Introducing the future of Geeks for Social Change!

Geeks for Social Change have had a hell of a few years. Amongst other things, we have: hosted a reading group, organised a popular community tech discord server, made websites for some really cool people, hosted an unconference, created award winning sofware to bring communities together, built a key resource for the UK trans community while distributing 15k to grassroots groups and improving accessibility, given talks on digital autonomy and grassroots organising, held Greater Manchester Police to account on Taser usage, created and rolled out a genuinely community-led approach to technology, produced a podcast, and managed over half a million pounds of funding over two companies with 15 staff and a dozen volunteers. Phew!

Doing all this during an ongoing global pandemic was... a bit much, to say the least. None of these things meshed very well from a business perspective; we were a bunch of people doing our best during some of the toughest times any of us have lived in, while getting pulled in too many directions at once. From our peak having 11 paid staff across 2 businesses in 2024, we are now again (hopefully temporarily!) an entirely volunteer-run organisation with a clear focus.

We're thrilled to announce the relaunch of GFSC as "GFSC Community": an infrastructure organisation supporting the people, grassroots groups and community businesses trying to build an equitable and survivable world.

We are a collective of people trying to do radical things with technology, and making technology to do radical things. Our initial blog contributors are: Kim, Emma, Olu, Sean, Micah, Petra, Stefan, Anna, and Jamil. We're supported by a handful of organisations doing some of the most interesting and radical work with tech in the UK today: Common Knowledge (who we did a workshop with in the summer), Lutalica, Autonomic, Resilience Web, Fractals, and Tipping Point. Each group has its own similar track record in the last few years, such as making tools to map constituancy action, providing tools for the climate justice movement, building independent infrastructure services for the movement, and way more we're only just discovering. Over the coming year we want to bring all these people, movements, tools and practices together.

Some of the ideas we've had for blogs, videos, podcasts and livestreams are:

• Invite people on to tell us what tech they use, what works and doesn't work, and what they'd do next time
• Deep dive into a tech methodology together, finding out what affordances each has, and who benefits
• Fix a bug or write a feature together for one of our code bases
• Run workshops on getting started with open source technologies and alternatives to big tech offerings
• Continue to roll out our existing projects such as PlaceCal and The Trans Dimension, as well as support our collaborators to roll out theirs
• Collaboratively write or edit a Wikipedia article, or contribute to #visiblewikiwomen
• Design a poster, sticker or zine together for the BDS movement or Trans Liberation

We'll be introducing ourselves and our work properly over the coming weeks and months. Personally, I'm thrilled to have a collective project to work on with this bunch. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about doing tech for left wing movements in 2024 was that we had scarce time to actually collaborate, being thrown into competition by nature of how capitalism works. Our collective and wider network has known each other for years, months or weeks, and I'm really excited to start a new direction focussing squarely on this open and collaborative work that the world so desparately needs.

Why we're doing this

The world is dying and its clear billionares and governments aren't going to save us. The worst people on earth are being rewarded with litearlly unimaginable amounts of money for boiling the planet and conducting a genocide while doing their level best to undermine and destroy global democracy and peace. We have to start saving ourselves – noone else is going to do it for us.

Lots of people want to make ethical, meaningful, creative and socially valuable technology and design but lack access to capital, social networks, project mentoring, and job opportunities to do this. With Universal Basic Income, GFSC would be a cinch to run – but we don't have it so it's a constant struggle to balance being able to survive in the short term with humanity's survival (and our own joy!) in the long run.

Currently this means left-tech projects struggle to become sustainable. Lots of people are stuck in corporate jobs they don’t enjoy or think are worthwhile, struggling for employment at all, or have their political beliefs unrealised. It's a very small sector economically, and we're all struggling to fill our books. While client work can pay the bills it's not always what we think needs doing most – the charity, grassroots and non-profit sector can be very siloed and backwards looking and the projects we can see as tech practitioners that need building need us to work together to find resources to build them.

We will focus on the doing ('praxis' if you're fancy), recognising that the left is currently very critique-focussed and lacking inspiring and creative calls to action. Rather than get bogged down in theory written decades ago by beardy men, or get dragged into the endless discourse battles on social media, we want to shine a spotlight on the people organising their communities warts and all, and give inspiration and encouragement to everyone to join in and do the same where they live. We will aim to share things that feel achievable, fun, joyful and inspirational, and plant a thousand seeds for community action in every neighbourhood.

How you can support us

Part of this change is to move to being a membership organisation, reducing our dependence on funding bids. Funding sucks. Erin Kissane notes that "I'm working from a one-legged stool; it needs more legs". I've felt this running GFSC. Like everyone else, we're frustrated as hell trying to get funding for our work – we find that community funds don't fund us because we're too tech, tech funds don't fund us becuase we're too community, and social enterprise funds don't fund us because we don't have a clear enough business model. It's very frustrating! At our last rejection we were told the National Lottery acceptance rate for the fund we went for is 3% at the moment. As the public sector falls apart we only expect this to get worse.

There's a bunch of ways to get income for a social project: client work, funding bids, raising social investment, research grants, and so on. We've found that these streams are way more incompatible than you'd like to think. At our heart we are a volunteer-led membership organisation. We're inviting you today to financially support us to continue this work sustainably and for the long term with a regular subscription or one-off donation.

Contributors will get the chance to join our monthly hangouts, and to steer the direction of content we make. Over a certain threshold you'll also be invited to join our Mastodon server and use our other hosted web services. You can see what's on offer using the "Subscribe" button below. If you've enjoyed our work the last few years and want to support us please do contribute and help us nurture and grow this community.

Projects we're inspired by include: Red Planet, Transwrites, The White Pube, Progressive International, Sovereign Tech Fund, Craftivist Collective, Ella Baker School of Organising, Act Build Change, and Dynamicland. Let us know if there's any others we should consider!

What's happening to gfsc.studio?

Dr Kim is still available as a freelance consultant doing work as "GFSC Studio", and will be making changes over time to that website to reflect this huge change. However, she's going to shift to being more of a "website doula", helping organisations align their strategy with their tech, and then using this foundling network to commission work collectively.

This is a big change, but we have identified there's too many studios going for too little work right now in a time where we need this work the most, so we are happy to move into this infrastructure position and try and improve the economy and opportunity for everyone.