The Arrow Community
Meet the Arrow community — who we are, why we're here, and how to get involved.
Arrow has no office. The community spans timezones and continents: software engineers debugging flight controllers at midnight, mechanical designers iterating CAD from home workshops, people who've never worked in aerospace but have strong opinions about where it's going. What connects them is a belief that the way aircraft get built today is needlessly closed, and that open source changes the equation.
Why we're doing this
Aerospace is broken. It's locked behind defense contracts, NDAs, and a culture of secrecy. The defense and aerospace industries move slowly not because the problems are hard (they are) but because there's no incentive to share knowledge or bring outsiders in. The result is that most of the world's interesting aircraft work happens behind closed doors, funded by governments, inaccessible to anyone who isn't already inside. Hardly anyone is building aircraft in public, for the genuine benefit of humanity. We think that's wrong, and we're trying to prove there's a better way.
The path to cargo drones and manned aircraft is long, and we're clear-eyed about the work ahead. A scaled network of automated VTOL aircraft means you can live far outside a city without losing hours of your life every day. It means rural communities with real air access, cargo moving without massive road infrastructure, and point-to-point travel that doesn't depend on where the airports are. We're years away from that. But every aircraft we build openly gets us closer, and we're committed to building patiently and in public.
We also hope Arrow proves something beyond aviation: that a decentralized community can build serious hardware without a company behind it.
Where we hang out
Discord is our living room, where ideas spark, meetings happen, and the community hangs out. Most design decisions start there. You'll find channels for specific projects, hardware discussions, governance threads, and community calls announced in the events tab. If you're new, it's the right place to start. Join our Discord
GitHub is our workshop. Every design file and line of code lives there, public and open. If you want to understand how something works, the source is all there, no permission needed. Arrow-air on GitHub
The DAO forum is where bigger decisions get made: project proposals, governance, and where Arrow focuses next. It's slower and more deliberate than Discord, which is the point. Proposals need to be written clearly enough that a stranger can evaluate them. Visit the DAO forum
In-person meetups
Arrow is primarily an online community, but we periodically gather in person to build together, work hands-on with the designs, and remember why we're doing this. We've met up in Turkey and a few other places, usually a few days of hands-on build time, some community discussion, and a lot of conversation that only happens when people are in the same room. Keep an eye on Discord for announcements.
Get involved
You don't need to be an engineer. There's work here for mechanical designers, software people, writers, video makers, and anyone who wants to help with governance. Contributors get paid in USDC for completed bounties, and in $ARROW tokens, which give you actual governance power, not just credit.
Most people find their way in through Discord. The usual pattern: lurk for a bit, ask a question, get pulled into a thread, find something that needs doing. Arrow moves fast enough that a new person with good ideas can have real impact quickly. Pick up a bounty, pitch something for a grant, or just show up. Join Discord, introduce yourself, and find where you fit.