GFSC Hosted Services

• Managed by the Collective
  • Collective doesn’t currently have any autonomous presence, isn’t a legal entity
  • Collective could become the steering group for GFSC Studio
  • Collective could be incorporated, but feels like overkill to just get a server up and running
  • Collective will need to have autonomy outside of the studio to act as a steering group for the studio
    • If structures and decisions are all downstream, it’s hard for them to flow back up
  • Collective could have an ambition to incorporate in a year as a co-operative but in the interim make some compromises
• Name on paper
  • Could be the Studio.
    • Feels like a fussy detail to derail getting the server set up just because the Studio’s name would be on it
    • Decisions about how it’s managed are more important materially to the server and if it feels like it’s run for and by the Collective

Costs of the Collective

• UnTechCon
  • Approx £2k in donated staff time
• Collective Meetings
  • 1.5 hours x2 staff
• UnReadingGroup
  • 5-8 hours of staff time

Would this work happen if the studio wasn’t donating staff time so people were paid to do this work? Probably not

All of this work could be run and funded by the collective as an autonomous organisation, but that is a long way away in terms of time and money

In-group trusted labour is a positive, jobs are positive. If we can get funding for a role, we should

Autonomy and equity are build through practice and are hard to come to without an active engagement. Giving the Collective space to figure that out is as much the work as producing a hosted service.

Collective and Studio are emergent requirements of the base need

Sometimes things are just fallow for a while, then a response/intervention is needed and having the correct environment to rapidly facilitate that is important. Knowing where the skills are and who has or can make capacity when it matters.

To make: survey which explicitly asks the questions raised in the collective meeting/this document/Kim’s brain dump.

Collective Survey

Questions

• What would you like us to do?
• Is this a supportive and welcoming environment where I can get support to produce my project under our broad studio themes to do with systems change and social justice?
  • What does ‘environment’ mean here?
  • What do we need to make that environment?
  • Can the collective support this?

Possible structural analogy

• Less like competing organisations and more like complimentary work strands