the space
• Code of conduct
• Calendar
• Onboarding
• Group list / who uses the space / entry points

~~~

• Forms: General contact form, rental inquiries, issue reports (facilities, tech).

Calendar

• Rental booking
• Public event listing
• Program scheduling
• Meeting schedules

What does calendar represent? Main space, gym, basement?

Email

• Connection point for financial and contractual issues
• Variety of emails for specific functionality
• No personal emails

Transparency?
Hosting?

Domain

ridgewoodcommons.nyc 3/3 votes
commons.nyc - experimental staging and link shortening

Mailing Lists

• Rise-up
• Hosted via electric embers (https://electricembers.coop/services/sign-up/)

Donor platform

• Pact (open collective)
• Camraderie
• Patreon
• Withfriends

Donor strategy? Presence on many platforms with seasonal push to preferred platform? Single platform? Use of actual Patron features re: perks?

Social Media

As above, this group should be limited to tech aspects, not directly involved in content.

Doc Store

When is shared docs useful, when is it not?

Some obvious stronger intra-group comms, e.g. finance with rentals

Action items

TechComms Meeting Notes 08/04/2025

Agenda

Two streams of work

1. bootstrapping new space in a low-friction way that allow us to interface with each other and the outside world and continue to survive

2. transitioning culture and practices for the future

   • doing working group outreach to understands:
     • what is currently working for individuals / groups
     • what wants and needs exist
     • how disruptive and in what way potential changes would be
   • external outreach and research into alternative tools & infrastructure

Near-future needs:

• website
  • starting with a simpler static self-hosted site feels reasonable to me
• email & calendar
  • Vanessa set up a gmail account for email & calendar
• mailing list
• donor platform
• social media tech
• document store

Notes

• bookstack is totally public as it is. we had to redact contact info from the charters

• llama bought the .nyc domain

  • last meeting we talked about full domain for external facing and commons.nyc for experimental stating, link-shortening, and

• desire for semantic emails. info

• p cm: most pressing action items seem to me to be

  • static landing page (or just a linktree) and audience capture

    • mailing list

      • mvp could be just setting up subscribe@ridgewoodcommons.nyc

      • could be a simple as a mailto link on a linktree (but this could be confusing for less techy / younger people)

      • how many people are actually on the current mailing list?

        • there are many list and we don't know how many people are subbed and where they are or if they are paying any attention

        • we can use riseup for free, or pay electric embers- this would allow our org to create a bunch of WG- or task-specific email lists

        • micro: we need to disclose guarantees for any services we provide

        • LP willing to do due dilligence on mailing list providers

      • MVP is a mailtolink and/or contact form

    • social media

    • donors

    instagram annoucement: - dual post on IG between the WB and RC - next steps, set up business for IG-- gives us analytics api access which would let us use tooling like buffer, zapier etc - who even controls that account

    next action items:

    - lp: do due diligence on mailing list providers, write or collect blurbs for working groups
    
    - micro: set up landing page with links to
    
        - donation platform
    
        - email list signup
    
        - social links
    
        - blurb for public-facing working groups (question mark)
    
      - p cm: figure out current situation with domain, who owns the ig account, reach out to advisors on capturing social media, donors
    

Comms/Tech Meeting 09/09/2025

Impromptou working session 8 may

tech admin spent a few minutes figuring out what work we wanted to do

ended up on 'setup bookstack on wiki.rc.nyc and move our data to it' as a step

first is making a repo of the existing coop cloud .abra/servers config and cloning that
second is making a repo of the existing coop cloud .abra/recipes/bookstack recipe and clone that

Backdrop CMS Coop Cloud Recipe

vibe coded recipe

It says no SSO, dunno what's needed to get that working...

README.md

compose.smtp.yml

abra.sh

env.sample

entrypoint.sh.tmpl

compose.yml

 

Hosting

Pricing and integration comparison

Squarespace

Yeah, gross, I know.

https://www.squarespace.com/pricing lists the basic site plans, emails are an additional charge:

So a basic site with 5,000 sends is $16 (site) + $14 (emails) = $30, with up to 20 lists, segmentation, and on-site form integration.

Shopify

Even more gross.

Shopify has a limit of 10,000 monthly emails, even with their cheapest plan, $30/month

Electric Embers

Basic groups (no custom domain) = $15 month, depending on how they choose to price us, 10,000 message limit.

Custom groups (custom domain) =  $35 month, depending on how they choose to price us, 25,000 message limit.

No seamless form integration with outside site,.

Possible to modify template files to modify subscription page in order to maybe do a relatively clean iframe embed.

Riseup

Free, no custom domain, no seamless form integration, no access to templates.

freelists.org

No size limit, unknown backend, customization, or embed options. They don't allow for making test lists, so I didn't.

Example list homepage: https://www.freelists.org/list/pure_bullshit

Mayfirst

Supports custom sub-domains.

It feels like we should be able to have mailman listserves with the basic $50/yr plan but this might be up to their judgement based on our operating budget.

Gaggle

https://gaggle.email/pricing

free for up to 1000 members. at least $10/mo for paid plan that enables searching email archive and using a custom domain in a normal way.

the free version lets you use a custom domain but in a hackier way that involves an externally-hosted mailbox on your custom domain forwarding all its mail to the gaggle list. https://help.gaggle.email/article/258-how-use-your-domain-send-custom-redirects

Koumbit

$88/yr plan includes 50gb storage on a shared host, 100 email mailboxes, mailing lists via mailman. It's slightly ambiguous to me if their mailman supports custom domains or not. I am waiting to hear back via email (p cm)

One can also apply for solidarity pricing, but the application for this needs to be re-submitted every year.

They replied to my email and said they do support custom subdomains for mailing lists, but gave the following caveat:

That said, our system works well for mailing lists within a work team, for instance. It works well up to about 250 people, I would say. We do have some clients with mailing lists with 2500 people, but the emails will take a couple days to reach everyone. 

Backdrop/Drupal Calendar proof of concept

https://dev-wb-backdrop-test.pantheonsite.io/woodbine-public-event-calendar

Basic Overview

Main Calendar

Main calendar would be a table, with columns for date, event, time.
Other columns could be added:
- "Add to calendar" button for visitors to add individual events to their calendar.
- Links to a general page for the sponsoring WG, or a general page for categories like "book clubs," "wellness," etc.

Scheduling Tools

Event managers (rental coordinators, programming group) would have access to a series of "Scheduling tools" via a sidebar or scheduling menu.

It's possible that WGs might be able to post draft events that require confirmation from programming.

If draft events were posted by WGs, it might be possible to send emails or ping a chat platform (just probably not Signal).

Technical Stuff

Events can have numerous "fields" attached, e.g. organizer, capacity, whether it's a rental, status (hold, awaiting deposit, confirmed). Displays can be created for private or public use - so the public event listing won't show organizer name/contact, but logged in users will see it.

Custom feeds can also be made, so that event coordinators can have calendar feeds via google, ical, etc. and not have to log into the site. They would have to log-in to manage events.

Private fields can be inserted into the event description for organizers. See following .ics has organizer name inserted into event description, to provide organizer with detailed information via a calendar feed.

Wiki

This wiki (https://wiki.ridgewoodcommons.nyc) is hosted on a pikapods instance. The credentials can be added to our bitwarden.

---

Bookstack is seeing some usage - let's figure out what options there are to keeping it up for folks.

Selfhosting

Currently selfhosting, with single sign-on, and anubis protection

• Backup strategy is 'backup the whole damn disk' via a checkbox on DigitalOcean
• Would need to migrate accounts, and pages to new infra if we want to selfhost
• If we selfhost, we might wanna adopt something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJPYeTeq7q0

Commons Hosting

Mayfirst

Can run php, would have to manually install bookstack. Not sure how managed/hands-on we would have to be, or just ask them to set it up for us.

Koumbit

Can run php, would have to manually install bookstack. Not sure how managed/hands-on we would have to be, or just ask them to set it up for us.

Commercial Hosting

None of the listserv providers offer bookstack hosting. Bookstack has a list of providers in the installation docs
https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/installation/#other

Of these hosts, the following look promising

Peak Networks
PikaPods
Elestio
Cloud Above

I know nothing about these providers, other than they are cheaper than what we are currently paying, and we don't need to admin it. We do need to trust their admins though, as I think bookstack is not E2EE.

