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Greater Manchester Trans Organisers Fund

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Trans Organisers Fund was a one-off pilot fund for trans organisers in Greater Manchester. The fund was administered by Geeks for Social Change and financially backed by Lankelly Chase, with a steering group consisting of Greater Manchester-based trans organisers.

Trans Pride Manchester. Photo: Chris Northwood.

The goal of the fund was to facilitate trans healing and justice work in Greater Manchester. We feel that being a trans organiser is currently extremely stressful, underfunded and high stakes at the best of times, with almost no material support out there for the people doing the work on the ground to ensure a better future for trans people. The fund’s goal was to work to support organisers to work out how we can do this work sustainably in ways that value people’s time and result in long lasting community infrastructure and care networks.

Who are trans organisers and what do they do?

We identified trans organisers as being the people who bring the trans community together. This is usually through organising events, which might be in-person or online, and cover nightlife, craft groups, social spaces, peer-support, fundraisers, and more.

What we’ve done

To cover this diversity we first recruited and paid an honorarium to an all trans and nonbinary steering group including representatives from Geeks for Social Change, Inclusive 11s football, Queers in Manchester event listings, and Trans Mutual Aid Manchester. We met 12 times over a year from Autumn 2023 - Summer 2024.

We dispersed two rounds of funding, one at the start of 2024 and one in the summer of 2024.

The first round was focused on finding out more about the goals, barriers, vision and experience of funding of trans organisers in Greater Manchester while providing a much-needed boost to organisers’ financial stability.

The second round was informed by the conclusions drawn from the first round, and focused on providing trans organisers with material support to publish accessibility statements.

First round of funding

In the first round of funding we wanted to find out more about key players working towards trans liberation in Greater Manchester. We devised a series of questions for fund recipients, intended to discover more about their motivations, goals, barriers and experiences of working on the ground. These questions were:

What do you want to achieve as a trans organiser in Greater Manchester?
What are the barriers that stop you from achieving what you want to achieve?
What is your vision for the world you want to live in?
How has your group been funded so far and what challenges have you faced?

Who we contacted

We did this by offering £1,000 of funding to key organisations we identified. We contacted six organisations, five of which responded to the questions and received the funds. One organisation cited lack of capacity as a reason for not accepting the funds, although we did not require respondents to answer the questions or do anything specific in order to receive the funds.

How we analysed the responses

We analysed the responses by conducting a thematic analysis of the responses provided. We used the full list of themes to inform the analysis below and discussed these findings with the steering group.

What do you want to achieve as a trans organiser in Greater Manchester?

Organisers note wide-ranging goals focusing both on broad systemic change and directly supporting individuals, resisting structural and institutional transphobia and creating space for celebration and joy. Groups with specific focus of course speak to specific goals for their focus area – for example the Inclusive 11s football aims to create spaces and opportunities for trans people in sport, as well as resisting structural transphobia within this space. Housing, sex education and nightlife and entertainment are also raised as priority areas, as well as a focus on accessibility.

What are the barriers that stop you from achieving what you want to achieve?

Capacity is the most significant issue facing organisers, alongside funding. Funding and capacity are related – cost of living increases have meant that many organisers need to spend more time and energy on paid work. Groups are struggling to find volunteers with capacity to take on significant responsibilities, and are unable to pay staff or collaborators. It’s noted that as trans people often have less access to funds due to structural disenfranchisement, organisers put a lot of work into keeping their provision free or low cost, at emotional and time cost to the organisers themselves.

Structural disempowerment and discrimination is also raised as a big issue facing trans organisers, including harassment and obstruction from official bodies and the police. Some groups operate in areas where there are big players with a lot of resources who have a monopoly on spaces, and many of the available spaces are unaffordable or inaccessible to those with disabilities. This makes it difficult for organisers to find suitable venues. Disability is something which impacts capacity across the board, as well as requiring higher levels of support when organising, and necessitating accessible spaces. Not knowing where to promote events to other trans people is also mentioned as a barrier.

What is your vision for the world you want to live in?

All respondents, regardless of their group’s scope or focus, mentioned safety. This is compelling in that it betrays that none of the organisers currently feel that trans people experience safety. This is noted on both the individual level (wanting to end harassment against trans individuals, the desire for “a world where we can just be”) and the structural level (financial security, having needs such as housing, healthcare, transportation met). These responses largely mapped onto what each organisation stated they want to achieve, with many also noting a desire for celebration, enjoyment, thriving (not just surviving).

How has your group been funded so far and what challenges have you faced?

The majority of the groups have been primarily self-funded, meaning the organisers volunteer and put in their own resources, up until receiving this grant from the Trans Organisers Fund. Most of the groups have also received some income from ticketed events and donations. One group had received significant funding in the past, including a grant from the LGBT Consortium – it’s worth noting that this group were the first to respond to the questionnaire and claim the funds from the Trans Organisers Fund.

As fund administrators, we noted that it was very difficult to liaise with several of the organisations we contacted to receive this funding. Lack of capacity, both in organising and administrative capacity, was cited frequently by prospective grant recipients as a reason which meant it took a long time to get back to us, and why one organisation refused the funds. There was a sense that £1,000 was a lot of money and required a project or specific initiative to be ‘worth’ accepting. Many of the groups did not have a concept of building financial reserves or using the funds to build capacity. It almost felt like groups were nervous to act, as if accepting the funds and not doing something ‘good enough’ with it would be detrimental to their organisation’s image. Throughout convening this fund, issues of interpersonal tension and criticism from other organisers have reared their head to complicate the process of dispersing these funds and building capacity for trans organisers in Greater Manchester.

