Our vision for the ‘community’ in community technology

GFSC has been through a lot of iterations over the years – a book group, a design studio, an activist collective, a digital inclusion NGO, and now a community of practice. This has led to us simultaneously getting told “oh that’s so cool!” followed shortly by “ok but what is it you actually do?”. Reader, this has probably been as vague for us as it has been for you so this article is an attempt to set the record straight and put our plan out in to the world.

Our newly-refined mission as GFSC is to help people use technology to do community stuff. We’ve found this a surprisingly open area. Corporate tech cares about profit and information extraction. FLOSS communities routinely only really seem to care about tech for tech people. Digital inclusion programs can do this to some extent, but are mostly focussed on helping with the operational side of running an organisation, not the community stuff itself. Most digital build briefs tend to make new tools for one organisation to do new things – not create shared tools that can de-silo and encourage greater cooperation

Our goal is really simply to be a place to make this collaboration happen. It matters to us less what we are building and more how we are building it (as we explored in our philosophical foundations): together. We think that organisations can never truly resist big tech alone: the scale capitalism operates on gives the maximum efficiency of scale, and the accessibility and ease of use that billions of users and trillions of dollars produces. However we think we can start to build a new world together if we do it by working together on things we collectively own.

Some practical examples

PlaceCal

We’ve written a lot about PlaceCal as a piece of software and initiative but underlying it is an operating principle we’ve maybe not explored well enough on the blog is: what if we helped every organisation in a given community individually to publish events however they want? PlaceCal is specifically a community information aggregator: so we say “you publish it and then we will aggregate it into our listings automatically”.

This is in wild contrast to how events platforms generally work. For example, a local librarian has told me she is expected to log in and upload every event the library does to 5 competing events management systems, at least 2 of which are operated by the library. They all have different fields and requirements and this takes up hours of people’s time. By contrast, PlaceCal populates the Manchester Libraries site using five Outlook calendars linked to existing staff profiles. Many of these platforms place undue stress on event uploaders by requiring a ticketing link and image for example. Perhaps most frustratingly, there is no official bug reporting or feature request system for any of them, as they are all for-profit commercial SaaS with no way for users to engage with.

This logic of helping people set up something that works for them, in a canonical, efficient and integrated way isn’t at all obvious to people though, given how conditioned everyone is to thinking in terms of products. We’ve been opening up PlaceCal recently to anyone who wants to give it a go at our monthly dropins. It’s been fascinating to see how the smart, capable and engaged community organisers who have been turning up are asking how they should be doing things, and what we want, as if we have a single answer, when in our model the whole point is to ask each community group what they want. So a lot of groups are Instagram-only for example, and are increasingly wanting to do something about that, but we know any brand new thing would last as long as the enthusiasm for that lasts and that each group probably already has half a dozen abandoned accounts on various services already. Instead, we teach people to ask them how they are working as a team now, what tools they use internally to plan things, and give people the option to go through our wide list of supported platforms to find something that works for them, which we can then help them set up.

This is obviously a very different process to the default “shut up and use our app” approach that product-based initiatives use. It lets us start to think holistically about who is responsible for data between say, bands and venues, or community centres and user groups in the centres. It lets us think about how we get out information and how we could get it if we worked together. I feel inherently sorry for the amount of work that people putting on events and festivals feel they have to do on Instagram now especially to get attention – carefully staged social media strategies with slow-rolled performer and venue reveals, videos, reminders, countdowns, stories, etc. We used to get by with a flyer and a solitary Indymedia or Facebook Events (before they sucked!) and trusted the natural organic reach of those to percolate out.

Doing this work together gets us to ask what it takes to get all the organisations in an area to share their information in ways that work for them. GFSC’s drop-ins, blog and training programs are all designed to build the community that makes this possible: a world where we use tech to collaborate rather than compete.

