Join IrregularChat

IrregularChat is an invitation-only, vouched professional community covering national security, cyber, research/OSINT, AI/ML, unmanned systems, RF/SDR, privacy, fabrication, and self-hosting.

Say yes if you want a small, serious community that expects you to contribute — not lurk — and follow strict rules: Chatham House (no screenshots or attribution outside the group), no PII/classified, no bare link drops, engage in good faith.

Say no if you want a passive feed, can’t commit to reading before you share, or don’t have a professional stake in these topics yet.

→ To accept: reply to the person who sent you this — “Yes, please invite me.” They run !invite in a Signal group and walk you through a short onboarding. Your only job: fill out a short intro when the bot prompts you.

→ To decline: “Not for me right now.” No hard feelings — the community stays small by design.

On the fence? Keep reading.

If you’re reading this page, someone in the community thinks you might be a fit — or you’re considering reaching out to someone who is already a member. Read this page in full before asking to be invited. It is the first filter, and members who vouch for you will expect you to have internalized what’s here.

What IrregularChat Is

IrregularChat is a Community of Interest (CoI) focused on breaking down silos between people working in national security, irregular and information warfare, research/OSINT, cybersecurity, AI/ML, unmanned systems, RF/SDR, privacy and OPSEC, fabrication and hardware, self-hosting, and adjacent fields. We exist to help each other learn, to share hard-won signal across organizations that would otherwise never talk, and to support service members, veterans, and civilians working on problems that matter.

The community started in 2021 inside the 4th PSYOP Group’s Innovation and Evolution Council (IEC), founded by Trish (then Group S8) as a way to push insights from the team level up into U.S. Army and SOF modernization. Collaboration with experts in Cyber, Special Forces, and Electronic Warfare outside the 4th PSYOP Group made an external space necessary — so Trish and Sac started IrregularChat. It grew from the 18 original IEC members to a cross-organization, cross-service community united by independent, high-agency project work and a shared belief that the best ideas travel horizontally.

Read the longer welcome guide and Field Notes to get a sense of how people in the community think and write.

What gets discussed

The wiki is the best map of what the community actually works on. The major domains:

Research & OSINT — research preparation, datasets, tools, archival research, TAAW (Target Audience Analysis Worksheet) workflows
Information Warfare — COG analysis, PMESII-PT, Structured Analytic Techniques, behavior analysis, influence operations, sock-puppet tradecraft
Cybersecurity — red teaming, incident response, mobile and medical-device hardening, CNO, phishing, web application attacks
AI & ML — local models (Ollama, HackerGPT, Pi LLM, community fine-tunes), prompting, ethics, Claude/Codex/Gemini tooling, evaluation
Unmanned Systems — sUAS, FPV, counter-UxS, multi-mission platforms, operating conditions
RF / SDR / Comms — software-defined radio, DragonOS, HAM, Flipper Zero, GSM, Wi-Fi, modem design
Fabrication & hardware — 3D printing, 3D scanning, CAD, cyber decks, fabrication
Privacy — VPNs, Monero and privacy-preserving payments, data removal and opt-out, tracking prevention, travel routers, digital footprint hygiene
Server & Infrastructure / self-hosting — Proxmox, Ansible, Docker, Matrix, Nextcloud, Jitsi, GitLab, Cloudflare Tunnels, Authentik
Military & Career — leaving service, credentialing assistance, evaluations, awards, promotion boards, tactical tech
Certifications & Learning — OSCP, GPEN, GCFA, GWAPT, CASP, OSWE, cloud, PM, FAA Part 107, trade
Writing & publication — sitreps, series packets, award bullets, Field Notes submissions

Nobody is deep in all of these. Most members are deep in two or three and curious about a handful of others — that’s the point.

What This Community Is For

We help each other. That is the point.

Share what you know. If you’ve solved a problem, write it down — in the wiki, on Field Notes, in Outline, or in the chats. Someone else is hitting the same wall right now.
Ask real questions. There are people here who have built, broken, taught, and deployed almost everything in scope. Use that. Bring specifics, not vague takes.
Engage, don’t just forward. We want hot takes, arguments, and actual discussion — that’s the point of the community. What we don’t want is bare link drops. If something’s worth sharing, read it first, then say why you’re sharing it: what caught your eye, what the take is, what you want the community to do with it. Unread RSS-style feeds belong on the RSS reader — the chats are for what you think about what you’re reading.
Fill the gaps. Find a missing page on the wiki? Start it. Find a bad explanation? Fix it. Leadership here is lateral and earned by contribution.

This is not a venting group, a job board you lurk on, or a place to collect contacts. If that’s what you want, this isn’t the right community for you.

How You Get In

IrregularChat is invitation-only. You cannot sign yourself up. Every single member has been vouched for by another member.

If someone in the community pointed you to this page, that person is your path in. Ask them directly:

“Can you run !invite in one of your IrregularChat Signal groups to get me in?”

That’s the whole ask. From that point, your voucher drives the process and the bot handles the plumbing. Here is who does what:

#	Who	What they do
1	Voucher (existing member)	Runs `!invite` in any IrregularChat Signal group they belong to. The bot DMs them instructions and preps them in the Entry/INDOC chat.
2	Voucher	Adds you (the person they’re vouching for) to the Entry/INDOC chat in Signal.
3	Voucher	Runs `!request` in Entry/INDOC and `@`-mentions you. The bot posts back an intro template addressed to you.
4	You (invited)	Fill out the template the bot posted — name, organization, email, interests, LinkedIn (optional) — and reply in Entry/INDOC.
5	Voucher	Confirms (“yes”) when the bot DMs them asking whether they vouch for you.
6	Automatic	The bot provisions your SSO account, DMs you credentials, adds you to groups matching your interests, and removes you from Entry/INDOC.