Conclusions and next steps from the first round of funding

The responses we received demonstrated a significant need in the trans community, which far outweighed the capacity of this fund. This meant that we needed to identify a specific priority for the next round of funding. At the same time, we faced the challenge of organising groups not being equipped to deal with the administrative and operational burden of receiving and utilising funds. Trans organisers are used to operating on a shoestring against significant systemic challenges.

We were not able to identify visible models for ways in which robust community care could be enacted in a sustainable and ongoing way in the trans community in Greater Manchester. This made our decision-making more challenging when deciding how to approach the next round of funding, as we wanted this fund to have the greatest possible impact. Organisers recognised that many trans people are struggling individually due to the lack of systemic support. This raised the suggestion that dispersing the funds to individuals could have a positive impact—at the risk of ignoring systemic issues for papering over the cracks in the meantime.

In the absence of systemic and institutional support, a need arises to create and empower alternate structures, such as the suggestion of community-led care. When devising the next round of funding we appraised our capacity against these possibilities. It was apparent from the responses we received to the first round of funding that whatever route we chose, it needed to be intersectional and inclusive of disabled people and others who are structurally disadvantaged.

t4t clubnight. Photo credit: Jessica Guscoth.

Second round of funding

In Round 1 we discovered that trans organisers in Greater Manchester have a clear vision of the world they want to create, even if the exact steps on the way there are less certain. The single clearest theme we heard from almost everyone about was accessibility, so we elected to focus on that for the rest of the fund.

Lack of accessible spaces as a key issue impacting organisers, limiting where events can take place and who is able to attend them. In order to attempt to address this, we decided to start by building our understanding of the current landscape of venues used by trans organisers and how this impacts access. By understanding the current picture of accessibility in the trans community we can provide a basis for future campaigning and set a trajectory which is grounded in the reality of the landscape as it stands, not acting from an assumed baseline.

We funded organisers to write and publish accessibility statements in order to both materially improve access through access to this information, but also to highlight the lack of affordable, accessible and trans-friendly spaces in Greater Manchester. This lack of accessible spaces is a critical factor in Greater Manchesters’ chronic lack of resources for trans and disabled people, and is creating wide disenfranchisement of the wider trans community. Because so many spaces are not accessible, trans and disabled voices are not heard in the design and provision of new spaces. On top of this, Manchesters’ increasing gentrification is removing or reducing access to public, free-to-use spaces, for example the Manchester LGBT Centre, which no longer has a cafe or public access and is unaffordable for many trans grassroots groups.

This lack of accessible spaces for events is a big source of anxiety for trans promoters but this often falls out individual promoters’ capability to alter. Where spaces are aware of the need for equitable access, they often do not have the funds to carry out necessary works in order to make their space accessible. We did not have the funds or scope to financially back alterations to buildings or spaces, but hope our highlighting the limited accessibility its possible for grassroots trans groups to offer shows this as a systemic problem that could be addressed by placing pressure on landlords.

Who we contacted

We contacted 16 groups and organisers to ask them to publish an accessibility statement in order to claim £500 of funding towards their activities. Of these 16 groups, 5 never responded, 1 responded initially but dropped off, 1 declined the funds as they had stopped operating in Greater Manchester and 9 accepted the funds and published accessibility statements. The remainder of the fund once groups had expressed their interest was allocated towards writing and distributing this report, bar a one-off contribution to a venue in financial trouble which was cited as being the main venue used by three of the organisers we contacted.

Responses we received

We provided a template to help organisers prepare their statements based on our previously published Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events. All of the responses we received used titles and structure from the provided template, even if they added further information or missed out some sections. Despite following a template, the information depth and clarity of the responses we got varied greatly from group to group. This is a best case scenario - we are funding people to do the work of providing this information.

What kind of spaces do trans organisers use?

In the accessibility statements we received from respondents, we noted that the majority of organisers used temporary or pop-up spaces, rather than dedicated community space. The exception to this is the three organisers who cited being based at Partisan, an LGBT+ community space, previously operating from Islington Mill. At the time of the allocation of funds, Partisan was experiencing a period of acute financial hardship which threatened the future of the space. As of writing this report, Partisan have had to leave the space which they were operating from previously and are using a membership model and temporary spaces to continue providing community services. This narrative is one shared by many of the groups which wrote accessibility statements: they struggle to access permanent space, so are at the mercy of the physical features of temporary spaces which are hired or donate their time for events. Without access to permanent space, investment in infrastructure for accessibility is very difficult to manage.

Other than Partisan, the other venues cited by respondents are Reform Radio, The Grafton Arms, The Proud Place, The Derby Brewery Arms and The Brewers. These are mostly nightlife and community spaces, with Reform Radio as a notable exception with its primary function as a recording studio. One respondent doesn’t publish their address online to protect attendees.

What are the features of these spaces?

All venues utilised by respondents reported the presence of accessible toilets, with all bar two reporting gender neutral toilet facilities.

Most respondents said that they encourage attendees to take tests before arrival and stay home if unwell. Several respondents admitted that the spaces they use are not well ventilated. Two respondents stated the venues they use filter their air, and one of these said they provide masks, hand sanitiser and COVID tests on entry.

All respondents, bar one, cited level access at the space they use. The space which does not have level access is a basement space under another venue, with narrow stairs to the basement.

Most respondents said their venues did not have a specific quiet or separate space to decompress, however some provided suggestions of spaced within their venues which tended to be quieter, or stated that this information might change per event. One respondent went into great detail about how they accommodate neurodiversity at their events, which is well-written and thorough.

Round 2 conclusions

The trans community demonstrates a high willingness to make events accessible, with many of those we contacted already taking steps to make their events as accessible as possible. This being said, it’s not always clear on the best action to take, especially for organisers who suffer from a lack of material resources. Because the trans community is structurally marginalised, many trans organisers do not have access to the material resources necessary to make their events as consistently accessible as they would like. They are faced with the choice of: run an event which not everyone can attend, or not do anything at all.

