User:Nthmost
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 • Create More Masters
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)
- Create More Masters — Talk given at NB16 (Dec 2025): an unronic anarchist manifesto for Noisebridge
🦆 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.
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:
Algorithmic stations:
Stack: liquidsoap to sculpt the station, Python to wrap it, icecast to stream it.
Miscellaneous
Voluntary Public Embarrassment
Public Keys
Crimes Against Wiki
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 Blocking
- Nthmost/Sandbox
- Nthmost/Things I Said
- Nthmost/WhatLinksHere