May First reportback

https://mayfirst.coop/en/

Cost inquiry in 8/12/25 ~LP

I sent an email asking about costs before I found their pricing page, it's a bit complicated, so dialogue might still be necessary: https://mayfirst.coop/en/member-benefits/

Basic shared hosting for us would be $125/yr for basic services and 100G (Plan 2)

A VPS (fully managed or partially managed) would be $70/month for 25 GB system disk, 1 CPU core, 1 GB of RAM.

Server & Applications

Most users run shared infra. Creates some limitations on docker based stuff: https://help.mayfirst.org/en/explain/shared-hosting-supported-applications

But they do offer VPS services as well: https://mayfirst.coop/en/services/

Core offerings:

• Email is structured with separate components for user/address/inbox, see: https://help.mayfirst.org/en/explain/about-email
• Mailing lists via GNU Mailman
• Websites (HTML or CMS-based) https://help.mayfirst.org/en/explain/about-websites
• Nextcloud - Unclear what modules they have running
• Chat/forums - Jabber/XMPP (Gajim), Discourse
• Videoconference - Jitsi

Infrastructure map/topology

https://help.mayfirst.org/en/explain/why-new-infrastructure

Red flags & potential issues

Documentation

Some of their help pages and documentation is incomplete or broken

^^^ https://help.mayfirst.org/en/links/common-tasks

Bookstack Dev Notes

Single Type Limited Access UX Experiments

Bookstack has some predefined roles, but roles can be created such that they have read access limited to:

• Books
• Chapters
• Pages

Interface for users with read permissions strictly limited to those types changes dynamically.

See: https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/1171#issuecomment-446378261

They do appear to all have access to the page set as the landing page.

Permissions Grid

Pages only interface

Pages only user:

• has the Books menu item
  
• can see the homepage
• maybe can't edit homepage? (~LP)
• can see other pages, (I don't believe there's a page that lists all pages ~LP)

Books only interface

Pages only user:

• has the Books menu item
  
• can see the homepage
• can see/edit books (duh)

Chapters only interface

Chapters only user:

• has the Books menu item
  
• can see the homepage
• can see/edit chapters (duh)

Misc Dev Notes

User name change error

Had an "unrecognized user name" error when I changed a test user name via admin panel and then tried to log in.
Logged in fine with email.
I'd changed my personal account name from the keycloak created hash without issue, so maybe issue is that the admin did it in this case? Or maybe I screwed it up, haven't tried to replicate.

ACL Strategy

Permissions can be overridden for specific Shelves/Books/Chapters/Pages, and they do inherit, but overrides are per defined role, so if many roles exist, there's a need for nearly redundant sets of overrides for each role.

1st SSO login issue

https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack/issues/4436#issuecomment-1684113880

Mobile Breadcrumbs

Mobile breadcrumbs are just icons, and kinda mushy. Might be nice to have Book name, even truncated with ... ~LP

Adding CSS or content based on page tags

Interesting tip that could be used during an import process, or also to add hero banners or something to specific tags.

https://excessivelyadequate.com/posts/booksthack.html#displaying-banners-or-making-other-style-changes-based-on-tags

Combo Books/Pages Permissions Testing

Testing users with a role that limits them to view/edit Books and Pages.

• User has access to Books menu item
• User had breadcrumbs for Book List/Book/Page

Wiki organization proposals

Possible wiki structure, including functioning as a general home page for WB.
Uses Books/Chapters/Pages
This was the first thing that came to mind, but seems like maybe Minutes and Proposals want to be books because they'll get big, and I'm not sure how the logical separation affects stuff like page link pickers, media pickers, etc.. ~LP

This diagram was made in the wiki, it can be double clicked to edit.

Idle thoughts and TBD agenda items

Thoughts

Participation accessibility

• establish baseline tech & tech competency required for "participation," pair with mechanisms to minimize barriers to participation. (~LP)
  • e.g. Proposals: Ideally should be discrete properly filed and formatted wiki pages, but could be generated from a form - either via API/page creation, or by librarian style work, where member of group takes form data from other source and creates page. Or similar, but with paper versions that can be filled out and submitted. (~LP)
• explorations in translated/multilingual elements within infrastructure or events

Privacy / Internal vs External

• identify areas most likely to contain personally identifying information and think about how to handle that (p cm)

Org wide integration

• provide and encourage nontechnical means for feedback for communications and technical needs (micro)(+LP)

Spokes

• Possible to create "note-passing" method for spokes to allow for group members to offer input to spoke.
• Make our wiki homepage (or other page) friendly and navigable for other groups.

Internal

• record initial group agreements on (micro)
  • cadence and form of synchronous work (+LP)
  • expected regenerative tasks
  • commitments to initial role-mapping
  • resiliency tactics (knowledge recording, apprenticeship, etc)

Musings on assets and systems

• Site
  • Ghost via (~LP)
    • https://www.synapsmedia.com/
    • https://www.magicpages.co/
  • Drupal (~LP)
    

Transparency

It already feels unclear who the admin committee bottom-liners are. These groups and their point-people should be made visible in the physical and digital community space, as well as how to plug in. The same goes for the working groups but i think it's more urgent to get this sorted out for the admin committees at first. 

TechComms problems self-interview

Not being aware of tasks, timeline, and status of work in other groups work that intersects w/ours (~LP)

e.g. Rebrand announce. Opening party stuff like staffing signup & raffle. Booking forms and negotiation.

At the simplest, could be something like a list that's a a group by group breakdown ala

Comms & Tech Admin 

Active

• Researching mailing list options (@LP)
• Interviewing groups re: comms issues (?)
• Planning email hosting and usage
• Planning web, funding, social presence for RC announce (@pcm, @micro)

Upcoming

• Calendar system

Dates:

• None

Finance Committee 

Fundraising & Grants

Programming Committee

Relational Skills

Rental Committee

Ridgewood Commons Facilities

Coordinating meetings and workflow across varied set of tasks and goals so as to not burn people out on tons of meetings yet maintain broad discussion and engagement. (~LP)

[brainstorming] how to make an event-specific announcement chat

off the top of my head, given our current infrastructure, if I wanted to start a "we're having a space cleaning party, here's a low-noise way you can stay up to date about what the details are and any updates or changes"

• create a new wiki page or whatever online doc ("public doc") that contains the original announcements and any further updates
• create an announcement only signal group "RC Cleaning Party [DATE]" with the public doc in the description (ideally with an expiration date for the chat in the title or description)
• post to 9 (or more) working group chats with the TLDR version of the announcement, a link to the public doc, and a link to the announcement only signal group
• any further announcements will be both added to the public doc, posted as a message to the announcement signal group, along with the link to the public doc
• once the event happens, post to the announcement group that
  

cons:

• initial announcement creates a lot of noise across the signal chats
• people have to join yet another group chat
• no backscroll for people who join after certain ideas or conclusions have been made (~LP)

pros:

• the public doc part of it addresses the fact that any newcomers to the signal group won't have access to any previous chat history
• the hygiene around chat management (an enforced expiration date and deletion protocol) lowers the psychic weight of joining yet another signal chat (at least form my perspective)

Password manager research

How many users? Estimating at least 1 per working group + 1 per spokes group so maybe like 18 people?

Goals include resiliency and self-sufficiency.

Bitwarden - $4/mo/user without SSO, $6/mo/user with SSO. Vaultwarden is self-hosted for $0, as is bitwarden official which still costs the same. Supports export and import. Apps are fine, not great. Team has good reputation.

1password - $8/mo/user. not self-hostable. does support export and many other password managers can import directly. A little bit dated but popular.

keepass - Just passing a file around. Free and error prone. Native apps for so many platforms, would have to come up with our own backup/distribution methods. Could self-host the file I guess?

just share passwords with the three people who need them on a piece of paper or in personal devices - free, easy, wont scale up but we are not at the scale that needs it now

[Sketching] Communications flow for WG feedback loop

Forms Fields

Rental Application

Blurb

General inquiry for space usage – Ridgewood Commons

585 Woodward Avenue, Ridgewood, NY 11385

RidgewoodCommonsNYC@gmail.com

Ridgewood Commons is a Community Space with an emphasis on Mutual Aid. While we are not primarily a rental hall, we do rely on rentals to help cover rent and expenses so that the space can continue to serve the community.