This lack of access to material resources is exemplified by the large reliance on temporary space and pop-up events. The main permanent venue which caters to the trans community was forced to close its physical location during the course of this research, leaving many organisers who had previously used it as a ‘home’ without a stable base. This means that the accessibility of an event may change from event to event, as it is forced to use different venues depending on availability.

Lack of access to permanent space also precludes concrete steps being taken to make accessibility better on the whole. Long term renovations and structural changes, which would be necessary in many existing venues and event spaces, aren’t practical or within reach, and where they are implemented often have to be abandoned when that space’s usage is no longer feasible.

Inclusive 11s football practice. Photo credit: Sandy Rushton.

Recommendations

We’ve devised these recommendations from the findings from our two rounds of funding and research. We’ve split them up based on who we think is best positioned to undertake them.

Landlords should…

Invest into access improvements, such as level access entrances and changing places toilets
Invest in air filtration systems to mitigate the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and combat other airborn pathogens
Keep their premises in a well-maintained condition which doesn’t require significant investment to utilise, even when being used for ‘meanwhile’ lets and short-term projects
Consider reduced rent for community use
Make their commitment to the trans community clear and invite trans people to use their spaces by working through our Guide to Inclusive Events

These measures support organisers without the means to make such additions and alterations themselves, and materially benefit the whole community.

Groups should…

Pay attention to the accessibility of any space they use, and consider setting minimum standards
Share comprehensive accessibility information in advance, and signpost to it each time they promote an event
Provide a named point of contact and a way of contacting them directly, without relying on social media
Seek opportunities to work together and share resources
Try and build financial buffers to create more stability in the work they are able to carry out, and mitigate organisational burnout

Funders should…

Provide more administrative support for grassroots groups, who may not be used to seeking funding
Proactively support trans organisers and focus funding on long-term, infrastructural projects, building sustainability in from the beginning
Share information on how grassroots groups might be able to model their financial structure based on proven case studies, to make it easier for those who have never dealt with fundraising before to understand the successful management of organisational finances
Recognise where they have historically underfunded trans groups, move to support trans groups on their own terms rather than making them translate into “funder language”.
Work with existing trans community networks and support participatory budgeting and place-based giving approaches

Report prepared for The Trans Organisers Fund Steering Group by Geeks for Social Change.

Want to use PlaceCal in your community?

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Climate Action Newcastle volunteers at Heaton Festival. Photo: Rakesh Prashara.

PlaceCal is our international award-winning software and community development approach that lets you curate a list of groups and events for any combination of place and interest.

Other people are using it to make listings of age friendly groups in Hulme & Moss Side in Manchester, parent and child groups in Torbay, transgender groups in London, and climate and migrant justice groups in the North East.

Some of the things people have told us they want to use it to list are: listing home education networks, a health and wellbeing directory or asset map, cycling groups, independent music venues, reading clubs, gardening groups, and protest and abolition initiatives.

Some of the benefits of making a centralised community calendar and group listing are:

Reducing social isolation and loneliness, increasing community cohesion, and improving health outcomes
Assisting with local strategies like community wealth building, asset-based community development, doughnut economics, and transition towns
Creating the conditions and networks we need to resist the current “polycrisis” by building a culture of mutual aid and resistance as government, charity and NHS support erodes
Fulfilling statutory obligations to create asset maps or community directories for institutions, community forums, social care providers, etc.

We know there’s loads of things out there like this — and that none of them are working very well for the people on the ground actually doing the work. People don’t want to go and sign up for one more service, or list their thing on one more website. We agree, and have designed our approach accordingly.

PlaceCal has been developed alongside an engaged community development approach that works by training up existing community organisers (like yourself!) to first go and support all the groups in your partnership to list their events using software they already have, such as Google Calendar, Outlook 365, Eventbrite, and SquareSpace (there’s a full list of supported sources in the PlaceCal documentation). PlaceCal then automatically aggregates this information, requiring almost no effort once set up. This takes all the pressure off the groups to get it set up, but then lets them take it over once it’s running.

Even better, once groups are in the system, they can be added to multiple partnership sites. This way, we are creating a digital commons owned by our dedicated nonprofit, building something like “Wikipedia for community events”, that can be sustained past the end of any one project or volunteers’ input.

After 8 years of hard work making sure it does what community groups need, we are now ready to open it to the public. To celebrate, we are offering training on a pay-what-you-can basis for the first 10 community groups to sign up.

Would you like to curate a PlaceCal website for your community partnership?
Do you want to get trained up to be a community technology organiser and be able to support your network to promote their activities?
Do you want to learn how to connect it all up and make a sustainable, self-maintaining listing of activity?
Do you want to join our groundbreaking and innovative program to change how people access community information, forever?

We’re ready to onboard PlaceCal Organisers!

We’re happy to say we’re ready to welcome a new cohort of PlaceCal organisers to use our PlaceCal platform! We’re offering a three part course to get you set up with PlaceCal and ready to start using it in your community. It’s offered on a sliding scale, depending on your organisation and community context.

Who is this course for?

This course is for people who are interested in becoming PlaceCal Organisers. PlaceCal Organisers are members of a community who actively work with and engage their local community to connect to PlaceCal and build a community calendar. This course is designed for people who are ready to press ‘go’ and start building a site—attendees should already have some idea of who they want to reach, as well as how they will support their own time as a PlaceCal Organiser. This might be someone embedded in an organisation who wants to undertake this training to carry out the work of a PlaceCal Organiser as part of their role, or a dedicated volunteer who wants to connect their community.