Mastodon

As a second example, we’ve been quietly having discussions about something we’ve not announced yet: a new Mastodon/Fediverse server for UK community organisations. Mastodon is microblogging software that looks a lot like X, Bluesky or Threads. The key difference though is it’s de-centralised (quite a confusing concept but bear with it): everyone is free to start their own ‘server’ for just themselves or their community and they all can ‘speak’ to each other. This means that no one person or corporation owns the network, and we genuinely get data sovereignty and escape the enshittification cycle by removing the profit motive.

The good side of this is that it leads to a tighter knit community. Because of the way federation works, you will see more content ‘closer to home’, i.e. on servers you and people on your server are connected to, and less from random strangers. In other words, it feels more like IRL community. There's nice hashtags for moss, people introduce themselves properly, there's no algorithm, ads or sponsors, and connecting feels intentional.

The downside is, well... the community itself, which unfortunately can represent some of the worst clichés of programmer culture. The project founder compared even discussing AI to killing puppies yesterday, leaving this bsky post from someone who tried it and left to be a little too on the nose:

I tried Mastodon in good faith and it was the social media experience of eating bran flakes while being glowered at by an angry German

@faineg.bsky.social

Of course, like any community it’s not all like this: but I’m finding it better to start with the worst things about it and have them confounded than vice versa nowadays. While being technically decentralised, to me it currently feels culturally homogenous because the things that make it interesting – the open protocol, the decentralisation, the independence and self hosting, the diy culture – naturally mean it mostly appeals to specific sub-community of developers who are a bit too ‘like-minded’. I suppose this is a case in point of ‘community’ being about what you’re willing to tolerate in return for being able to explore your identity, culture and values. Despite my complaints it’s the only social media I regularly use and so I’m invested in trying to make it better in a way I never could on a corporate site.

So how might I do that? What would it take to meaningfully onboard other communities onto it? Hopefully by now, you guessed that it would mean doing it with a bunch of groups at the same time who all commit to giving it a go and trying to bring their audiences along with them. For each group individually there is little point: there’s probably very little of your audience on there (if any!) compared to corporate social media sites. It’s a different culture (for good and bad) with different affordances that takes time to learn. Overwhelmingly this is happening at a time people want to use less social media not more: so until it can replace another network it’s not looking like a great option.

I’ve spent the last few months trying to recruit some people to try exactly this. I got a domain name as a placeholder - organise.diy, thinking of branding it as a kind of “UK Riseup.net” but with more of a focus on community organising than activism. Our pals Autonomic and Tipping Point were up for this very quickly, although of course raising concerns about moderation, paying for maintenance, and the ever-present Online Safety Act Sword of Damocles. At the Information Lives in DIY Culture event I spoke at last year I met Ben from Another Subculture, who was new to the fediverse themselves and up for having a fresh server. But getting another group or two to round this out has proved really hard. I’ve tried asking artist friends: but they are all stuck on Instagram as a career necessity as most of their work comes through there. I’ve tried a few activist groups but most are just stuck for time and don’t have the energy to commit to another thing, especially given the unproven audience. I’m also keen to recruit at least one Black-led organisation given the systemic racism experienced by Black Twitter’s attempts to migrate over previously. Finding a range of people in the niche where the community ownership and decentralisation is important to them and they have access to a network they think might give it a pop is proving difficult.

If you think this sounds kinda exhausting then you’re right -- and this project has been in a holding pattern for months trying to create the right cultural mix to meaningfully start a new server. But it is precisely these cultural and social obstacles we have to overcome if we are serious about community-owned and non-profit information sharing. Mastodon is just a tool. GFSC ask: what happens if we commit to using the tool together?

What next?

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed

-- William Gibson

In the next post, I’ll share our community business plan and how we hope to operationalise this way of working that considers the social first and the technical after. We have more than enough technology: the job for us is ensuring that communities can use it to work together to produce community outputs again, and stop the enshittification merry-go-round.

If you’d like to be part of our mission you can come to a drop-in, join our discord, support us with a subscription, or of course, follow us on Mastodon.