What’s Been Happening at Our Drop-ins?

We've had four strands of meet-ups, and all have led to interesting discussions:

• A meet-up with tech developers and creators who work on community technology
• One focussing on our PlaceCal platform and those who use it
• One for artists, creatives and freelancers
• One for writers and researchers, especially (but not exclusively) people who write for our blog. (Hello).

Let's look at some of what we discussed – and then a few words on how these will change in the future.

Tech Developers and Creators

Our tech drop-in has brought together folk from a large part of the country, including Edinburgh, Macclesfield and the Kennet & Avon Canal – all working on community technology in different ways. Here are some of the topics which emerged:

Open data for events. It turns out it's tough getting community groups to publish event information in a usable (and reusable) way. Even in the tech community, it's a struggle to get organisers to put accurate, structured data out there. We've been sharing a few approaches: using tools like public-data-extractor-for-meetup-com to import data from Eventbrite and Meetup, and storing event data in Git. There was some praise for the work that OpenTechCalendar has been doing in Scotland since 2012.

Surveillance and harm in healthcare. One researcher is looking into the use of technology is used to monitor people's mental health on dementia wards and in homes. Tech-based record-keeping doesn't solve the power problems which already exist in these spaces. By taking away the human element, patients feel even more that they're being spied on in their bedrooms. People have always been observed in clinical settings, but the new systems cause unanticipated problems. Plans to keep staff numbers down are driving adoption of such technology at a rapid pace – something which needs much more scrutiny than it's getting.

Self-hosting and community media. This has been an important strand in these drop-ins: running community infrastructure on your own hardware, and writing zines about making technology approachable. We've been glad to see some interest in the cooperative.computer space and community-run servers more broadly. One contributor was keen to start a community radio show about software, licences, and copyright. That last one raised an interesting regulatory question: if software is political, does FM broadcasting's obligations towards political balance mean you'd need to represent the opposing view? Does one need to speak about software from different ends of a political spectrum?

What tools do small organisations actually need? This might be the biggest recurring theme. One big issue was scale: on the one hand, “it's mad when people want to run an entire organisation through a website, but then skimp on it and don't properly invest”. On the other hand, people feel obliged to get complex systems for simple setups: “Having CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is like having a big truck when maybe you just need a couple of bikes.” Sometimes what you really need is an analogue thing like a flyer. Everyone's keen on building tech, but the harder problem is maintaining it. That's a financial problem as well as a practical one. Enthusiasm and funds help us start new projects, but how do we sustain the energy and the money to keep a system running in the long time.

We discussed disability advocacy, neurodivergent community organising, food bank work and LGBTQ+ activism – all approaching technology from a community perspective rather than a product one. Discussions also covered sustainability in healthcare technology, and how the economic model for remanufacturing single-use equipment doesn't really exist – at least, not yet.

One point resounded: community organisation has become a kind of folklore. Councils stopped printing guides to what's on because they assumed computers would solve it. Computers didn't, so now if you want to find a yoga group you have to rely on knowing someone who knows one. That's the problem we're all trying to solve.

PlaceCal Community Organisers

Kim wrote about PlaceCal recently - one of GFSC's key projects, and these drop-ins brought together PlaceCal organisers, and those interested in using the system. People joined from Leeds, Glasgow, Birmingham, Exeter, and Manchester. Here are some of the key topics:

Local knowledge is everything. The most valuable thing people bring to these sessions, and this system, is understanding of what's already happening in their city. In Glasgow, they connect with networks which already exist, including anarchist organising groups. There ae platforms like the Inter-Organising Network and Communal Leisure that PlaceCal could connect with rather than duplicate. In Birmingham, there's interest in using PlaceCal for queer community events, particularly around Pride. Not just listing things for people who already know about them, but making things discoverable for people who don't yet know what's out there. In Leeds, people working with queer community groups are already familiar with the platform's backend.

That's the whole point: PlaceCal works best when local people who already know and understand their community are involved in shaping how it's used there.

The frontend gap. Work continues to be done on the backend, but the frontend isn't complete – there's a gap between what's been built and what people can actually see and use. This came through clearly in discussion, and it's something we mean to address.

Practical platform needs. There are some practical issues we need to fix, for instance event reduplication, support for multiple partners per event (as they're often collaboratively run), and the need for much better partner onboarding guides. If we want community groups to use PlaceCal, we need to make it genuinely easy for them. Something which is seen as handy, not just technically possible.

