User:Nthmost

Naomi at Noisebridge

Naomi Most aka nthmost — Member since August 25, 2009

Contact: nthmost on Discord | Slack | GitHub | nthmost.com

I spent my first decade at Noisebridge not writing things down. I didn't think anyone read the wiki, and I didn't know what was worth documenting. I was wrong on both counts. I'm here now trying to right that.

Currently

Working on guild structure as a model for distributed authority, restorative communication practices, and helping Noisebridge navigate community dynamics.

Old hacker on a rocking chair sessions: 5:55pm every Tuesday until the Tuesday meeting. Hear stories, meet other members, ask all the annoying questions you're too afraid to ask your own anarchist mom or dad.

Recent writing: Anarchy Paralysis • Excellent Hacker Fallacy • Restorative Communication • Open Letter

Working On

• Noisebridge automations — Automatically turning the lights on/off when people open or close the space: Noisebell → HomeAssistant → SmartLights
• Kells — Upgrading the Noisebridge Wikimedia server. Named "Kells" as a ward against hordes of AI bot vikings.
• KNOB panel — Continuing to add Blade Runner-like panel widgets and unnecessary visual alerts to the KNOB panel for Beyla (the music server)
• Meeting notes automation — Script to automatically populate meeting notes from the Riseup Pad (work in progress)

🦆 Rubber Ducky Guild 🦆

The Rubber Ducky Guild is my flagship guild concept at Noisebridge.

The premise: explaining your problem to a rubber duck (or any patient listener) often reveals the solution. This guild practices:

• Listening without fixing - Sometimes people just need to talk it through
• Question-asking as an art - The right question unlocks understanding
• Psychological safety - No judgment, no mockery, just presence
• Debugging life, code, and everything - Works for technical problems AND emotional ones

Status: Active concept, seeking interested practitioners

See also: Rubber duck debugging on Wikipedia

Projects & Work

Industry

• Orkes / Conductor OSS — Currently lead on Conductor, the open-source workflow orchestration engine
• Streamlit — Data app framework; early engineer on the core engine, specializing in memory caching and media streaming

Noisebridge Infrastructure

• Guilds — Distributed authority model for hackerspaces; co-created with Mark (Arity) during the 2019–2020 nuclear winter
• KNOB — Noisebridge's FM radio station, broadcasting at 87.9 MHz
• Beyla — The Noisebridge music server powering KNOB: Liquidsoap + Icecast stack, streams to FM and online

Open Source Code

Project	Description	Status
metapub	PubMed/NCBI research access library	100s of ⭐, cited in papers
illuminate	Bioinformatics toolkit	In use at CDC
secureconfig	Secure configuration management	Active
sensate	Sensor data toolkit	Active

All projects: github.com/nthmost • pypi.org/user/nthmost

Tech I like: AMQP • liquidsoap + icecast • Asterisk PBX • Raspberry Pi • Python (obviously)

Hardware Hacks

rb3_keytar — Rock Band 3 keytar repurposed as a wireless MIDI controller. Because why not.

Goonies theme on the RB3 keytar

Background

Languages: Irish/Gaeilge 🇮🇪 (fluent) • French (business fluent) • Japanese/日本語 (conversational) • English (native)

Academic: Math & Linguistics • Bioinformatics • Data Analysis

Noisebridge: A Conceptual Timeline

→ Full timeline on its own page

Community Patterns & Systems

Documenting what I've learned about how hackerspaces work (and don't work):

• Hackerspace Community Dynamics - General patterns
• Guilds - Distributed authority as solution to recurring problems
• Anarchy Paralysis - Why communities fail to act on harm
• Excellent Hacker Fallacy - Why technical brilliance doesn't justify harmful behavior
• Restorative Communication - Framework for addressing conflicts before they become crises

On Anarchy

I've been writing about anarchism and Noisebridge since 2010. The best of it:

• Anarchy Is Not "No Control, Man" — on using "anarchist space" as a get-out-of-accountability card (2015)
• Membership as Anarchist Trust Architecture — why Membership is a tool for anarchist governance, not a contradiction of it (2019)
• Executive Functioning under an Anarchist Flag — can an anarchist organization develop collective executive function without hierarchy? (2019)
• On Blocking — a consensus block doesn't mean "I will leave"; it means two very different things and you can't tell which (2020)
• Guilds and Anarcho-Syndicalism — the guild model as syndicalism, and why property ownership is the wrong direction (ongoing)

Full archive: User:Nthmost/Things_I_Said

Project Graveyard

Projects past but not forgotten 🪦

Streaming Radios

Hosted various internet radio stations

Live studios:

• Mutiny Radio

Algorithmic stations:

• Feliz Navidad Forever
• Radio Loki

Stack: liquidsoap to sculpt the station, Python to wrap it, icecast to stream it.

Miscellaneous

Voluntary Public Embarrassment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE1oFJ9Ce6I&index=29&list=PLF7EFE57DDF6BDEE9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy6VSrdQZ8U&index=30&list=PLF7EFE57DDF6BDEE9

Public Keys

My public RSA key.

/etc/passwd entry

$ sudo adduser --gecos 'Naomi Most' --shell /bin/bash nthmost

Crimes Against Wiki

• 86_Speedrun

Badges

Badges? Badges? We don't need no stinking badges.

Guestbook

Leave a note! [your message] --Nthmost (talk) 08:12, 25 March 2026 (PDT)

Subpages

• Nthmost/Anarchy Is Not No Control
• Nthmost/Charters And The Shining
• Nthmost/Conceptual Timeline
• Nthmost/Create More Masters
• Nthmost/Executive Functioning Under an Anarchist Flag
• Nthmost/Guilds and AnarchoSyndicalism
• Nthmost/Meeting Notes 2026 02 24
• Nthmost/Meeting Notes 2026 03 03
• Nthmost/Meeting Notes 2026 03 10
• Nthmost/Meeting Notes 2026 03 17
• Nthmost/Meeting Notes 2026 03 24
• Nthmost/Membership as Trust Architecture
• Nthmost/On Anarchism
• Nthmost/On Blocking
• Nthmost/Sandbox
• Nthmost/Things I Said
• Nthmost/WhatLinksHere

What links here →