Each laptop can toggle a communication-collaboration intention state that ranges from : too friendly to too cautious.
That is done accepting that a personal computational device should follow the state(comm wiliingness)  of its owner.
According to that state the laptop calibrates :

• willingness to be part of a local or near adhoc network
    (a participant can at least see the other participants.
     additionaly could see a topology graph and the distances)

• the participants with whow it forms that network

• public announcemt of its presence not

• willingness to share public files according to various private rankings

• willingness to be part of applications that run only with participants
    on that adhoc network.
    (that maybe is sth different. Communication between peers is not the same
    as co-accesing through protocols a shared process.Holding shared state
    allowing realtime concurrent manipulation of that state means i think
    a node capable of supporting that digital state.

I ve learned in the libera#networking  about PirateBox. But it seems as having a computer
that belongs to someone of the participants and we decide to connect to that computer
if we want to share files and collaborate digital. That approach reminds me of the DeadDrops
approach in terms of confidence and trust . Its like demanding a leap of faith big of small.

Can a classic unix mainframe deliver all those requirement ?
With a small difference that all people in a gathering should use terminals to log into the mainframe
and see who is logged in , who shares files , who wants to talk etc?
What if some persons share a computational device ? Imagine four people came to a local cyber gathering
with a sized workstation and four dump terminals? Can say that those four people by having a unix installation
have already achieved - access to the adhoc local network facilities in my initial list? Are we playing with words here?
What could happen also if the 10 laptops were modular and i could take off the computational cores of the 10 laptops , hook them into a mother-board workstation running unix and let the participants access the shared workstation have we again achieved a local adhoc lan ? Or rephrasing: do we have the same facilities offered to the cyber -local- gathering ?

What about  lan parties  ?
In lanparties there is usually a server (a central node) that runs an application (game server) where other connect.
That reminds of a starlike topology , akin to using a piratebox to achieve local e-communication.

The last couple of year bic corps have released tech like Airdrop (ios) , NearbyShare (android and windows).
But perhaps due to the small factor of the smartphone device they focus on simple files exchanges (sharing)
and not on general local adhoc collaboration. And that could align conceptually with the small factor of a personal
computation device(PCD) that is not adequate for productive collaboration.

Also i had a look at KDE connect that seems to approach the issue of communication and integration of one's person's
PCDs

Lastly why it seems that the use case covered by techs like airdrop and nearbyshare seems counterintuitively more difficult than connecting the whole globe via the internet ? What do i miss ? Have we solved the confidence issues in communicating and collaborating in vast wide networks and not in a local one ?  Why it feels that installing a linux distro transform your gear into an isle connected nevertheless  to the internet hyperway  ? Why it feels that the box steers your communication path and not vice versa ? (wow.. that sounds more zen that i intented to :-) )

(ps: if someone read my previous post and find it atleast interesting i apologize for replacing it with that one but i constantly rethink my approach on the matter and i feel that a long philosophical minded post could not help in focusing in the essentials of my  inquiries.)

links:
Bring your own device