What’s in the course?

This course includes three one-hour sessions to set up a PlaceCal site for your community.

Session 1: Identifying your partnership focuses on building your contextual understanding of PlaceCal, how it works and refining the boundaries of the community who you aim to engage in your PlaceCal site.

Session 2: Getting started with PlaceCal gets hands on with how PlaceCal works and into the details of adding and updating community information.

Session 3: Calendar deep dive offers more in-depth detail about calendars and structured data, as well as identifying community needs and working with the tools already in place when onboarding community Partners.

At the end of the course you’ll have a fully-functional PlaceCal site and the tools you need to use it in your community. At the moment, this is the only way to get a PlaceCal site up and running in your community. The software is in a closed beta, a period of testing with select users, and undertaking this training means you can be part of that!

How will it be delivered?

This course will be delivered in three one-hour sessions over Zoom. Full access to the training materials will be provided to allow for independent study and revision. Some parts of the course are interactive, and some require assistance from the PlaceCal team (e.g. setting up accounts). These tasks will form ‘homework’ to be completed between the sessions so that everyone is on the same page and making progress together. The sessions are formed of a mix of hands-on activities and taught sections.

Course details

Dates

This training will run three times, each course consisting of three one-hour sessions delivered a week apart. This is to allow you to do work on the ground and come back for support and feedback.

Option 1 - Wednesdays at 10am, July 17th, 24th and 31st
Option 2 - Mondays at 1pm, July 29th, August 5th and 12th
Option 3 - Tuesdays at 6pm, July 30th, August 6th and 13th

Pricing

This training is offered on a Pay What You Can (PWYC) basis as we know that some organisers do not have any funding or institutional support. The below pricing brackets can be used as a guide for what we need to make delivering this sustainable long-term:

Unfunded, entirely volunteer groups: £0-£50
Groups with project funding and budget for marketing: £200-£500
Groups with core funding and paid staff: £500-£1,000
Institutions and statutory bodies: £2,000-£5,000

Ongoing support

The course will provide an overview and everything you need to get started as a PlaceCal Organiser in your community. All participants will be provided with the supporting material including slides and written course content for reference. Following the course, Organisers will be encouraged to join the Organisers mailing list and/or the Geeks for Social Change Discord server, where you can post queries, raise issues and access peer support.

Who is carrying out the training?

This training will be led by the Geeks for Social Change team.

Fill out this form to express interest in the course. There are limited spaces available, so please book soon to avoid disappointment!

If you have any questions please book in a 20 minute consultation or drop us an email.

Our first year of Community Technology Partnerships

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is a CTP?

Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs) are a concept we’ve been developing since 2016, with a journal paper on the approach published in 2020 and our first official funding happening in 2022 thanks to the National Lottery Community Fund. Since then we’ve been working hard on refining and exploring CTPs and our flagship tool PlaceCal in order to help connect communities without needing to rely on walled-gardens and big tech.

What have we learnt about CTPs in this first year? The rest of this post is a selection of some of the “best bits” of our first year report. We will be sharing the rest of our findings in the coming months and years!

Disadvantaged communities and their people are not the problem – they are the solution

Hazel Stuteley OBE, Chair C2 National Charity

This quote informed the outcome of our first year in ways we could not have anticipated. The overarching narrative of our first year is one of shifting priorities and rescoping our activities due to the ongoing impact of Covid-19, and the the large scale removal of state support by the Conservative government. Illness, cost of living challenges, the climate crisis, and complete burnout across the sector has had a huge impact on both our abilities and the communities we work with.

We thought we’d be working mostly to set up partnerships and launch the CTP approach with our network of collaborators. However we were told pretty quickly by basically everyone that actually they’d just like us to use the tool we keep going on about — PlaceCal. There is a big sense at the moment that people are tired of more approaches and initiatives and just want simple technology that works for them right now.

In our case, the overwhelming demand is for a community information source and events calendar that honestly just works the way Facebook Events used to: but easy, free and shaped to fit their needs rather than serving corporate interest. Following this thread, we shifted course to focus more intently on making PlaceCal the tool it needs to be to meet communities needs, and even secured an extension to our funding to reflect the cost of living challenges – but where does this leave CTPs?

Perhaps the single biggest refrain heard when doing community work with tech today is some variation of:

…But I’m not a tech person!

Everyone

Empirically however, almost everyone we interact with uses one or more computers to do some or all of their job with, and if they didn’t, they would be incapable of doing that job. So how did we get to the point where we have more computers than ever, but people feel less empowered to say that they feel able to operate them?

Our Growing Great Ideas project aims to interrogate this disempowerment and begin the work of building digitally autonomous communities.

In developing PlaceCal, we are working to create a digital commons of high quality, accurate, and trusted information about community activity and events. It will be owned, curated and operated by a real world network of community organisers.

We want everyone to live in a neighbourhood where it’s simple to organise community events and bring people together. It should be easy to start a new group and have people find out about it. It should be simpler to put on and promote events. We want people to be able to easily work with others in their area to do things they can’t do on their own.

PlaceCal is being co-created by the project partners (i.e. existing groups in real world communities), and aims for four levels of impact:

Grassroots (aka soil, roots and compost): Work done by activists / organisers to facilitate things based on place or interest (Partners)
Niche: Local partnerships and groups who cooperate together in similar places on similar interests (existing partnerships and CTPs)
Regime: Our “network of networks: the work of the project is “community organising organising”, creating connections between and across this network and finding places we can create outcomes that benefit everyone.
Landscape: The laws, policies and framework that structure people’s day-to-day life. Our redefined concept for Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs), and the framework on which PlaceCal is built, is based on the UN/WHO-backed Capability Approach. The concept takes a non-representative, directly hands-on approach to overcoming people’s problems with technology, as an alternative to ideas like digital inclusion and design thinking which in our view are failing the communities we work with.

