GFSC are a collective helping communities use technology to do community stuff.
You can find the full article at gfsc.community/our-vision-f...
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.
What next?
This look at our business plan for community technology will continue next week. You can find a fuller form of it on our blog at gfsc.community
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed
-- William Gibson
What would it take to meaningfully onboard other communities onto Mastodon?
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.
A lot easier said than done. We all want less social media, not more.
Strongly-espoused tech views abound.
The project founder compared even discussing AI to killing puppies.
It may be too intense for some.
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.
Mastodon is decentralised, but to me it currently feels culturally homogenous:
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.
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.
No algorithm, ads or sponsors, and connecting feels intentional.
This means that no one person or corporation owns the network, and we genuinely get data sovereignty and escape the cycle of enshittification!
The good side of this is that it leads to a tighter knit community.
Mastodon is microblogging software that looks a lot like X, Bluesky or Threads.
The key difference though is it’s de-centralised: everyone is free to start their own server for just themselves or their community, but all servers can ‘speak’ to each other.
PlaceCal is not an app and not a platform. People use the sites and systems they already have, and PlaceCal aggregates the data..
It's a very different process to the default “just use our app” approach that product-based initiatives use.
We hold monthly PlaceCal drop-ins. Come if you're curious.
Why PlaceCal?
A local librarian told me she has to upload every event the library does to 5 events management systems, all with different fields and requirements. This takes hours.
By contrast, PlaceCal populates the Manchester Libraries site using five Outlook calendars linked to staff profiles.
Practical Examples: PlaceCal
What if we helped every organisation in a given community individually to publish events however they want?
That's PlaceCal! It's specifically a community information aggregator:
You publish your event and then we will aggregate it into our listings automatically.
A new piece on our vision for the ‘community’ in community technology:
Our goal is to help community organisations do things together rather than individually. Each project is a different expression of that.
It matters to us less what we are building and more how we are building it together.
Because of this, we focus less on ‘a community’ (noun) and more on ‘being in community’ (verb/process).
Our working definition is “people you don’t get paid to hang out with.”
You can find the full piece at gfsc.community/state-your-a...
‘Community’ itself is of course a critical category, not a given.
It’s instrumentalised by capitalism (to motivate workforces, retain customers) and the state (to measure statutory goals).
Community exists before and independent of technology
People organise, connect, and care for each other with or without digital tools. Technology can support this, but it's not an end in itself.
The moment we talk about platforms & features instead of people & relationships, something's gone awry.
Technology is about humans, and isn't neutral
We read technology in the broadest etymological sense: “the systematic treatment of an art, craft, or technique”.
Posters, well-run meetings, atomic bombs, pencil sharpeners, feminism, zines, style guides, hospital protocols etc. are all technologies.
Resist the urge to over-generalise, over-scale, & over-egg things.
Take a few steps back and do one simple thing really well. Then we can start making things emotionally sustainable by not making everything we do about everything there is.
What brings you joy, & what do you like to do with others?
We value encouraging a plurality of smaller groups that prioritise individual autonomy. A diversity of tactics
Small, informal, messy, local
The most innovative community work comes from groups with no formal structure.
Volunteer-run, ad hoc, and temporary work is the vast majority of on-the-ground activity that actually matters.
Institutions hate it.
Doing the work IS the research
We aim to collect knowledge first, and worry about what to do with it later.
We don’t study communities and then intervene: the intervention is the research.
PlaceCal was developed through hands-on day-to-day community development work, not designed in isolation.
These are all real forms of knowledge. But they sit in a power relationship that can be uncomfortable and contradictory.
No form of knowledge is inherently more important
• What a community knows from living somewhere (vernacular knowledge)
• what a practitioner knows from doing the work (tacit knowledge)
• what a researcher knows from studying it (scientific knowledge)
We've spent nearly a decade doing community technology work and tried to write it down it in a dozen different ways.
At gfsc.community/state-your-a... you can read Kim's latest attempt to state Geeks for Social Change's assumptions.
Here are some ideas which emerged.
I wrote a piece on guilt, the impossibility of remaining ethics, and whether it's ok to play The Sims.
Woman smiles, wearing a brightly coloured hat and glasses under a Trans Day of Visibility banner.
Next up is Dr Kim Foale, founder of trans and disabled-led @gfsc.community, creating community tech in anticipation of a world without billionaires.
gfsc.community
Come as you are and tell us how you'd like to be involved, or what you think we need.
Finally, we are always ready to welcome more people to write for our blog and help us produce streams and podcasts.
We hope to see you there.
The Discord: discord.gfsc.studio
Our next meeting is Tuesday the 7th of April from 4pm-5pm BST on Discord
If you can't attend, but would still like to get involved, please do drop Kim an email at kim@gfsc.studio
As always if you'd like to support us from a distance you can find out how over here:
gfsc.community/support-us/
We are also interested in other skills you might have to bring such as:
• graphic design
• writing documentation
• management accounting
• social business development
• bid writing
• qualitative and quantative research
• and of course contributing code.
But don't let these asks limit you!
We are especially looking for:
• people who can proactively project manage some organisational operations
• people with volunteer and community management experience
• people who are interested in helping maintain our codebases
• people who can manage our Mastodon co-op cloud server.
This is a meeting for anyone interested in helping GFSC become a properly co-operative and community-run project.
We're a community of people using technology to help communities do community stuff.
If you'd like to be involved in that mission in any way, this is your chance.