Your only active step is step 4 — filling out the intro. Everything else is your voucher or the bot. If the flow stalls, it’s usually because your voucher hasn’t run step 3 yet or the @-mention didn’t resolve — ask them, not the bot.

You have 8 hours from the moment your voucher kicks this off (step 1) to complete your intro (step 4), or the request expires and you start over.

Full mechanics — including the manual fallback, bot commands, exact syntax, and troubleshooting — live on the User Validation page. Your voucher should know all of this, but read it yourself too.

Don’t know anyone in the community?

Then you aren’t ready to join yet. That’s not a rejection — it’s how the trust model works. Keep doing the work you’re doing, keep writing in public, and the path in usually presents itself over time. Cold emails asking to be let in will not get a response.

The Vouching Contract

Vouching is the single most important thing in this community. It is how we stay small enough to be high-signal and trusting enough to be useful.

What your voucher is saying when they vouch for you:

They know you personally or know your work well enough to stake their standing on you.
You understand what this community is, you’ve read the rules of engagement, and you will honor them.
You will contribute — not just lurk, extract, and leave.
You will not share what happens in these channels outside the community without permission.

What happens if you break trust.

If you post classified or sensitive information, dox someone, screenshot a conversation outside the community, argue in bad faith, or otherwise damage the community’s ability to operate — your voucher gets brought into the conversation along with you. That’s not punitive; it’s the mechanism. The person who said “I trust this one” is part of any conversation about removing that trust. This is what makes vouching load-bearing instead of ceremonial.

The corollary: vouch carefully. If you’re reading this as a prospective voucher, you are attaching your reputation to this person’s future conduct. That is the cost of keeping the community high-quality. It should not be zero.

Rules of Engagement

These are non-negotiable. Full versions live on the Welcome and Discourse Guidelines pages — read those too.

Respect all members. Leave rank and ego at the door. The value here is expertise and contribution, not title.
No classified, PII, or otherwise sensitive information. Encryption does not make it permissible. If you suspect a spillage, vulnerability, or threat, report it to at least two admins immediately.
Chatham House Rules apply. You can use what you learn here. You cannot attribute it to a named speaker outside the community. Screenshots of conversations shared outside the community without permission are a breach of trust.
Stay on topic per channel. Each chat has a focus. Meta-discussion, gaming, off-topic — those have their own spaces.
Engage the wiki. Find a missing or wrong page? Fix it. Leadership is lateral — you lead by contributing.
Argue in good faith. Steelman before you critique. Assume good faith until proven otherwise. Bad-faith tactics (strawmanning, whataboutism, gaslighting, brigading) get called out and, if repeated, get you removed.

What You Get Once You’re In

One SSO login gets you into all of these. The community portal is the central hub that links them all.

Chat

Signal groups — the primary real-time venue, organized by topic (tech, AI, research, cyber, information warfare, off-topic, gaming, outdoors, and more). Augmented by the Signal bot for invites, Q&A, games, RSS, wiki search, and admin tooling.
Matrix / Element — the larger decentralized venue for persistent discussion, used as we approach Signal’s per-group member limit. See the Element guide.
SimpleX Chat — anonymous-by-default messaging venue, with its own bot mirroring the Signal bot’s command set.

Knowledge

Irregularpedia wiki — community-maintained knowledge base across research/OSINT, cyber, AI/ML, RF/SDR, unmanned systems, information warfare, military/career, infrastructure, and more.
Field Notes — community publication. Any member can submit; admin-reviewed before publication.
Outline — collaborative living documents, working drafts, and team wikis. Lower friction than the public wiki for in-progress work.
Forum — long-form discussion and knowledge management; threads cross-post into Matrix.
Community portal — the central hub that indexes everything below.

Discovery

Search — unified search across wiki, Q&A, chat history, news, docs, and web, with optional AI synthesis. Also reachable as an MCP server for Claude Code / Claude Desktop.
RSS reader — the community feed reader. Share the why in chat; the firehose lives here.
AI — self-hosted Open WebUI with community models including irregularbot:latest, fine-tuned on community knowledge.

Work, opportunities, coordination

Career Board — community-sourced job postings.
Task Exchange — bounties, gigs, and requests for help between members.
Events — community meetups and event RSVPs.
Teamco — team coordination, directories, schedules, and operational planning.
Q&A — structured question-and-answer web frontend for the Signal bot’s Q&A system.
Developer portal — tooling and resources for members building on community infra.
Skills Exchange, Reading List, 2026 Recommendations — curated, community-maintained lists.

If some of these are unfamiliar, that’s expected — nobody uses all of them. Find the two or three that match what you’re here for, and lean in.

Already Been Vouched In?

If you’re reading this page because you were just invited and you need to set up your SSO and Matrix access, go to SSO + Matrix Setup and the Welcome guide.

If you’re an existing member trying to invite someone else, go to User Validation.

Questions about the process belong in the Signal group where your voucher saw you. There is no public mailing list, no self-serve signup form, and no “apply here” button — by design.