We focused year one at two specific intersections:

Grassroots → Niche: how do individuals grassroots groups help coordinate more organised local partnerships, or niches?
Niche → Regime: How do we help this “network of networks” work together? (i.e. how do these niche partnerships form a regime coordinated by our initiative?)

These levels of concern were given to us by our lottery funders but we found them really helpful to think about the different ways of thinking about communities and is based on Geels’ theory of technological transitions.

We are developing ways to create tech outcomes from community needs

We are currently completing our methodology for converting community needs to tech outcomes. This involves working with individual community groups and partnership organisers, and thinking about the shape and structure of our own team.

Fundamentally our goal is to be able to convert a simply expressed community need into one or more tech¹ outcomes. These needs include situations like:

“I want to put on a social coffee morning for older people and have everyone know about it”
“I want to get all the people doing yoga in my neighbourhood together”
“I want to start a new drum’n’bass night and am not sure how to do it”

Anyone aiming to do these things will face many barriers. These might be things like:

Access to space: knowing where there is a space you can hire, knowing who to talk to, having experience with managing contracts and expectations around venue hire.
Social: knowing who to talk to, who already puts on events like this, having the social skills to host a group, being able to access other volunteers to help you run it.
Financial: being able to afford hire fees and startup costs, having your own time covered to do the work, being able to organise events because your financial needs are met.
Technical: getting the event online, promoting it to other people, managing expenses, getting people’s contact info for future events, managing booking forms and ticketing.

The kinds of barriers are pretty consistent across many settings, but the specifics faced in overcoming them by any individual are unique to their personal situation and neighbourhood. This is commonly reflected in the overall feeling that certain neighbourhoods have a lot going on and others don’t and there’s ‘nothing to do’.

If there are only a few barriers to organising and it’s a well-trodden path with lots of support and infrastructure, then people are far more likely to figure out how to overcome their challenges . But if they can see dozens of barriers, and there’s no support easily discoverable, community organising can look completely out of reach.

People go to their friends, relatives and trusted community organisers for help and support with promoting their events. This is why it is no coincidence that we ended up with two part-time venue managers as our community development organisers: in their interviews they were far more qualified to take on this role than ‘tech people’ who might have organised the odd code meet-up.

The tech and social aspects of promoting local events and activities are heavily intertwined, however. For example, choice of social media promotion can be very context dependent, and may only be known by people in a given area. There might be key WhatsApp or Facebook groups that people can access, Instagram aggregation accounts, or local info portals with a big audience, and you wouldn’t know about these if someone didn’t point you in the right direction.

This means that some blockers can be very difficult to untangle. Someone wanting to organise a home education network (one of our collaborators is doing this in Calderdale), is simultaneously figuring out their own tech and social expertise limitations, as well as the tech and social expertise limitations of their whole network. Capability is communal as well as personal.

To put it simply: it has emerged that there is no meaningful dividing line between what is experienced as a social problem and what is experienced as a technical one. This is a sticking point that has taken a lot of work to unpick, both for our own team, and the people we are working directly and indirectly with.

We are understanding the underlying problems stopping people bringing groups together to form partnerships

The main focus for year one has been understanding what kinds of people have both the will and the means to establish community partnerships — “groups of groups” working together. There are several kinds we have encountered:

Institutions such as city councils, housing associations, and the NHS wanting to work locally with community groups. These organisations often had the stated intent to do so, but neither a plan to pay anyone externally do do this work, nor the internal will (or staff) to push this work forward. Their main focus tended to be intelligence gathering work to make private resources for their own employees, rather than investing in the public good. We have abandoned working with these groups for the time being.
Individual ‘local’ community organisers, the people ‘everyone knows’. These people have typically been active for a long time and are usually doing lots of ‘behind the scenes’ work. We found these groups run by these individuals have the will to succeed, and already put in the work and cultivate the relationships, but don’t have any resources of their own to ‘spend’ outside their own time, and are often unsupported by local institutions.
Communities of interest, such as around hobbies or small businesses. These range from a 500-strong women’s social enterprise network to six people with their own holistic healing groups. These are the types of groups we have spent most of our time working with.
We also found an ‘anti-example’: funder communities. Where big funders have established communities around their funding (often called ‘communities of practice’ or ‘participatory grant making’) these are often vastly unequal power relationships where the people in them use very different language to describe their membership and affiliation than the funder does. While everyone is generally mutually happy to be in this relationship, we’ve found that they’re not a meaningful basis to do further unpaid community organising work on top of, as they do not have strong roots or a reason to exist beyond the funder itself.

We are therefore focussing our work on community organisers of interest and place, to understand their barriers as they try and get all the groups in their network working together. Our primary outcome for this is that they have a ‘curated calendar’ in PlaceCal: https://placecal.org/find-placecal.

We are helping individual community groups overcome their barriers to having a web presence

Our team’s first goal with each individual community group (partner) is to help them get a tech setup that works for them. This usually involves helping them to adapt what they already have, or sometimes adding something new. During this process, we regularly encounter questions about getting information shared online.

People sometimes want help with an events-specific web presence (like Eventbrite, Meetup, or Dice), sometimes with social media accounts, or they may simply want an online internal management tool like Google Calendar, Airtable or other services. They may want help with their existing website on Wordpress, Squarespace or Wix that they don’t know how to edit or the volunteer doing it has gone missing or left the organisation.