Rental Rates

Rates generally range from $200–$500, depending on:

• Whether the event takes place during peak hours

• If other Ridgewood Commons projects can use the space at the same time

• The amount of set-up and rearrangement required

• The total duration of the event

Once terms are agreed upon, a $100 deposit is required to secure your booking.

Promotions & Liability
For liability reasons, all promotional materials must be reviewed by an admin before being shared publicly. Please send them to: RidgewoodCommonsNYC@gmail.com.

Other Uses
If you are not looking to rent the space for your own private or public event, you may instead be looking for our Programming Form or Film Screening Form.

• Name * (text)

• Phone Number * (phone #)

• Email * (email)

• Name of organization (if applicable) (text)

• Describe what you'd like to do at the space * (text)

• Preferred Date / Backup Dates * (text)

• Hours of Use (including set up and break down) * (text)

• Is this a public or private event? (single select)
  
  • Private
  • Public
  • Unknown at this time
• Can the gym (back room) and basement engage in activity during your event, or would this be disruptive? (single select)
  • Yes, other operations can happen in the space during my event
  • No, no other operations can happen in the space during my event
  • Maybe, would like to discuss further
• Do you have a budget for this? If so, what's the range? * (text)
• Do you require a walkthrough, or are you familiar with the space? * (single select)
  • Need Walkthrough
  • No, I know the space well
• Will there be alcohol at your event? * (single select)
  • Yes
  • No
  • Unsure
• Will there be loud music at your event, and if so how late do you anticipate the music lasting? (text)
• Will you require use of the projectors  and/or projector screens? * (single select)
  • Yes
  • No
  • Maybe
• Will you require use of the PA system or microphones? * (single select)
  • Yes
  • No
  • Maybe
• Do you have any lighting requests for your event? (text)
• If this is for a Film Shoot, are you bringing stage lights or any other equipment that may require specific power accommodations? (text)
• Do you have any other needs for the event not listed above? (text)
• Are you involved with a project or working group at Ridgewood Commons? * (text)

Film Screening Proposal Form

Blurb

Ridgewood Commons shows films on Wednesday evenings from 7pm (usually starting at 7:30pm). If you are interested in screening a film, please tell us more about what you'd like to screen in this form.

RULES: No streaming. Please come with a high-resolution file for the film. You can either bring a laptop or use the computer in the space near the emergency exit if you bring an external hard drive with the file. The computer that lives in the space has an HDMI input, and we have an HDMI to USB-C adapter in the pink electronics cabinet near the computer. There is an HDMI cable hanging from the ceiling that is permanently attached to the projector.

If this is a foreign film, check that the subtitles are properly synced beforehand.

While we are a small community center and accordingly don't always go through official channels for obtaining rights, we don't want to take additional risks with early release material. If this is a recent film that has had very limited release, we request you make arrangement with the filmmaker.

Programming at Ridgewood Commons

blurb

[Sketching] Email lists

Some ideas for lists:

RC-events@

Lists all public events

• Type: Automated announce-only
• Schedule: Weekly or monthly?
• Title:format:
  • "Ridgewood Commons, August 1-8 + <feature>
  • "Ridgewood Commons Events, August 1-8, 2025"
  • "Ridgewood Commons, August 1-8 + <aphorism/quote>
• Recurring duplicate events as standard block w/link to site page (Pantry, Yoga, Tutoring, CSA, etc.)
• Recurring changing events (screening, dinner) with heading, details/links/image.
  
• Footer: About blurb, onboarding & support pitch, link to other lists and socials.

RC-presents@

Lists all "unique" programming like film screenings, presentations, book readings, parties
+ Hopefully a dash of humor or inspiration?

• Type: Automated announce-only
• Schedule: Weekly or monthly?
• Title format:
  • "Ridgewood Commons presents, August 1-8 + <feature>
  • "Ridgewood Commons Events, August 1-8, 2025"
  • "Ridgewood Commons, August 1-8 + <aphorism/quote>
• Footer: About blurb, onboarding & support pitch, link to other lists and socials.

RC-support@ / RC-community@ / RC-Mutual-Aid@ / RC-Solidarity@

Calls for community support re: organization needs, physical, skill, etc.
+ related solidarity orgs? Maybe limited to NYC/NYS?

• Type: Handmade announce-only
• Schedule: As needed, monthly at most
• Footer: About blurb, link to other lists and socials.

Emergency / time-sensitive would be via socials only

RC-Spokes & Group Updates@

• Type: Automated + Handmade announce-only
• Schedule: Monthly
• Link to other lists and socials.

Monthly updates on spokes process, proposals, WG updates

WG updates will probably be like pulling teeth, so would benefit from a process like:

JMP # is registered to signal, messages from groups can be forwarded to @RCUpdates.1312, forwarded messages undergo light editing, also can take direct text messages with more edited content. Reminder to please not get upset at editors!

RC-Newsletter@

Quarterly or Bi-annual broad updates on recent events and upcoming efforts, with feature sections for high promo events

• Type: Handmade announce-only
• Schedule: Quarterly or bi-annual
• Footer: About blurb, onboarding & support pitch, link to other lists and socials.

RC-community@ / RC-Mutual-Aid@

Kinda like ridgewood comunized but with delineated terms of use?

Begging for disaster

• Type: Discussion, possibly with moderation?
• Schedule: Chaos
• Footer: Site link

Automation

Ideally some content would be automatically generated from calendar or site feeds.

In drupal/backdrop, it'd be possible for events to be tagged as "feature" such that they get ingested differently, including an image.

I think it's nice to include some personality. Could be boring like we make a list of 52 little phrases or quotes.

Non-automation

All lists including handmade content will obviously require work, and might not be sustainable.

LP RC announce draft

The space you've known as Woodbine at 585 Woodward Ave is under new collective leadership as "Ridgewood Commons."

Ridgewood Commons will continue to be a home for mutual aid, community building, and a space for collective thought & experimentation in Ridgewood, Queens.

Ridgewood Commons operates under a democratic spokes council governance model, with the goal of fostering cooperative skill building, diverse community representation and influence, and organizational resilience.

We host free community programs and projects year-round, including: a Food Pantry, Communal Sunday Dinners, Film Screenings, a Community Gym, Yoga & Meditation, a Maker Space, a Writers’ Workshop, Reading Groups, Arts & Crafts Workshops, a CSA, plus Talks and other skill-sharing and educational events.

Anyone interested can join.

The space can also be rented for a variety of purposes: from presentations and workshops, to parties and as a film/photography shooting location.

To contribute to Ridgewood Commons or learn more about programming and participation, see links in bio.

Edits

• Tweaked 9/10/25 9:48 PM, see revisions
  • The space you've known as Woodbine at 585 Woodward Ave is under new collective leadership underas the name "Ridgewood Commons.
  • The space iscan also providebe for rentalsrented for a variety of events,purposes: from presentations and workshops, to parties and as a film/photography shooting location.

  • To Contribute to Ridgewood Commons or learn more about programming and participation, see linklinks in bio.

Unsure about capitilzation in list of activities.

Spokes Updates

2025-09-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update

Completed projects

Withfriends account	Link	QR - Click for larger size in new window
Withfriends.events homepage	https://withfriends.events/o/ridgewood-commons/
Withfriends.events donate page	https://withfriends.events/o/ridgewood-commons/donate/
Patreon account
Patreon.com homepage	https://www.patreon.com/cw/RidgewoodCommons
Riseup mailing list
Riseup list homepage	https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info
Riseup list subscribe page Requires free riseup list account and sign-in Working on better subscription flow alternatives	https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info
Forms
"Rental Application for Ridgewood Commons" (assume owned by main google account)	https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScMsyQwvfUK1nt_hMQ6wo2JiytbNCVp_ix6H0WIQfyl2B_hdw/viewform
"Programming at Ridgewood Commons" (assume owned by main google account)	https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeZttCPYzVbobKJ6rVx2muerTWUoevBcc60BbHwptgrUPGwxg/viewform
"Film Screening Proposal Form" (don't know form owner)	https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfgC-HNbTdfnE5g9EydPZce10ms8s78a5wRq2CJVbXOEWeM4A/viewform
Socials
Instagram	https://www.instagram.com/ridgewoodcommons/
Bluesky	https://bsky.app/profile/ridgewoodcommons.bsky.social

Active projects

• Basic site / "landing page"
• Single streamlined calendar management workflow that doesn't leak personal information using existing google tools
  • Custom non-google calendar and event management
• Web hosting via solidarity partners
• Documentation and instructional screencasts re: wiki
• Financial software
• Brainstorming and development of communications beyond existing use of signal groups
• Improving copy and aesthetics of funding platforms
• Migrating our stuff off of woodbine.nyc and not breaking the old site -- the wiki being the most visible to the group

Needs expressed

• More group participation by those interested in a combination of people/tech/communication to...
