We've come a long way since we announced this new blog in March. We've done over a dozen posts, launched our first livestream, given talks in London and Edinburgh, and hatched ideas for the weeks and months to come. The main conversation I've had over the last couple of months is that no-one is coming to save us, that the world is almost certainly only going to get to be a harder place to live in as resources dwindle and the billionare class increases their wealth, and so we have to start building our own means of production and community commons now, before it's too late.

Our last two posts showed the start of the concrete plan to do just that. I wrote about establishing Community Technology Partnerships in the (relative) abstract, showing the outline for how I'm now thinking about technology. I then wrote a specific use case of the Trans Dimension, one of GFSC's flagship initiatives, and discuss a route to shed ourselves of the demand to use one multinational, for one community, for one set of use cases. Gotta start somewhere!

We definately started the pace on this blog a bit too quickly. Our cadence of two posts a week has quickly slowed down and we're currently working out how to make this a sustainable volunteer-led project in the long run (more posts are coming from not-me soon, I promise). Over the course of the next year, five years, ten years, we truly want to help everyone build the community owned commons they deserve, and remove completely the need to use billionare-owned tech in our daily lives. We'd love your input and help to do it.

This new intiative and the new posts have bought a big influx of people onto our community Discord (now at nearly 500 members!), who are now asking very reasonable questions like “who are you?”, “what is the goal?”, “where does the money go?”, and “how are you organised, exactly?”. However after nearly 10 years of GFSC being the scrappy, messy, pragmatic project it is, writing down clear answers to all this has been harder than I thought.

Answering all those questions in full will probably take a few few months, but I've made some headway into describing at least what's going on right now and I'm sharing it in the sprit of the WIP vibes we're trying to establish.

Organisational structure

From the top: we are a Community Interest Company, which is the UKs compromise somewhere between a company and a charity. Charities in the UK have restrictions around engaging with parliamentary politics, so they're not really a great option for organisations like us who are lets say a bit politically spicy, as well as having a huge admin and reporting burden.

As well as the legal directors, we have a very informal advisory group we are currently working to formalise, and a set of emergent core principles that need codifying. We then currently have four main activities we are engaging with: hosting community spaces, building tech partnerships, creating tools and infrastructure, and communicating it to the world.

Community spaces

First and formost we are a community project and so we organise community spaces so people can meet. Our main online spaces are our Discord and Mastodon servers, and we are also looking into setting up a “tilde club” to get support for our infrastructure whilst giving people some server space to play around on.

Outside of that we have several PlaceCal and Trans Dimension partnerships in the early stages of getting organised in various cities. We hope that by providing these spaces we give people a nice gentle on-ramp into tech independance, and to make friends while doing so.

Tech partnership

We can't build any of this without a healthy and well funded economy of people producing liberatory technologies. We host regular meetings of community tech practitioners with some of the most exciting community tech projects in the UK, and are working out how to get in joint funding bids, align our strategic visions, and collaborate together on building a liberatory economy.

This was founded directly to address the fact that we found ourselves all tendering for the same, limited amount of work, and a desire to create our own independent sources of income. I'm now using this network to commission work through in my role as a community tech consultant. If you think you'd be a good match for this group please do get in touch.

Community blog (you're reading it)

This blog was started largely out of the realisation that for all the work GFSC Studio did over the last few years, we had precious little insight into the people, places and processes behind it. While things are getting better, tech culture has historically been and continues to be home to some of the worst kinds of predatory white male culture, a hostile and unwelcoming place separate from the rest of the workforce that has made many people think they are just “not a tech person”.

Of course, it's not all like this but I think we can do a much better job of dymystifying how software is made by showing the process, inviting more people to be involved in its creation at all stages. Specifically, we want to:

1. Showcase the people, communities, design processes and just straight up hard work that goes on behind the scenes to create technology,
2. Demonstrate how technology works in human terms, showing how it can be applied to real communities warts and all,
3. Encourage reflection, explanation and interaction between designers, coders and everyone else so we can create reciprocal relationships and re-integrate software development into our movements.

We are obviously just getting started with this mission and hope to have more to share over the coming months, but if you've got a product or project that you think we could help profile for you, please do get in touch.

Tools and infrastructure

Finally, our tools of the trade. This consists of software we're making ourselves, both as GFSC and the Tech Partners group, as well as existing software we adapt and the physcial infrastructure it's hosted on.

This is where we try and put our money where our mouths are, and are working towards developing, hosting and running our own software on our own machines built by our networks and collectively managed.

Just to give an idea what this looks like for us right now and an idea of our monthly costs, here's an overall schematic. Our current goals are to move our quite pricey Digital Ocean droplets over to Hetzner Cloud, which is managed for us by Autonomic. (Side note but if you work at Digital Ocean please hook us up with some nonprofit credits, I can't get a response from them). Our biggest single expenses are running our PlaceCal servers and our Mastodon server, which is extremely resource-intensive. We're also looking to have more of this worked on and managed by volunteers, if you'd like to help out check out our Get Involved page.

How you can help

Hopefully this article gives a bit of clarity about the goal and scale of the ambition of what we're about at GFSC. Currrently we are entirely running on donations, and are working on a three pronged income strategy: raising donations to support the overall mission and do the work that funders won't support, funding bids to accelerate the process by working on specific, time-bounded projects, and trading income from producing videos for community tech practitioners who would benefit from our collective skillset.

If you're able to make a monthly donation to support us please do, we are still in the very early days of this project and your donations go a long way. You can do this by clicking the “subscribe” button in the bottom right, or if you're logged in it shows a GFSC icon (we're still a bit confused about some things in Ghost!). You can also volunteer to help through joining our Discord. You can also sub to our newsletter in the box below.

For everyone who read this far, thankyou for supporting us and we can't wait to update you on our progress over the coming months and years.