What we did in July and August
PlaceCal livestreams! Accessibility moans! Consensus decision making hate! Podcast revival! Mastodon interview! Ava introduction! Exclamation marks!
Latest
Out, damn Spotify!
Much like Lady Macbeth, Kim has found herself sleepwalking in her enormous castle unclear how she ended up covered in blood (by indirectly funding a military drone company). Read on to discover how she rid herself of Spotify and rediscovered her love of music, albeit with a distinct lack of witches.
Hello, I'm Ava!
Meet our newest author, Ava. She can solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute, host a comedy show, and have an anxiety attack on demand. However, the Labour party's anti-trans moral crusade means she is planning on emigrating with these in-demand skills and starting a career as a developer.
Consensus decision making sucks
Oscar Wilde once wrote that “the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”. Possibly there is no greater culprit for these lost evenings than the scourge of consensus decision making, Kim vents.
Community Spotlight: Mastodon
Kim caught up with Andy, Mastodon's new comms lead, for a chat about the Fediverse's poster child. Find out more about the future of the project, how they feel about Bluesky, and how you can get involved.
How we created a community digital commons: 8 years of PlaceCal
For our second livestream we're looking at the story of PlaceCal, technology that serves communities by aggregating and displaying events in a single place. Featuring Kim and Sean (GFSC), Rakesh (Tipping Point), Jay (Gendered Intelligence) and Stefan (Manchester School of Architecture).
Accessibility: complexity and contradictions in graphic design
Accessibility is a vital and increasingly recognised component of all design practice. But what does accessibility actually mean, what happens with accessibility requirements contradict one another, and how can graphic designers learn about accessibility implementation?
Our first three months as the Geeks for Social Change Community!
Our grand plot to overthrow billionaire technologists and place communities in charge of their own technology is gathering pace. Find out about what we've been up to since we launched this blog, and find out how to join us.
Full Meta Jacket: How corporations colonised queer life and what we can do about it
Big tech, especially Meta, is synonymous with queer and trans organising. Kim gets into the weeds exploring how this happened, and suggests some routes out of it including GFSC's own Trans Dimension initiative.
How to establish a Community Technology Partnership
Let's retire the endless magic bullets and solve problems together instead. Kim lays out a methodology for how we can start building technology by thinking about people, not products: and guess what, it's rooted in ✨ existing community networks ✨.
GFSC's April Roundup
New writers, new stickers, new articles. Here's your monthly roundup to see how the GFSC community is growing including our first livestream (an immersive client simulator x dolmio sauce mascot appreciation crèche) and an interview with the creators of the Vote Out Covid webapp.
Vote Out Covid: community spotlight
GFSC's community Discord supports people using technology to futher their social campaigns. Kim caught up with Dave to chat about his Vote Out Covid campaign's goals for the 1st May UK elections, their Django webapp, and building Corsi-Rosenthal boxes.
Can you subvert YouTube's battle for your eyeballs?
YouTube's homepage is a slot machine: brightly lit, loud, ephemeral, provocative, uncertain, and there to make money for the house.
Exposing its design principles is a surprisingly complicated task. Micah has a crack at it, investigating how a browser extension might take away the house's edge.
You Are The Client: We Make The Stickers
It's our first live stream! You are invited to join us tomorrow (Wed 16th April) at 7:30pm to cross to the other side and play the heinous client hectoring their long-suffering creative team.