  • ...think about ideas and systems to democratize communications
  • ...find existing "pain points" and communication bottlenecks within and between working groups
  • ...create compelling, clear, copy for communications
• People with graphic design & branding skills
• People who actually use and are fluent in corporate social media
• Please try https://ridgewoodcommons.nyc/ and report any issues with your device. Flag us down after meeting to report plz.

Projected budget needs (annual)

In discussion! Trying to get it down down down 📉

• ~$250 financial software
• ~$40-125 site hosting, email lists

Other

Internal discussion of re-naming group from "Tech & Comms) to make group function more clear (e.g. building workflow for content, but not creating content), or take on more responsibility for crafting content as listed in above needs list.

2025-10-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update

Completed stuff

• Schedule maker tool: https://ridgewoodcommonsnyc.github.io/RC-schedule-maker/index.html
  • Takes exported file from calendar page (sample: ridgewood-commons-weekly-schedule(10).html) 
  • Can use community supplied backgrounds!
  • Sample output:
• Social post maker: https://ridgewoodcommonsnyc.github.io/RC-presents-IG-maker/index.html
  • Take an image, adds "Ridgewood Commons" header
  • Sample output:

Current Practices

• manually updated rolling (first day listed is today) sidebar calendar on https://ridgewoodcommons.nyc/
• effort to post weekly calendar poster to community announcement chat / IG
• using withfriends for event RSVPs to free events to present opportunity for donor conversion.

Upcoming

• Online non-google collaborative schedule/calendar prototype

Analytics report

Withfriends (~LP)

tier	#	$	$ total/month	% total
Vision Supporter	10	$10	$100	9%
Rent Contributor	14	$25	$350	31%
Infrastructure Upgrader	3	$50	$150	14%
Future Planner	2	$100	$200	18%
Coworker	3	$100	$300	27%
Total			$1,100 net ($1,001.95 gross)

For posterity/other groups: Makes me think tiers are not optimal bc of big drop from $25 to $50 tier. (~LP)
Adding arbitrary donations to tiers such that you can sub as a Rent Contributor but then more would maybe be optimal. Maybe worth talking to Withfriends about this.

Membership jumped up, plateaued, bumped again, plateaued
Hard to say why, but would be good to keep a solid posting schedule and review

Patreon

? Don't have access because of two-factor setup. (~LP)
we need to fix that! (~ p cm)

tier	#	$	$ total/month	% total
Vision Supporter	16	$10	$160	14%
Rent Contributor	14	$25	$350	30%
Infrastructure Upgrader	5	$50	$250	21%
Future Planner	2	$100	$200	17%
Coworker	2	$100	$200	17%
Total			$1,160 net

Combined Funding Platforms

tier	#	$	$ total/month	% total
Vision Supporter	26	$10	$260	11%
Rent Contributor	28	$25	$700	31%
Infrastructure Upgrader	8	$50	$400	18%
Future Planner	4	$100	$400	18%
Coworker	5	$100	$500	22%
Total			$2,260 net

Socials & Communication Channels Growth (or lack thereof, aside from Instagram)

IG	bluesky	RC community announcements	RC spokescouncil announcments	RC spokescouncil chat	list-info
1134	14	181	121	27	9

Need to directly message in order to grow these connections.

Other Thoughts

• Need for dedicated "comms" group to handle
  • Collection and confirmation of events from disparate groups and individuals
  • Very regular social posting: week schedule, day-of stories/posts
    • Using submitted posters, bespoke graphics work, or using existing tools (with feedback/improvement cycle)
    • IG, bluesky, withfriends, nonsense, cal.red, etc.
  • Social question/comment/message followup
  • More standardized copy for various calls to action re: in-space signage, membership calls, socials, lists, etc.
    
• Need for additional person(s) to help with
  • DevOps / infrastructure management and research
    • Hosting
    • SSO
    • Integrations
  • Analytics/reporting

2025-12-11 Spokescouncil Meeting Update

Current focus is finalizing the infrastructure that will help:

• visibilize and distribute admin labor
• ease onboarding into admin roles / tasks
• make Tech / Comms role sustainable
  
• support WGs in the same way

Tasks Completed

• Deployed beta version of our new digital infrastructure
  • open call for user testers from admin commitees (and WGs too).
• calendar on https://ridgewoodcommons.nyc/ now generated from google sheet.

Tasks in Progress

• https://coopcloud.tech/ adopting their tools and building a relationship with their community
  • a community of values-aligned open-source developers and tech-cooperatives
  • our technical labor becomes a contribution to a free and open-source commons
  • in early talks of planning a workshop using Ridgewood Commons as a case study
    • "come see what we did, learn how we did it, and learn how to help us do it"
• Working w sunday dinner increase onboarding opportunities with dinner announcements configuration
• Initial conversations with working groups about public-facing onboarding materials

Future Tasks

• Somebody has to send out a newsletter (124 pending subscribers).
• Have a meeting
• Onboard new members to admin committee
• Clarify purpose of the inter-working-group chats: "how do I make an internal announcement?"
• Set up distributed encrypted backups with other community spaces around the country
  

Task Pitches

• help write an inagural newsletter?
• user testing on our infrastructure
• figure out an organized way to handle IG DMs
• research https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

Pain Point

• Our charter is far broader than our capacity allows
• No-one is doing the important work of improving our internal communication

Other

Riseup subscription flow

Mailto link

List subscribe mailto should look like so:
to: sympa@lists.riseup.net
subject: subscribe ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info

body can be blank

Here is a mailto that includes the basic to and subject portion, along with a body section (ignored by sympa that might serve to explain the process to the user:

Simple version:

mailto:sympa@lists.riseup.net?subject=subscribe%20ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info

HTML code:

mailto:sympa@lists.riseup.net?subject=subscribe%20ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info&body=This%20email%20has%20been%20prefilled%20with%20a%20destination%20and%20a%20subject%20line%2C%20please%20do%20not%20change%20them.%0A%0AHit%20%22send%22%20and%20this%20message%20will%20request%20a%20subscription%20verification%20email%20from%20the%20riseup.net%E2%80%A0%20mailing%20list%20system.%0A%0AWhen%20you%20receive%20the%20verification%20email%20from%0Asympa%40lists.riseup.net%2C%20simply%20reply%20with%20a%20blank%20message%0Aand%20hit%20send.%20You%20will%20then%20receive%20a%20confirmation%20email%2C%0Aand%20be%20subscribed.%0A%0AThank%20you!%0A-Ridgewood%20Commons%0A%0A%E2%80%A0%20Riseup.net%20provides%20online%20communication%20tools%20for%20people%0Aand%20groups%20working%20on%20liberatory%20social%20change.%20They%20are%20a%0Aproject%20to%20create%20democratic%20alternatives%20and%20practice%0Aself-determination%20by%20controlling%20our%20own%20secure%20means%20of%0Acommunications.%20Learn%20more%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Friseup.net%2Fen%2Fabout-us

Rendered HTML:

Subscribe to ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info

Body text

Should create a body field that looks like this:

This email has been prefilled with a destination and a
subject line, please do not change them.

Hit "send" and this message will request a subscription
verification email from the riseup.net† mailing list system.

When you receive the verification email from
sympa@lists.riseup.net, simply reply with a blank message
and hit send. You will then receive a confirmation email,:

and be subscribed.

Thank you!
