A Lesson from Pacificon 2025
At this year's Pacificon, I witnessed something that's bothered me ever since. I’ve used MMDVM for many years, for both (very) casual operating and as a development platform for three different projects. MMDVM makes digital voice work great for many amateur radio operators. The history that was shared at Pacificon from Jonathan Naylor’s pre-recorded presentation made the value very clear. However, during the Q&A after the presentation an audience member made a request. He asked if the project could work on a real-time translation feature so hams from different countries could communicate more easily through their hotspots. I got excited about this because it made so much sense. With AI in the news all the time, this could be done. And, I’d recently spent a lot of time improving my German for a trip to Bochum and recently helped get audio transcriptions reliably working in the radio interface program for Opulent Voice. I immediately grasped the value of being able to understand people without a language barrier and saw an obvious way to get it done.
The response from the presenter, Jim Mclaughlin KI6ZUM, was incredibly disappointing. After some dissembling, he said “This isn’t on the list that ARDC gave us, and we have to do all we can to make them happy. So, the answer is no, we are not going to do this.”
I don’t know Jim personally. He is involved with MMDVM. He was the presenter for the MMDVM talk. He also gave the keynote at the Pacificon banquet, which was also about MMDVM. Jim repeatedly praised and flattered an organization called ARDC during both of these talks. They are a wealthy foundation that gives money to amateur radio projects. The source of that money was a community asset from amateur radio that ARDC was supposed to manage for the amateur radio community. ARDC sold the asset without involving or notifying the community in advance of the sale, and now the same organization privately controls all the money. ARDC hired Jonathan Naylor to work on MMDVM. ARDC is now paying for some of the boards or prototypes. So, ARDC are providing a lot of cash, including a salary for Jonathan.
This was surprising to me because I was told as far back as 2018 and 2019 that ARDC would not be paying salaries. I got a lecture directly from Phil Karn KA9Q, the President of ARDC, about, as he put it, the “purity” of ham radio volunteerism, and how ARDC was for the “passion” of it all.
Now, Phil did not and does not have any management experience. Neither did anyone else at ARDC. I was told, in person, that anyone asking for salaries in their grant applications at ARDC would be denied funds because it was “inappropriate”. ARDC was strictly about funding technical open source work in amateur radio. I believed this, but the grant managers told different things to different people. Over the years, the number of people with confusing or conflicting information from ARDC staff has steadily grown.
ARDC are very much a “he who has the gold makes the rules” type of organization. Like any other private foundation they have little to no oversight and multiple members (past and present) on their board of directors have been quite clear in emails and other writings about wanting to influence, guide, and shape amateur radio. There is very little curiosity about what the community wants.
Good for them. There is nothing any of us out there doing volunteer technical work can do about this. We deal with this exact sort of thing at churches with big donors, we deal(t) with this at the NSF, and we deal with it in politics and government with Super PACs. Those of us that work at large companies have additional perspectives on what happens when a small number of people control a very large amount of money.
I have thought a lot about what happened with this particular audience member’s question. After thinking about it and reconsidering it carefully I have to say that I do not like it at all. MMDVM was (and still is, and will continue to be) a highly successful open source project. It was built by hams, for hams, and was worked on by volunteer contributors. But someone leading that project just told us at Pacificon that a feature request gets a NO because it wasn't on their sole funder's priority list. Jim didn't say “Thank you so much for the question! That's so interesting, but we lack the resources" or “Hey let's discuss the technical challenges." Jim said he had to keep their grant provider happy. He didn’t say anything positive about the request at all. It’s a genuinely good idea and aligns with one of Part 97 purposes of amateur radio in the United States. We are supposed to increase international goodwill. This could be better accomplished if you could understand people from other countries.
When open source projects accept big cash funding, the power dynamics matter a lot. This is true of any project, including projects at ORI. Independence and good governance is something that ORI board keeps front and center. We restate this in every newsletter, when we print “We equally value ethical behavior and over-the-air demonstrations of innovative and relevant open source solutions.”
Jonathan has been hired full-time by ARDC for several years now. This is a deserved and wonderful thing for Jonathan, a person I deeply respect. However, external funding means MMDVM now has a stakeholder with full paycheck power. The rest of us just can’t compete with this. If you think you can then please understand that you cannot. If your boss tells you to do something, then you do it. Why? Because the implied threat is that if you don’t do it, you are fired. Once outside money gets in and is allowed to control agendas, an organization accepting money has fundamentally changed.
A person at our table asked quietly “If MMDVM needed money then why wasn’t that something we heard more about?” This is a good question, and it has several good answers. Did MMDVM appeal for funding and we all missed it? Was there a way for grassroots support to show up? It’s incredibly difficult to ask for money. Having successfully raised funds from Burning Man to the San Diego Catholic Diocese, I can assure you, raising money is hard. It’s also nearly impossible to demand that the amateur community support you professionally. Even if you have a wildly successful software or hardware product, we are not talking about a living wage in either Europe, the UK, or the United States. Or many other places. Engineering altruism in amateur radio is rich white man’s hobby. ARDC has not changed that. They have personified it and calcified it.