Given that having an online calendar of some kind is a requirement for getting events added to PlaceCal, undertaking 1:1 support and tutorials with groups to overcome these direct pain points they are already experiencing has been a vital part of our work. We have been able to help groups identify more clearly what their needs are, what tech solution would best fit their ways of working and requirements, and get them set up with that solution. As our work in getting partnerships inevitably involves repeat visits and ongoing communications, we have also been able to help troubleshoot ongoing issues along the way.

One of our key learnings during this project is that this kind of ‘hands on’, low-level tech support is vital. Even though setting up a Google Calendar (for example) is often a relatively simple task within the technical skill of the people we work with, it’s making a decision to join a wider network and taking that first step to do it that can be daunting. It takes a lot of trust and faith in the person asking you to do it. This is one of the areas in which our team have offered the most value to the partners that we have directly interacted with. We have also found that a lot of people don’t realise the full functionality of the calendar services that they are using — for example, that you can update an event’s details on your phone, and then these will update everywhere online, or that it is possible to publish an iCal feed from Outlook. Realising how simple and powerful these tools are to use has been a real gamechanger for many groups especially as it’s working with technology already used and paid for by groups that people already look at every day.

This has been vital in building connections with groups as I found many people had the skillset to make a Google Calendar, they just didn’t have the confidence, and had reached tech burnout over lock down.

Providing a space where people could ‘have a go’, ask ‘silly’ questions, and do it together, showed people they were more tech savvy then they thought.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

We are building the evaluation and training tools to manage all this

We have created a theory of change and project plan. These are now guiding us on the resolution of the project.

We are currently working on ironing out our evaluation and training methods and the stages findings go through from discovery to resolution. Once complete, we will have data stored in a consistent manner across the whole project.

We will be sharing our theory of change and fieldwork data when we’ve tidied it up — watch this space!

Our first year of CTPs

The first year in numbers (May ‘22 — April ‘23)

86 partner sign-ups
4 x live PlaceCals: The Trans Dimension, PlaceCal Manchester, PlaceCal Torbay, and Greater Manchester Systems Changers (GMSC)
6 x PlaceCals we are actively working to set up: PlaceCal Norwich, PlaceCal Oldham, Conscious Collective, Climate Justice (Tipping Point), Home Education, Women’s Social Enterprise Network (Flourish CIC)
5 x dormant sites waiting for us to add key features
50+ enquiries to work through when we’re ready from a wide range of community groups and institutions throughout England and Wales
6 x tech workshops for partners with nearly 100 attendees

The first six months: setting up our infrastructure

From the outset, we knew we had to recruit a team on on the ground to work directly with communities, listen to their challenges, and help them figure out how to dismantle their specific barriers.

A project manager was recruited to administer the delivery (David, based in Manchester), and two Community Digital Organisers: Rachele (North England, based in Manchester), and Coral (South England, based in Torbay).

Both Coral and Rachele were initially tasked with setting up the first CTP in their region.

Rachele, who runs a thriving community pub in Hulme, Manchester, was tasked with creating a PlaceCal partnership with the Greater Manchester Systems Changers (GMSC), which was comprised of around 30 grassroots organisations funded by Lankelly Chase. As mentioned earlier, pursuing a partnership comprised of organisations united by a common donor rather than shared purpose or existing relationships meant Rachele struggled to make meaningful connections.

I initially found it hard to engage with GMSC — I met most people at the event, and got numbers and emails from GMSC… but the details seemed to be out of date. I cold-called, attended GMSC events, sent emails and didn’t have much luck.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

Coral is based on Torbay, where she runs a board game cafe shop, and is deeply embedded in the local community. She attended C2’s three-day “Residential Experiential Learning Course”, convened by C2’s cofounder Hazel Stutely OBE, in September. She delivered a presentation on PlaceCal and CTPs to the C2 network. Coral then worked hard to establish a thriving PlaceCal in Torbay, getting 18 groups and dozens of events on board in short order.

Coral doing a presentation on PlaceCal to C2 at their weekend gathering

We also set up a steering committee made of representatives from C2, Lankelly Chase, Gendered Intelligence, Geeks for Social Change and Radical Routes. However, after a series of enthusiastic initial meetings, attendance began to drop off as the sector became increasingly embattled and meetings were eventually halted.

The impact of this sector-wide withdrawal was felt most keenly for us when one of our most important partners in our initial Lottery bid — C2 — became dormant, and could no longer support us with their guidance or infrastructure. Without the capacity to recruit new partners through C2, Coral was forced to limit her efforts to Torbay and, six months into the project, had to resign her position entirely, due to an inability to access appropriate childcare.

In October, Kim and Rachele did a podcast called “The Rise and Fall of Facebook Events” on the issues we’d faced already, and their own experiences as organisers. This podcast led to an invitation from the NHS’s Public Participation team to present a talk at the Start With People event in March 2023.

In November, we launched The Trans Dimension in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence, our first ‘white label’ PlaceCal site. The development budget for came from another funder (Comic Relief and Paul Hamlyn’s Tech for Good fund), and we were able to use all our learning and code base improvements from the National Lottery funding to make it even better. There is more information on this on our website portfolio. A poll of people following Gendered Intelligence on Twitter (i.e. an already heavily engaged group) found that the median number of trans groups people knew about in London was 3 — our project found over 45 active groups that are now actively working in partnership together publishing dozens of events per week. This site is a huge success with 6.7k visitors since launch and continues to get hundreds of visitors a week despite almost no extra effort being expended.

Kim launching The Trans Dimension at Queer Britain in King’s Cross

Jay from Gendered Intelligence opening the event

We also developed The Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events, a mini-zine on how to make events more trans and disabled inclusive. We did this based on workshops with Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People and Gendered Intelligence staff and volunteers.