-Ridgewood Commons

† Riseup.net provides online communication tools for people
and groups working on liberatory social change. They are a
project to create democratic alternatives and practice
self-determination by controlling our own secure means of
communications. Learn more: https://riseup.net/en/about-us

Bilingual Spanish/English version

mailto:sympa@lists.riseup.net?subject=subscribe%20ridgewoodcommonsnyc-info&body=This%20email%20has%20been%20prefilled%20with%20a%20destination%20and%20a%20subject%20line%2C%20please%20do%20not%20change%20them.%0A%0AHit%20%22send%22%20and%20this%20message%20will%20request%20a%20subscription%20verification%20email%20from%20the%20riseup.net%20mailing%20list%20system.%0A%0AWhen%20you%20receive%20the%20verification%20email%20from%20sympa%40lists.riseup.net%2C%20simply%20reply%20with%20a%20blank%20message%20and%20hit%20send.%20You%20will%20then%20receive%20a%20confirmation%20email%2C%20and%20be%20subscribed.%0A%0AThank%20you!%0A-Ridgewood%20Commons%0A%0A---%0A%0AEste%20correo%20electr%C3%B3nico%20ya%20tiene%20un%20destinatario%20y%20un%20asunto%20predefinidos%2C%20por%20favor%20no%20los%20cambie.%0A%0APresione%20%22enviar%22%20y%20este%20mensaje%20solicitar%C3%A1%20un%20correo%20de%20verificaci%C3%B3n%20de%20suscripci%C3%B3n%20del%20sistema%20de%20listas%20de%20riseup.net.%0A%0ACuando%20reciba%20el%20correo%20de%20verificaci%C3%B3n%20de%20sympa%40lists.riseup.net%2C%20responda%20con%20un%20mensaje%20en%20blanco%20y%20presione%20enviar.%20Luego%20recibir%C3%A1%20un%20correo%20de%20confirmaci%C3%B3n%20y%20estar%C3%A1%20suscrito.%0A%0A%C2%A1Gracias!%0A-Ridgewood%20Commons

Rendered

This email has been prefilled with a destination and a
subject line, please do not change them.

Hit "send" and this message will request a subscription
verification email from the riseup.net mailing list system.

When you receive the verification email from
sympa@lists.riseup.net, simply reply with a blank message
and hit send. You will then receive a confirmation email,
and be subscribed.

Thank you!
-Ridgewood Commons

---

Este correo electrónico ya tiene un destinatario y un
asunto predefinidos, por favor no los cambie.

Presione "enviar" y este mensaje solicitará un correo de
verificación de suscripción del sistema de listas de
riseup.net.

Cuando reciba el correo de verificación de
sympa@lists.riseup.net, responda con un mensaje en blanco
y presione enviar. Luego recibirá un correo de confirmación
y estará suscrito.

¡Gracias!
-Ridgewood Commons

Invites

We can invite users to the list.

So it may be relatively simple to create a form that creates an email with an invite.

e.g. form takes email input from page, and then populates request email as follows

So could be as crude as a google form that fills out a spreadsheet, and then either automatically creates invite request, or waits for a column to be filled in.

Unclear if this would violate riseup policy if it were fully automated.

Unclear if sending address needs to be list admin, or can be some other email that's been granted admin privileges.

Failed I tried using links and they either fail or require account creation:

Subscribe to Ridgewood Commons info list

Get updates by email. We’ll send a confirmation message to finish signup.

Subscribe with "wws" url prefix
Subscribe with "sympa" url prefix
Subscribe with "www" url prefix

Batch CSV adds

We could just collect emails and batch add.

Ridgewood Commons Media Assets

Facade pictures

Click images for full size in new tab/window

Textures and Type

Site type

• From a typewriter
• JetBrains mono - https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ 

Textures and analog type

Click images for full size in new tab/window

Paper bg, should tile vertically well

Transparent "dirty" png logo

Comps

Withfriends cover image

Donation platform level images

Original b/w marker images currently used for withfriends.events donation levels

Actual icons were layered with semi-random colors and comped

Click images for full-size image in new tab/window

General Info Sign

Welcome to Ridgewood Commons

Ridgewood Commons is a space for mutual aid, community building, and collective learning & experimentation.

Governance & Groups

Ridgewood Commons operates under a spokes council governance model, with the goal of fostering cooperative skill building, diverse community representation and influence, and organizational resilience.

Current spokes groups:
Food Pantry, Gym (Ridgewood Commons Strength), READgewood Tutoring, Spokescouncil Planning, Sunday Dinners, Tech Collective, Writing Workshop, Yoga and Meditation, Commmunications & Tech, Finance, Fundraising & Grants, Programming & Rentals, Facilities

Programming

We host free community programs and projects year-round, including: a Food Pantry, Communal Sunday Dinners, Film Screenings, a Community Gym, Yoga & Meditation, a Maker Space, Writers’ Workshop, Reading Groups, Arts & Crafts Workshops, a CSA, along with Talks and other skill-sharing and educational events.

Rentals

The space can be rented for a variety of purposes: from presentations and workshops, to parties and as a film/photography shooting location.

Funding Support Link Sign Short v1

Support Ridgewood Commons

The transition of stewardship of 585 Woodward has put us, Ridgewood Commons, in a difficult financial position, and your support, however small, is much needed and greatly appreciated

Link Sheet - Financial Support, Socials, Nonsocials

Support Ridgewood Commons

Community support and space rentals keep the Ridgewood Commons doors open and refrigerators running - every contribution helps. You can donate cash in the donation jar, or become a monthly sustaining contributor via Withfriends or Patreon.

Socials - Instagram / Bluesky

Please give us a follow and/or re-share our posts to help our reach grow.

Email list / Signal Group

Join our email list or community announcements Signal group if you'd prefer to not rely on social media. The email list is currently for occasional updates and announcements, the signal group is more active, and better suited for staying up to date on weekly programming.

Funding Support Link Sign Long v1

Support Ridgewood Commons

Physical noncommercial space is so profoundly rare in New York City. Ridgewood Commons is dedicated to being open to all - a place you don’t have to buy a $8 coffee to sit for a few hours to read or talk with your friends.

We’re here at this party to announce Ridgewood Commons - introduce the projects currently housed here and have a nice time with each other. But we’re also here because we very seriously need to fundraise.

It would be great if money didn’t come into the picture at all. But the reality is that this space is big and while we have a good deal on the space, the rent is still considerable. $6k every month - well below market rate especially these days in Ridgewood, but no small sum. And as a new formation, we have a pretty small financial runway.

If you can toss us some money tonight through cash, Venmo, whatever you’ve got, we are truly grateful. And we know that funds are tight and the job market sucks. But what we really ask is if you can make a recurring donation of whatever size works for you. Having regular recurring expenses coming in gives us financial stability and a real fighting chance at a long future in Ridgewood.

If you care about this project, you are not an observer or a consumer. You’re part of it. If you want RC to be reliably around the corner from your home, robust and powerful, make a recurring donation through Withfriends or Patreon.

Link Sheet - Rental and Programming

RC Space Rental

Ridgewood Commons can be rented for a variety of purposes: from presentations, workshops, and fundraisers, to parties and as a film/photography shooting location. Complete the form to submit a request.

Community Based Programming

Ridgewood Commons aims to offer programming that is both inspired by and responsive to New York City, Ridgewood, and the community members who frequent the space.   Do you have a skillshare you'd like to host? A solidarity project that needs meeting space?   Some programming that has emerged from community: Circuit Hacking, Letter Writing to Political Prisoners, Writing Workshop, Common Threads (mending & crafting circle).   Complete the form to submit a request.

HowTo: Membership tracking

Membership Tracking Overview

Because Woodbine used both Patreon and Withfriends, RC created a presence on both platforms, with the idea that Woodbine would send out messages to their members with links to our profiles.

Each platforms reports stats differently:

Patreon

Has a dashboard with table views, charts, filters etc. Allows for exporting a CSV which uses a primary key of the "patron," so historical data is only visible via their dashboard charts.

Fields:

• name
• email
• current tier
• pledge
• lifetime (total amount over subscription duration)
• status (paid/free)
• join date
• last charge date
• subscription source (?)

Withfriends.events

Withfriends information is scattered.
Current active memberships are listed on the memberships tab, with a total # listed at the top, and #s accompanying each tier listing, in descending $ amount.
Non-membership based contributions are listed on the account home tab, along with next payout, all-time revenue, membership count, etc. Period-based contribution totals (last 30 days, last month, year) don't appear to be available.
A record-by-record history of all events can be found under the analytics tab, which can be used to reconstruct historical data, though the entries can be confusing (e.g. a membership cancellation can generate two records for cancellation).

Tracking

Current practice

Current process is to manually copy over current tier counts to a spreadsheet each week, either Sat or Sun.

There are formulas and array formulas which copy data to other sheets in order to create various charts.

Socials are similarly manually copied from various platforms.

Options

We have used automated tools to tally membership counts based on CSV exports, but the complexity of anonymizing the data, and parsing the withfreinds records was error-prone.