The Instagram problem. Everyone promotes events on Instagram, because that's where the audience is. But Instagram is a terrible way to find out what's on: no search, no date filtering, posts disappear, and you can only find things if you already follow the right accounts. Frequently the key text is only in pictures. Most community groups have ended up there by default, not by choice. We need to address this dependency head-on – not by telling people to leave Instagram, but by making the information they post there discoverable somewhere more useful.

Accessibility as a first-class feature. We've talked about filtering for masked events, wheelchair accessibility, and making sure these are built into how the platform presents information, not just added as afterthoughts but are built into how the platform presents information. If PlaceCal is going to be useful for marginalised communities, accessibility can't be an add-on.

Next session: Wednesday 18 March, 12–1pm on Google Meet

Artists, Creatives and Freelancers

The creatives drop-in, hosted by Olu, has brought together musicians, activists, designers and researchers from the UK and the USA.

How do you leave Instagram when your audience is there? This is one of the big questions. Everyone knows corporate platforms are bad for you – the algorithm buries your posts, your audience are seemingly kept from your posts, and the whole model is designed to extract from you rather than serve you. But the alternatives don't yet have the people. The fediverse is where we'd like everyone to be, but the user base isn't diverse enough, curation is difficult, and it can be a surprisingly hostile place if you're not already technically minded and on the ‘right side’ of various ideological divisions about it. Bluesky is newer and growing but comes with its own questions. Unfortunately, moving your creative practice off corporate platforms means accepting you might lose reach, at least for a while – and for people whose livelihood depends on visibility, that's a big ask.

Tools for a more independent creative practice. Here are a few which already exist: Faircamp for self-hosting music, Merlot for creative projects, and ActivityPub-based platforms for social media. Kim recently set up a new GFSC music platform Music Wall – an experiment in what it looks like to share music without Spotify or Bandcamp. The question isn't just “what tools exist?” or “what is better in principle?” but "what would make them genuinely better to use than the corporate version?"

The indie web, and web design ethics. We've discussed the practice and politics of web design. What does it look like to develop sites and systems that respect people, work without surveilling their users, and don't depend on platforms that could disappear at any time or change their terms tomorrow?

Guilt-tripping people into using alternatives is a terrible tactic, and it doesn't work. If we want people to leave big tech, we need to build things that are actually nicer to use. That's harder than it sounds, and it's exactly what these conversations are for.

These have been fruitful conversations, but it's looking likely that the creatives dropins will be merged with our writers and researchers strand so that our monthly meetups are more focused. The drop-in system continues to evolve!

Writers and Researchers

The writers' drop-in, hosted by Ben, is a space for people writing about technology, community, and social change – including blog posts, academic work, zines, and just thinking out loud (or thinking onto the page). This has been a quieter, more reflective session than the others, partly because it has a large cross-over with the Creatives session above. This is one of the reasons we're looking to rearrange the makeup of the drop-ins in April – about which, more below. A number of the ideas discussed have fed directly into blog posts here, including last week's piece on why you should (and shouldn't) make a podcast.

The forthcoming revival of the GFSC podcast has also grown out of the writers' meetings. We see the podcast as an extension of our blog, and we hope you'll hear plenty more about this beginning next month.

Going Forward / Come along

So far, we've been running these meetings as pilots. We found the audience of the various drop-ins overlapped significantly, so we've decided to rearrange things a bit from here on, with one running more as a peer support/social group, with a mind to restarting GFSC as a collective. From late March, drop-ins will be refined into these two:

• PlaceCal! Those who use it and those who want to, or at least those who want to know more. This will be held at noon on the Wednesday 18th March, continuing on the third Wednesday of each month.
• Peer Support, a drop-in for creatives using technology and technologists who want to be creative, offering encouragement and accountability. This will be held on Discord at 7pm on Thursday 26th March (and on the fourth Thursday of each month).
• GFSC Collective Meetups, our freshly restarted monthly organising meeting for GFSC staff and volunteers. They will be on Tue 7th April at 4pm, then every first Tuesday at the same time.

All our drop-ins are free, online, and open to anyone. You don't need to be technical, you don't need to prepare anything, and you're welcome to just listen.

Find us on Discord at discord.gfsc.studio or just turn up. We'd love to see you.