Zines and badges produced for The Trans Dimension launch

Back in Manchester, Rachele discovered there was a desire to engage with our approach — but capacity was extremely limited and there were significant barriers to unpick and address.

I found many groups had switched to WhatsApp groups — these worked short term but fell apart when there were too many members. People did not know what to use instead.

Rising costs meant that many spaces were having to charge venue hire — this meant some groups had stopped.

People did not want to engage with digital skills after COVID — tired of Zoom etc.

Frustration with Platforms — eg Twitter! Nothing connects locally anymore — apart from some specific FB groups. People get burnt out by WhatsApp groups.

People did not have capacity to engage with PlaceCal — some organisations I contacted said that it did not fall into anyone’s role and they were only paid to do specific projects.

There is real burn out and “what is the point?”

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

The next six months: grassroots development

I went to as many panels and sessions where I could present about PlaceCal. I especially worked with Flourish CIC, as their group represents over 500 social enterprises and community-led groups across the North West.

Out of this research, I came up with [bespoke training] sessions. Most beneficial was working with Flourish’s network — we did informal sessions to develop the Digital Skills workshop based on what they felt they needed. I was really pleased as it was well received - each session had over 20 people sign up, and at least 10 people attend and all attendees really felt like they got something out of it.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

Rachele demonstrating how to use a Google Form for event registrations

Rachele also delivered sessions like this with a number of other groups.

In addition to identifying the broad need for up-skilling, Rachele’s on-the-ground research confirmed that in order for PlaceCal to gain traction, we needed to engage community organisers who had already built up partnerships of groups. Our starting assumption that we could build a platform from the bottom-up was complicated, as Rachele discovered individual organisers wanted a PlaceCal that was grounded in communities of interest, and could be run by one or two highly motivated individuals, rather than many partners tending their individual calendar.

[We] found “curators” — individuals who maintain a group or collect and share events around a specific interest. These are the people that PlaceCal needs to engage with. These people have the connections and trust needed, and normally have the level of tech confidence to engage with PlaceCal straight away. Most have been maintaining a calendar of some sorts. Alongside this, they understand the wider benefits of PlaceCal.

Examples:

We found a lady who had collated all the children’s events in Google Calendar.

There is a lovely man who collates all the up-to-date food bank information in Google Docs.

Hayley works to connect up Home Education events and has access to Facebook groups and runs some spreadsheets.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

The latter half of the year was spent creating a focused plan to execute the changes and improvements being fed back to us from the grassroots level.

This necessitated an increase in project management requirement and a reallocation of budget to fund essential tech development through our tech subcontractor, Geeks for Social Change (GFSC). We changed our development focus to work on PlaceCal features for our grassroots partners and niche partnerships.

We started really discovering and digging into the confusion and discomfort about ‘who does what’ in our team. Structural change is complex and so is the software that underpins PlaceCal. It isn’t just community development work with a bit of tech.

We started to ask questions like ‘How can people like Rach and David meaningfully interact with designing a product when their background is wholeheartedly in community development and not software development?’. This has been extremely difficult work for all of us but in working this through we’ve discovered a lot of fundamental issues with developing software with not for communities that we could not have discovered any other way.

At the end of year one, we were at a pivotal moment in the project. We had suffered numerous setbacks and had our assumptions challenged in many different ways. We felt it was time to document and disseminate our learning in a way that fully explored the complexities we had encountered. This was the genesis of our Theory of Change, and building on that groundwork to draw up a complete project plan for the rest of the project.

What have you learnt?

We have learned an enormous amount during this process about our approach, the conditions we are facing, and what we need to do to overcome this together.

We need to retarget PlaceCal at Organisers, as they are the key to engaging with grassroots communities — but they are struggling

Our previous assumption was that city-wide institutions like councils, housing associations and the NHS would be the ones supporting us in a rollout. We learnt this was not the case on the ground and that we instead needed to work with active community organisers.

Practically, the biggest difference this made was shifting our attention to communities of interest over communities of place. Our initial work assumed that community of place would be the biggest pull, with PlaceCal being based around the idea that individual organisers would step up to manage ward-level sites. In practice, the divide between community and interest is less concrete than we’d originally imagined. For example, trans people (an interest-based group) who live in London don’t really care about trans groups in Germany. Meanwhile, over 80s in Hulme (a place-based group) probably don’t care too much about drum and bass nights there (not without exception, of course!).

We also found that institutions (e.g. councils, the NHS) work very strictly according to ward boundaries and continue to move with them if they change. Communities of interest (e.g. trans events, yoga and bodywork) tend to operate over much wider areas, but with a much narrower focus, and they care less about which specific area they are in.

By shifting our focus to these networks we found people who were much more motivated to curate their network of groups, as this is something they were trying to do already — unlike the hyperlocal ward-level sites, which people didn’t have the same affinity towards. Even where there were some ward-level projects, they often didn’t define as the ward per se but some smaller subsection of it, e.g. ‘West Street’ — one area of one postcode in Oldham, or ‘Age Friendly Hulme and Moss Side’.

This shift has been profound. We discovered that to attract these groups we needed to give more of a combined package of support and encouragement to get their partnership working together. Most of all, people want a lot more visual, layout and functionality personalisation than PlaceCal is currently able to offer.

We are now working to improve these options, and are confident that enabling this relatively small but very motivated group of people is key to the success of our whole project.

Community digital tech overall is in a much worse case now than when we started — and we need to adjust expectations

This has been an extremely difficult few years for everyone we are working with.

In some ways this is an opportunity for us as an initiative. We are potentially a big source of hope and lots of people want the opportunity to work better together but don’t have the tools or skills to do so.

In practice though, this has meant that we have had a lot to learn about the specific differences between each community group’s exact needs. This has reinforced our approach of using known community organisers as the key people to lead this work. But it also means we need to meet people where they are, and deal with their immediate tech needs, before we can interest them in any further coordination or development work.