Zapier and IFTT can be used to integrate with both platforms, but the data would still need massaging in order to create weekly historical records.

Infrastructure

Internet

Ridgewood Commons provides free internet access over two wireless networks. The network buildout and maintenance has been the result of many contributors over the years. This snapshot of understanding and opinions is an invite for discussion, disagreement, and reflection.

I hope to build our resilience and have fun maintaining our network. I also kinda owe it to RC Tech & Comms since I've been  noodling with the system a bit.

Tasks up on vikunja

Forward

Why write this?
because micro's memory of conversations is poor
to help RC Tech & Comms more safely and swiftly respond to changing community internet needs
to improve the resiliency of the space, and extend that resiliency to our neighbors

How we help each other
Folks with interests and expertise beyond technical can share their values, so we can maintain a network that reflects those values.

Folks with technical interest or expertise can help demystify what the internet is, making it knowable and malleable.

How to get involved
Reach out to RC Tech & Comms, directly or indirectly. Introduce yourself when you see someone messing with big loops of wire or electronics with blinking lights. I'm probably gonna do office hours, using a tool a community member made to help find a good time for us to do so. 

The networks

We operate two semi-public networks for use in the space. One network is commercial provided by verizon, and the wifi named RidgewoodCommons is the advertised way to connect in the space, complete with silly-hard-to-say-aloud password with qr code that works-ish. The second network RidgewoodCommonsMesh is provided by NYC Mesh, a community and volunteer run internet provider. No commercial interests, just neighbors sharing wifi with each other, really well documented operations complete with considerations. Reading some of the writing on that wiki directly motivated me to fill out this page.

RidgewoodCommons

We pay around $85/mo for Verizon. They have provided internet that people expect to have in a community space, and especially as a requirement for coworking, and expectation for events. Its fine, but also fuck Verizon. So here are the details:

There is a modem and router in the gym. The router provides wifi, dhcp, and hopefully (we should audit) nothing else. I also heard Common Strength will reach new PRs with the electronics removed, since members won't have to hold back as a courtesy to the network.

device	does what	model	notes
WiFi Router	wifi + dhcp + ???	Verizon Something	password on router or ask rc tech
Modem / ONT	gateway to internet	Verizon Something

RidgewoodCommonsMesh (Under Testing)

We donate $0/month to NYC Mesh, a volunteer-run, community organized internet service provider. I gushed above about what the org does. Currently we are upgrading our connection to the wider mesh, and asking folks to try it out but that it is unstable. If you are interested reach out, we will announce when we are more confident in taking on more testers.

The mess of electronics mounted on the southeast (right) wall under the projector screen is the inside half of our network. The outside half is up on the roof, which connects us to the wider mesh and eventually to the internet.

If you connect to RidgewoodCommonsMesh your device will receive a DHCP address by the raspberry pi in 10.70.127.1/24. This pi on the wall network peers with a omnitik on the roof network over a protocol called BGP.  (TODO: is this iBGP? is everything in the mesh iBGP? If Ridgewood Commons applied for an AS number, we could make it iBGP right? Is the specialness of the mesh that its the most open AS to be a part of?)

This means the board in the basement is a complete, literal example of how the internet works. If you think this is cool, then you are cool. 😎

location	model	service	notes	power	$
wall	Ubiquiti Unifi UAP-AC Pro	RidgewoodCommonsMesh access point	OpenWRT 25	9W	120
wall	Netgear GS308EP manual	10.70.127.9 VLAN port mapping PoE+	60W PoE+ 30W/port	6W	80
wall	Raspberry Pi 4 Model B PoE+ Hat	DHCP 10.70.127.1/24 Mesh 10.69.2.154/32 Web Server	Arch Linux Arm linux-rpi kernel ipv4 forwarding	15W	145
wall	RPi 7" touchscreen	hypno-animation	~/fb16/build/bin/testLines	1W	40
roof	Mikrotik Omnitik	Mesh peer 10.69.2.54/32 [future] switch + wds??	PoE + switch, bird, routing solarprotocol	18W	120
roof	Ubiquiti Litebeam AC Gen 1/2	5Ghz gateway to vernon		7W	75
roof	AF60-LR	60Ghz gateway to vernon		18W	270
roof	sxtsq ac?	router offload for omnitik	TODO: make router	6W	70

VLAN

To have our own network, the pi is the dhcp server and router. The pi only has 1 ethernet port, so we use a vlan to create a second virtual cable. Ports 2 and 7 are the special ones.

port	mode	pvid (primary vlan id)	vlan memberships
1	trunk	1	1U
2	trunk	1	1U, 52T
3	trunk	1	1U
4	trunk	1	1U
5	trunk	1	1U
6	trunk	1	1U
7	access	52	52U
8	trunk	1	1U

Technical Details

A ton of random things to know

Router Setup

/etc/sysctl.d/10-enable-ipv4-forwarding.conf
net.ipv4.forward = 1

Peering with the roof

Comms stories

Individuals

Someone with door code is in space late at night, someone already there lingers to the point that it's not obvious they expect to also have to leave when the space closes.

Someone with door code is in space late at night, someone already there lingers to the point that it's not obvious they expect to also have to leave when the space closes, upon talking, they find the person lives very far away and lacks transportation.

Someone not connected to "big" chats like admin, spokes, etc. has to deal with an emergency.

Someone is in the space and finds we're out of various consumables: toilet paper, trash bags, disposable containers, printer paper.

Groups

Not all groups have the same "footprint." Kitchen & pantry have different space use overlaps than writing group, etc.

Misc.

Tuesday delivery palettes build up because they're not returned on a regular basis.

If you see someone you don't know in the space, doing something that would typically be something someone more familiar with the space would be doing, like cooking, going through the pantry fridges, working with electrical or A/V equipment... step one is probably just introducing yourself. Would be nice to have an "ice breaker" that would likely lead to knowing more w/o feeling like an interrogation.

Yoga was cancelled, it was announced in CA that it was cancelled, then a replacement was found. The CA post was deleted, but it was never affirmed that it was going to happen. Unclear what happened in the dedicated chat, I'm not a member.

Calendar

Public cal doesn't show private events, so people might think space is available.

The space needs to figure out dynamics around "community" - If I frequent the space, contribute labor, I might assume a certain right to show up whenever and use the space in a lightweight manner - meetings, working, reading. If private events (regardless of booking request for privacy) are not shown on public calendar, people may show up randomly. They may have traveled a long way, and not be happy with being turned away as they arrive at space.

Pantry

Sorter shows up as per the paper calendar listing, but isn't in the chat., has no info.

Sorter joins signal chat via site, gets pinged about deliveries, but can't ask for updates on expected delivery times..
Response: When pickups are scheduled, forward to sorter pager.

Sorter is unclear on process, or something arises they don't know how to deal with, has no place to ask aside from people in space.

Garbage

When we attach garbage curbing to an activity, if that activity is cancelled or moves, garbage may be not taken out.

Double booking of gym meet & brunchraiser.

Programming

Individual wants to see something happen, fills out form to connect RC with 3rd party. Individual who submitted form has no clear way to stay abreast of the conversation as it develops.

June 2026 State of the Infra

Overview

As of June 2026, Ridgewood Common's digital infrastructure is spread across a number of hosted and self-hosted solutions that can be disorienting to navigate.

This includes:

• two different self-hosted identity providers (keycloak and authentik) on two different servers
• a self-hosted bookstack wiki on server A
• a self-hosted static website on server B
• project management software (vikunja) on server B that is way out of date [1]
• google and riseup email accounts
• a https://purelymail.com/ account for sending password reset emails etc
• a https://bitwarden.com/ password manager with a single root login account
• web forms on google and tally.so
• spreadsheets on google sheets that are used for coordinating programming bookings & a structured version of our weekly calendar.
• 30? signal groups for group chat
• instagram and bluesky for social media
• https://www.patreon.com/ and https://pools.events/ for recurring donations
• https://pools.events/ for event listing

[1] we're currently at 0.24.6, while the latest is 2.3.0 . it is currently unknow what the migration path is across that many versions

Mediawiki Test Install Documentation

Doing a local MediaWiki install, to experiment with skins and plugins, to try and make it nice.

Site "profile" AKA ACL setup

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:User_rights

Default Extensions

Default suggested list:

Special pages

CheckUser is an extension that allows a user (with the checkuser permission) to check which IP addresses are used by a given username and which usernames are used by a given IP, without having to run queries directly against the database by hand. The extension is running live on all Wikimedia wikis.

