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Introduction to SBAY.ORG

Sbay.org is a collaborative do-it-yourself community network in the South Bay/Silicon Valley Area in Northern California. It's basically a local network of volunteers. Most of the sites are in people's homes.

Table of Contents

SBAY.ORG By-Laws

Though we have always called the organization by its domain name sbay.org, the official name is the South Bay Community Network. Our incorporation as a California non-profit organization (an IRC 501(c)7 hobby club) is pending. See the sbay.org incorporation site at http://corp.sbay.org/ until a specific By-Laws web page is created.

SBAY.ORG Board of Directors

SBAY.ORG Volunteers

sbay.org's web pages and policies refer to roles in the organization only by the name of the role. Except as otherwise noted, these positions are filled by presidential appointment. Numerous others contribute and/or maintain sbay.org network infrastructure. (See the SBAY.ORG Acknowledgements below.)

If you would like to propose a new project or service that you are volunteering to coordinate, please e-mail the idea to us and attend an sbay.org social event. We cannot accept suggestions for new projects or services without sufficient volunteers handle them.

History of SBAY.ORG

sbay.org gets its name from the sbay (South Bay) newsgroups. Originally the newsgroups, which were started in 1992 by Steve Harding, were kept private within a closed group of systems. New systems would only be added after agreeing not to distribute them to sites outside of Santa Clara County, Santa Cruz County, and Southern Alameda County. In September 1993, a group of Waffle BBS sysops whose systems were the core of the sbay news distribution area got together to talk about how to use UUCP (Unix-to-Unix Copy, a modem protocol) to get Internet-deliverable e-mail addresses for their systems. They decided that the only available path (at the time) was to join the *.us domain. Steve Harding's system was already known as grafex.cupertino.ca.us and it was working well. But, for all of them to do that, it required being one UUCP hop away from the Internet and finding an Internet site willing to cooperate. (Internet Service Providers were almost unheard-of back then so it wasn't an easy task.) Since grafex was getting a free UUCP connection from Amdahl Corporation in Sunnyvale, the others sent their requests there.

The administrator of Amdahl's Internet firewalls, Kris Stephens, received all these requests and immediately realized he didn't have time to handle that many new connections at once. (The connections are almost no work once they're running but they take some time to set up.) Rather than just saying "no", he asked a co-worker, Ian Kluft (the author of this document), for some ideas on how to handle the problem. After a short discussion, the idea popped up that all those sites needed to connect to an Internet site because of the rules of the *.us domain and, "if we make our own domain, we can make our own rules." This would allow the sites to keep their existing connections, some more than one hop from the Internet, and have a deliverable e-mail address within the new domain.

And so sbay.org was born. Its registration at InterNIC was completed in mid-October 1993. There were 8 sites in the original batch, mostly DOS-based BBSs running Waffle software. But there was also Ian's personal Linux system.

For sbay.org's first 9 years, it was an informal organization. There were no dues. There was no budget. (Though social events are considered recruiting so newcomers are welcome.) Even when the group meets for pizza, everyone pays for their own. (Well, that part's still true.)

One of the early site admins guessed that sbay.org probably had a total growth potential of 14 sites. Assuming that the original Waffle BBS group was the full scope of its membership, that might have been a good guess. But, over time, new groups of residential sites or BBSs discovered sbay.org and presented it with new spurts and phases of growth, each one slightly changing and diversifying the composition of the community. Even after subtracting sites that have shut themselves down (which happened from time to time), sbay.org reached 50 sites just days before its second anniversary in October 1995, with a user population estimated around 10,000. And as some local folks moved out of state and made arrangements to keep their sites, we had hosts in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas.

However, the days of large BBSs slowly went away as the Internet became more economical and useful for the same purposes. Most of our volunteers are happier this way since e-mail users have been moved off to Internet Service Providers where they can pay for the levels of service they were attempting to demand from our volunteers. It's much more pleasant to maintain systems for ourselves and our friends instead of 200-1000 strangers. But there are thousands of people who can say they got their first e-mail address through sbay.org.

The sbay.org network started out using mostly UUCP but most sites have "grown up" to be Internet-connected. UUCP will probably remain a niche in sbay.org for the foreseeable future, just like every other communications mode sbay.org has gotten into.

sbay.org started experimentation in late 1998 with the SBAY Wireless Project ( http://www.sbay.net/ ), which was founded by Dave Zarzycki. This is a Wireless Ethernet (802.11 standard) network using dishes on participants' homes and mountaintop repeaters. However, this is a hobbyist network, not an ISP. Even though we'll use IP and IPv6, people should not expect to be able to join just to get wireless Internet access. In late 1999, an 802.11 repeater was co-located at a Ham Radio repeater site on Montebello Ridge overlooking Cupertino. The proof of concept was considered complete when it was successfully tested by a handheld dish from 17 miles away in December 1999. Two residential sites (in Cupertino and Fremont) were connected in early January 2000. The SBAY Wireless Network home page maintains a more current and recent status.

Also in 2000, sbay.org's regularly scheduled social events expanded beyond just the monthly pizza meetings. In August 2000, we inaugurated the SBAY Geek Ride, a monthly social bicycle ride.

In 2001, sbay.org teamed up with the Silicon Valley Linux User Group (SVLUG) and the East Bay Linux User Group (EBLUG) to host the Linux 10th anniversary picnic. Based on the day in 1991 when Linus Torvalds sent out the first e-mail inviting others to participate in the project which he had already been working on, the anniversary was celebrated on August 25, 2001. 500 people attended the picnic at Sunnyvale Baylands Park. With T-shirt sales, corporate sponsorships and individual donations, the food and park reservations were completely covered. The event was widely considered a success.

In 2002, sbay.org grew its involvement in projects (including the Linux 11th anniversary picnic) leading its members to decide to incorporate as a non-profit organzation.

Overview of SBAY.ORG

The sbay.org group can be a lot of things because it's really the combined hobby and community service pursuits of some communications hobbyists and professionals in Silicon Valley. The philosophy of sbay.org has always been like that of UseNet - you pay back the network by helping others get connected.

Our expierience with sbay.org networking projects has been based on a do-it-yourself environment which has shaped the traditions and values of the organization. Generally, if you need tutoring, you have to find your own tutor rather than show up expecting anything that no one has yet offered.

We don't want to sound insensitive but whatever an sbay.org volunteer provides to you isn't really free - you have to do your part to minimize everyone's effort to provide it to you. Otherwise the effort couldn't sustain itself.

We call this the "carry your own weight" principle. During the 1990's period of explosive growth of the Internet, almost anything available for free was abused out of existence. Yet, sbay.org has continued to thrive in various phases of growth of the Internet because we looked out for the sustainability of our volunteers' efforts.

As we pursued different projects of interest to our members, we realized that the common theme has always been the administrative and technical side of electronic communications systems, a common thread among many technical hobbies in Silicon Valley.

SBAY.ORG Acknowledgements

sbay.org would like to thank the following contributors who make the network possible. These contributors are also acknowledged for previous assistance...

We appreciate everyone's support!

Updated July 31, 2006
webmaster@sbay.org