Money coming in from a single large donor can solve a lot of problems, but the agenda-deforming problem exists even when the funding comes from a highly regarded foundation, like the Ford Foundation or Melinda Gates. It might be a gentle Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but it’s still there, even when the funding institution is genuinely professional and supportive. When it is coming from a foundation that has messed up relationships with multiple projects and demonstrates entitlement and immaturity, then we have a worse situation.
ARDC has had multiple conflicts with highly technically competent people with proven track records in amateur radio. These conflicts date back well before the surprise sale of community assets, and involve people in networking, open source hardware, and open source software. Some argue that they may as well sell the assets “because people weren’t using them anyway”. This begs the question. An organization that squandered their opportunity to manage a uniquely powerful gift is not the right organization to manage an amount of money larger than the global annual amateur radio equipment market that was raised from that gift. Distribute the money proportionally to licensed amateurs around the world. There’s about 3 million of us. That’s about $50 a person. Just do it. That’s what these addresses are truly worth to the community. Funding a few projects at a time that manage to blunder through the questionable technical review process is piecemeal and inefficient. If the asset wasn’t worth keeping and managing correctly, then it isn’t worth hoarding. Give the money to the people that truly owned the asset.
As an amateur radio community, we wanted MMDVM digital voice. And we got it. The history lesson from Jonathan at Pacificon was delivered through a recording. Jim said Jonathan couldn’t travel any more, but didn’t give any details. The people that counted in the history presentation were operators and contributors. MMDVM in the past absolutely cared about what hams wanted to see come alive in their stations. What we heard at Pacificon is that MMDVM now cares primarily about what will satisfy the grant requirements. It’s the way of the world. People kiss ass toward whoever controls their resources.
I believe that ARDC supporters and some of the staff and some of the leaders must think that they are helping. But, everyone knows that when you're the one writing the checks, your priorities become the only priorities. Features from the community that aren’t what’s on ARDC’s list will get rejected, just like we heard at Pacificon from Jim. What are these lists? There wasn’t anything in the talk about a list. The future plans were a bit off, to me, as a digital communications specialist. The radio chip selected can handle up to 500 kHz. This is more than enough to start accommodating modes that are wider than the relatively tiny ~20 kHz amateur radio digital voice modes. All of the legacy and traditional-minded voice modes have very low bit rate vocoders. All of them. This is a self-imposed limitation that we do not need to commit ourselves to again for another generation of MMDVM hardware. We can and should be doing better. This is one of the many reasons why Opulent Voice exists. Opulent Voice on MMDVM can’t exist if we keep hamstringing ourselves with mid-1990s style digital voice protocols and very small fractions of what the hardware selected is capable of. I did ask why the artificially low bandwidth for new hardware in MMDVM, and Jim gave an answer that boiled down to “we are using the old sampling rates”. That’s fine. I can see the hardware direction and make an MMDVM that works at 80 or 100 kHz instead of ~20 kHz. I saw nothing in the bill of materials or block diagram that couldn’t be adjusted to accommodate better voice quality and a modern design.
All money comes with strings. Sometimes those strings are named out loud. What Jim said, quite loudly, was that he needed to keep the funders satisfied if he wanted the sugar to keep coming. MMDVM isn’t going to take on anything risky now. Because it will risk their funding stream.
This is how open source innovation dies. When you stop trying stuff and start following someone else’s strategic plan. This is not because MMDVM is bad or badly led. It’s a natural life cycle of organizations. They start to think they speak for the community instead of representing it. We at ORI can guard against this all we like, but it’s a risk for us as well, as we continue to demonstrate quality work and make quality contributions across the spectrum.
Our amateur radio reality is about experimenting and R&D. Money changes people. ARDC is giving out a huge amount of money. Sudden influxes of millions of dollars changes communities. MMDVM could not even recognize the quality of a question from the audience at Pacificon because of fear of losing funding. We saw an idea shut down. Open source works because it’s from the users. It’s not from some sort of big powerful institution saying that they got a strategic plan, and need to be loved and appreciated. When we see someone that came all the way out to Pacificon asking for something that doesn’t exist yet “no, because our funder hasn’t asked for that” then we've lost something essential about what makes projects like MMDVM so incredibly valuable.
MMDVM and projects like it should remember who they're really building for because it is not ARDC. It's for us if we want to use a mode. Or try a new mode. Or keep a mode in when MMDVM wants to kick them out. It’s guys who think a translation feature would be pretty cool. That's the community that made MMDVM possible in the first place. He deserved to have his voice heard, grant priorities or not.
Therefore, the Interlocutor project will investigate adding translation support to audio transcriptions. We’ll do it all in the open, through our GitHub repository. And, we’ll submit an article about it to ARRL’s magazines. It’s the least we can do to help increase the utility of open source digital radio products on the amateur radio bands.