Replace Text is an extension to MediaWiki that provides a special page, as well as a command-line script, to allow administrators to do a server-side global string find-and-replace on both the text and titles of the wiki's content pages.

The Nuke extension makes it possible for sysops to mass delete pages.

The Linter extension tracks lint errors from an external service. Currently the main use case is to track the errors identified by Parsoid and expose them to editors. Help for users wanting to fix errors is available at Help:Extension:Linter.

The Notifications extension, historically called Echo in code and documentation for sysadmins and developers, provides an in-wiki notification system that provides the user with alerts and notices about activity on the wiki, such as another user mentioning them on a talk page, or an edit of theirs being reverted. Other MediaWiki extensions can make use of Notifications to send their own notifications; Thanks and DiscussionTools are two such extensions.

Editors

The CodeEditor extension extends the WikiEditor advanced editing toolbar with an embedded Ace editor widget, providing some handy features for user/site JavaScript pages, CSS pages, JSON pages, and when extension Scribunto is also installed, for Lua pages, i.e. pages in the Module namespace. The code editor does not show on regular wiki pages, i.e. wiki pages with the "wikitext" content model. (See Extension:CodeMirror for syntax highlighting of wikitext when using the source editor.)

It provides the following features:

• syntax highlighting for JavaScript, CSS and Lua
• auto-indent
• tab key produces tab indents (since 1.22), soft indents before.
• indent/unindent selection with Tab ↹/⇧ Shift+Tab ↹ keys
• syntax validity check for JavaScript
• Pair-matching for parenthesis, braces and square brackets

The WikiEditor extension provides an improved interface (primarily a toolbar) for editing wikitext. It is the wikitext editing interface that Wikipedia started using in 2010 for desktop users, and so it is sometimes called the 2010 wikitext editor.

The VisualEditor extension allows for editing pages as rich content. It is based around a JavaScript library, also called "VisualEditor", that can potentially be used outside of MediaWiki as well. This page covers instructions for installing and configuring the VisualEditor extension. For help on using it, see Help:VisualEditor/User guide. For information on the development of the extension and the library, see VisualEditor.

Parsers

TemplateStyles is a parser extension that allows users to store custom CSS code on wiki pages and to embed these styles into articles via the ‎<templatestyles> tag. The extension allows only a safe subset of CSS syntax stored in embeddable style pages. This is powered by the Css-sanitizer library.

The TemplateData extension introduces a ‎<templatedata> tag and an API which together allow editors to specify how templates and their parameters should be used. This information is available as a nicely-formatted table for end-users, and as a JSON API, which enables other systems (e.g. VisualEditor) to build interfaces for working with templates. See Help:TemplateData for in-depth help.

The SyntaxHighlight extension, formerly known as SyntaxHighlight_GeSHi, provides rich formatting of source code using the ‎<syntaxhighlight> tag. It is powered by the Pygments library and supports hundreds of different programming languages and file formats.

The Scribunto (Latin: "they shall write!") extension provides a framework for the embedding of scripting languages into MediaWiki pages.

Although theoretically any scripting language can be supported, since its release in 2012 Scribunto has only supported one language, Lua.

Scribunto Lua scripts go in a namespace called Module. Modules are run on normal wiki pages using the #invoke parser function and each module has a collection of functions, which can be called using wikitext syntax such as:

The Poem extension allows easy formatting of poems and similar material within Wikitext. Once the extension is enabled, you can put any block of text within ‎<poem>‎</poem> tags, which has the following effects:

• All newlines are preserved by converting them into ‎<br /> tags
• The block of text is enclosed in ‎<p>...‎</p> tags (as well as a div of class "poem")
• Colons at the beginning of a line are converted into 1 em indentation
• Spaces at the beginning of a line are preserved and no longer invoke the ‎<pre> tag

The extension preserves wikilinks, bolding, etc. if they are present in the poem.

The ParserFunctions extension enhances the wikitext parser with helpful functions, mostly related to logic and string handling. Since MediaWiki 1.15, ParserFunctions has incorporated most (but not all) functions from the former StringFunctions extension, which may be enabled or disabled.

For instructions on how to use this extension, see the help pages.

The Math extension provides support for rendering mathematical formulae.

More information about installing and configuring this extension, including for older versions, can be found at Extension:Math/advancedSettings.

See an overview of what can currently be done with this extension at Extension:Math/Syntax.

The InputBox extension adds already created HTML forms to wiki pages. Users can "complete" a form (entering text, selecting menu items, etc.) by entering text into the box.

InputBox was originally created by Erik Möller for the purpose of adding a Create an article box to Wikinews.

The ImageMap extension allows clickable image maps. An image map is a list of coordinates in a specific image, which hyperlinks areas of the image to multiple destinations (in contrast to a normal image link, in which the entire area of the image links to a single destination). For example, a map of the world may have each country hyperlinked to further information about that country. The intention of an image map is to provide an easy way of linking various parts of an image without dividing the image into separate image files.

The Cite extension allows a user to create references as footnotes on a page. It adds two parser hooks to MediaWiki, ‎<ref> and ‎<references>; these operate together to add citations to pages.

The CategoryTree extension provides a dynamic view of the wiki's category structure as a tree. It uses AJAX to load parts of the tree on demand. CategoryTree was originally written by Daniel Kinzler as an external tool, but was later integrated into the MediaWiki software with the help of Tim Starling.

Media handlers

The PdfHandler extension shows uploaded PDF files in a multipage preview layout.^[1]

Together with the Proofread Page extension, PDF files can be displayed side-by-side with text. This allows users to transcribe books and other documents.^[2]

Spam prevention

The TitleBlacklist extension allows wiki administrators to block the creation, movement and upload of pages, the title of which matches one or more regular expressions, as well as blocking creation of accounts with matching usernames.

The SpamBlacklist extension prevents edits that contain URLs that match regular expression patterns defined in specified files or wiki pages and registration by users using specified email addresses.

When someone tries to save a page, this extension checks the text against a (potentially very large) list of illegal host names. If there is a match, the extension displays an error message to the user and refuses to save the page.

The ConfirmEdit extension lets you use various CAPTCHA techniques to try to prevent spambots and other automated tools from editing your wiki, as well as to foil automated login attempts that try to guess passwords.

ConfirmEdit ships with several techniques/modules to generate a captcha.

The AbuseFilter extension allows privileged users to set specific actions to be taken when actions by users, such as edits, match certain criteria.

For example, a filter could be created to prevent unregistered users from adding external links, or to disallow edits that remove more than 2000 characters.

API

The PageImages extension collects information about images used on a page.

It aims to return the single most appropriate thumbnail associated with an article.

PageImages also provides OpenGraph protocol metadata for articles on the wiki for 3rd parties like Facebook to extract.

Other

The Thanks extension adds a quick way to give positive feedback for productive contributions to MediaWiki sites. It allows users to send public 'thank you' notifications (via Echo) to other users for their edits and some logged actions.

A 'thank' link is added in the following places:

• next to the 'undo' link in history and diff views;
• on some log entries on Special:Log (see #Configuration, below); and
• if the StructuredDiscussions extension is installed, to Flow board comments.

It also provides an API for sending thanks.

Note that if you do not want to be thanked, you can easily disable this notification in your preferences, as described below.

The TextExtracts extension provides an API which allows retrieval of plain-text or limited HTML (HTML with content for some CSS classes removed) extracts of page content.

The SecureLinkFixer extension automatically rewrites URLs to HTTPS if the domain always requires HTTPS. It uses the Mozilla HSTS preload list for the list of domains.

The rewrite is done on-the-fly as pages are parsed. No edits to the wiki are made, and the page source retains the original URL.

The OATHAuth extension provides two-factor authentication (2FA) support. It enables MediaWiki users to log in more securely, using authentication codes, security keys, or passkeys, along with their regular password. It uses the OATH (Initiative for Open Authentication) and WebAuthn standards.

OATHAuth supports the following methods of two-factor authentication:

• Password managers and authenticator apps
• Passkeys
• Security keys
• Recovery codes

OATHAuth also includes experimental support for passwordless login, and provides a 2FA framework that other extensions can plug into.

The MultimediaViewer extension gives wiki users a different interface for viewing full-size or nearly full-size images in their browser without extraneous page loads or confusing interstitial pages.

The LoginNotify extension notifies you when someone logs into your account. It can be configured to give warnings after a certain number of failed login attempts (The number is configurable, and can be different between unknown IPs/devices and known IPs/devices). It can also give Echo notices (which can also be emailed) for successful logins from IPs you don't normally use. It can optionally integrate into the CheckUser extension in order to determine if the login is from an IP address you don't normally use. It can also set a cookie to try and determine if the login is from a device you normally use.

The Gadgets extension allows users to select JavaScript or CSS-based "gadgets" provided by other wiki users.

Gadgets are made up of JavaScript and/or CSS Snippets located on pages in the MediaWiki namespace. Each gadget is defined by a line in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition, providing a name and description for the gadget, and a list of the JS and CSS snippets that it uses (see #Usage section below).

Since Gadgets reside in the MediaWiki namespace (the list defining the gadgets as well as the actual code snippets), only sysops (interface admins from 1.32) can edit the code. This is as it should be: only users especially trusted by the wiki community should be able to edit JavaScript code used by other users since JavaScript can easily be used to hijack accounts or spy on people.

The DiscussionTools extension is a set of tools to enhance discussion pages. As of 2024, it is being built by the Editing team as part of the talk pages project.

User documentation is at Help:DiscussionTools.

Some features can be disabled on individual pages and sections as described at Help:DiscussionTools/Magic words and markup.

Search Extensions

Some extensions to consider to tweak search experience:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AdvancedSearch

Heavy UI, maybe nice to have available, but trades power/complexity pretty evenly.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch

To integrate with elastic search. Might also need https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CirrusSearch

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LinkSuggest

Not exactly a search, but autocompletes suggested links

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MediaSearch

Provides gallery results for media searches vs media page title/link

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SearchParserFunction

Kinda cool extension to make "embedded searches" - renders searches that are encoded into wiki markup in content

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SearchThumbs

Search results are delivered as page thumbnails. Depending on size of thumbnail and content on wiki perhaps not so useful

This list leaves out some large/powerful/complex directions like WikiBase and SemanticMediaWiki

Faceted Search (helping users find content)

In an organization like RC, the amount of minutes pages will grow faster than documentation and help pages.

The ability to facet searches would be helpful in this context, so that a search for "compost" returns practical information vs all compost discussion over the past years.

Mediawiki options:

• Categorization
• Namespaces
• More complex search integrations

Categorization

Categories are familiar (if people have ever used Wikipedia), but have usage restrictions. It's easy to click a category and get a listing of pages, but not easy to search within a category. Categories can be used in certain types of embedded searches such that a section can be made that's dynamically populated by category contents, but still with no search function.

Categories aren't used at all in the built-in search tooling.

Namespaces

Namespaces can be used as search facets, but MediaWiki generates a number of built in namespaces, some of which are confusing, like Template, Module, Mediawiki...

Extra namespaces can be made very easily in LocalSettings.php. Existing namespaces can be hidden with CSS.

But the CSS hiding namespaces from the advanced search are brittle, as namespaces CSS identifiers appear to be somewhat dynamic.

Excerpt of example rules:

More complex search integrations

Hiding by category isn't something the default MediaWiki search engine can do at all, regardless of CSS or config, it's a structural limitation. Categories are stored in a separate database table (categorylinks) from the search index (searchindex), and the stock SQL-based search engine only ever queries the search index. It has no concept of category membership at query time.

The standard fix is CirrusSearch, the Elasticsearch-backed search extension that most production wikis (including Wikipedia) run instead of core search. Once installed, it supports incategory: directly in the query syntax, including negation. But this requires a negative boolean in the search text rather than an exposed toggle, checklist, etc.

You can also bake this into a default search if you want it applied automatically rather than typed each time — usually via a custom search form or a MediaWiki:Searchform override that appends the filter.

Integration with Elastic Search means running more services, more version compatibility and dependency management, etc.

Minutes as a Service

It might be clumsy-elegant to just have a wiki for minutes, and a wiki for documentation.

Also might be possible to modify an etherpad or cryptpad instance such that when creating a pad, you select the working group from a list or free-enter text, select date, and it appropriately titles minutes.

An index of pads is then somehow generated.

Alternate approach - dual install

Another approach would be a dual install, of whatever software: MediaWiki, Outline, Bookstack...

So there would be notes.domain.tld and wiki.domain.tld - they would be titled and themed differently, could have different ACL setups. e.g. in bookstack there could be distinct shelves for upcoming and past meetings - and ACLs could be set such that upcoming agendas are world-visible-editable, and post-meeting they're moved to the other shelf and become hidden from non-logged users.

Could be two installs of the same software (mediawiki likes to do transclusion and interwiki linking), or distinct software to suit each use.

File uploads

One of the classic annoyances of a "classical wiki" is the need to upload files, and then link those files in content.

There are a few different extensions that aim to ease this:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MsUpload

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleBatchUpload

"Templates"

Wikis use the concept of template in a very specific/structured way.

This allows for a more basic implementation of the idea of a template: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MultiBoilerplate

Backdrop/Drupal based site experimental docs

Calendar interfaces

Different calendar visualizations, optimized for different use-cases: e.g. booking, public listings, etc.

Week and Day Analysis

Timeline + Resource view for detailed booking

This view is good for detailed resource/space management, and could potentially work well alongside booking logic that has internal "interlocks" that block double-booking of any location, assuming bookings resource needs are accurate.

Has some downsides for larger view, and may not work well on mobile because of need to side-scroll.

If events are abstracted to blobs, gives a really good snapshot of space use.

Events have no info aside from space use, tooltips could help, but seem finicky for mobile use.

Event text could go in rows between graphic rows, and just be stacked based on the sequence of events.

High level admin calendar review and scheduling

Tabled view

At one point, I thought maybe a big table would be useful, but it maybe feels overwhelming and doesn't seem to offer a clear "strategic advantage" - might be useful for reviewing specific aspects, like rental payment status, event coordinator, etc.

Standard Calendar

It's a standard calendar, with all the typical conveniences and all the typical downsides.

Thoughts on booking process

Bookings will likely either come in with specific informed guesses as to day/time based on publicly shared availability calendar, or will be extremely flexible. So a useful booking process would be to be able to see availability in a larger overview, and then easily "zoom" into a more detailed view to confirm fit.

Resource paradigm

Using a resource paradigm might mean not treating the event as an abstract event, but essentially to think of it based on physical requirements. e.g. a book club of 5-10 people could mean main tables, couch area, basement.

Using a needs paradigm might mean that needs such as ability to hold a conversation, privacy, general quiet, projector use could be used to slot events.

Resource + privacy

Resources and privacy overlap - A small group that needs strict privacy in effect requires ALL resources.

Public Calendar Display

Tabled calendar with featured event graphics

Wiki on Pikapods

The Bookstack at wiki.ridgewoodcommons.nyc is hosted on PikaPods, which is an app hosting service rather than VPS hosting. The login information is in Bitwarden.

We tried to change the login email to ridgewoodcommonsnyc@riseup.net but got an error "Please use a permanent email address," micro will reach out to them.

Currently this deployment is primarily managed and paid for by micro. Please reach out to him if you would like to assist with managing or paying for this service.

HOPE 26

Summary

We had 6 folks repping Ridgewood Commons

We made 200+ shots of espresso (8+lbs) for attendees. Many came back and asked how the coffee tasted so good. The hotel staff were super helpful and interested in the coffee printing.

We demoed an interesting electronic lock of some sort

We ran a reticulum nomadnet node + rrc chat, and helped with a workshop on reticulum.

We showed off a loom that was designed by a member and how to string it.

Feedback & Ideas

Please send feedback to feedback@hope.net even if just thank yous :).

It took about 48 hours until we had a sign with the website on it. Maybe next time we do a bit of branding prep.

- sign with link to website
- sign with upcoming schedule, and how to reach RC from the venue
- sign / pamphlets representing other groups at RC?
Stretchy table covers?
- could have brought even more seats - we shared some with NYC Resistor

Recommended Talks

https://www.hope.net/videos/

🤖 Ham Radio Isn’t Magic: Preppers, Sad Hams, and Practical Off-Grid Communications

Projects
https://frstcomputer.com/
Plan 9-ish eink display 36 split-key lora hipster katamari

hdmi adblocker by Cyril Engmann 
  hdmi adblock slides

Photos