One of my strengths as a community leader is I know how much people get hassled by consultants with no real gain except for taking up their time.

I have offered people my skills in return for meeting with me - anything from helping with funding bids to cleaning! This is invaluable as many of these groups run on volunteers / goodwill so people’s time is precious.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

Partners are struggling to make something suitable for their needs and need a lot of support before we can onboard them

Despite the supposed huge advances in tech, individual organisers are struggling more than ever to list events and services online in ways that can be easily discovered. Even staff on the project are struggling to find suitable and affordable ticketing and website solutions for their venues. Often people are stuck with relying on ‘the tech person’ (who no one has seen for six months) to provide and/or maintain a website, and there is no community culture around doing this in ways that are not effectively gate-kept by a tech volunteer.

I can’t do anything without getting hold of Solomon who runs our website. I don’t even go on the website! I need a new website! I want to know how it works, how can access it.

Local youth group leader

The primary way we are helping these local organisers is by working with them to understand and overcome the barriers they are facing to having and maintaining a web presence. We are doing this by direct hands on qualitative research with groups in each area, which is being collated into a database of barriers and solutions.

I explained how PlaceCal came about, how it could benefit the community, how simple it was… I also offered to come down and see the work they do and offer any support. I think this made a huge difference — the offer to sit next to her and set it up. I feel like lots of people I have connected with want the chance to be heard, to air their grievances and frustrations.

Rachele’s PlaceCal diary

It’s really hard to know where to apply effort best

A lot of times it’s really unclear where the problem lies with any given tech requirement.

For example, one community centre wanted a website for their organisation. They have really struggled to get a website up and are now using something with Wordpress. This is fed by a Google Calendar feed that also goes to PlaceCal. So on paper they already ‘have a website’ and ‘publish events online’.

However, results on PlaceCal and their site now show a lot of events that just say “empty slot”, and the calendar is incomplete and really hard to read. From our end this makes it really hard to know what’s wrong. Is this a problem with the base feed they’re sending us? Is this a problem on their website too? Should we write a filter to let people screen certain words from their import process? Or do we just say this is out of scope for us to fix and demand a base level of event information integrity before adding to our site in the first place?

Another example is the network of home education groups. These groups are attempting to create a national network of people doing this work, but had no computer systems to do this with properly, so the project was unmanageable. We’ve now worked with them to create a database in AirTable that meets their needs: but is this something that’s sustainable to do for everyone? Are we just making more problems as we go?

Overall it’s really hard to know where to draw the line when helping people out, and where our interventions end up becoming the next problem for the group to deal with when we are out the picture.

No one really has a model for how this should work

The current state of community data gathering, storage and retrieval is a complete mess. Almost everyone we worked with is, in our view, acting in breech of GDPR and data protection law almost all the time. We hear horror stories of residents who help out at a local food bank having their phone number put on flyers and circulated by institutions without their knowledge or consent. The ‘mass cc’ strategy to group organisation is still the main tool in use, resulting in many people ending up perpetually on mass mailings they can never ‘unsubscribe’ from.

The reverse is true too: willing and able community organisers who would like to be involved in local activity can never get their names onto these lists as there is no real acknowledgement they even exist, and most community events start from a semi-arbitrary list of all the emails the person convening thought of when they started.

This creates a culture of complex gatekeeping. Institutional organisers limit wider community involvement to people they personally approve of, so you can be added to lists against your consent to begin with, but also quietly dropped from distribution when you upset the wrong council officer.

Try and talk to anyone about these very real legal and social barriers around fundamental needs and they’ll probably pull a face or act as if you’re asking for the moon on a stick — which maybe you are. But given the millions spent on digital inclusion, the complete reliance on computer systems to do people’s day-to-day jobs, and the half dozen community development officers in any given neighbourhood, it is astonishing that even this basic most low hanging fruit doesn’t have a satisfactory resolution.

Computer databases have four basic activities: create, read, update and delete (aka CRUD). These are very simple to code and extremely difficult to create social structures for. We are learning that we need to have more and more detailed conversions about these rights on a neighbourhood level as a prerequisite for further development.

Create: almost every community group starts from this, creating contact lists or posters and online listings for events.
Read: currently you can only find out about things easily that you directly subscribe to (i.e. follow on Facebook or Instagram), or via a physical poster in a venue. In other words, there is no online organic discovery mechanism for hyperlocal activity.
Update: when things go out of date or need correcting, there is often no easy way to correct this info. E-flyers can’t be retrospectively fixed, posters need editing manually, etc. Online event listings can do this — assuming people have booked a ticket using a login and you can send them updated information. However, given that the majority of community activity is unticketed, this doesn’t actually happen much. Distribution lists are similarly complex in practice, and make it difficult to update contact info without great manual effort and multiple requests.
Delete: it is basically impossible to have your email and sometimes phone number removed from the public domain once in it, even using legal recourse to GDPR complaints.

A key benefit of PlaceCal is that it works as much as possible to give people the most direct and simple access to all of these actions without giving away their personal information. But we are learning we need to do much more work to help people understand the CRUD functions and their importance. Right now, across any given community, the way information storage and retrieval works is — in our view — dysfunctional, illegal, and immoral.

We need to develop organisational structures that are more fit for purpose

Our committee meetings were another casualty of Covid and sector burnout but they taught us that there are strategies around planning and administration we can incorporate to improve their efficacy when we restart them after PlaceCal is launched.

We are working on the following concrete outcomes:

Explicitly developing a new way of working between tech and community, something that we are already starting to discuss on our social media and in person.
Designing a company structure that manages to thread the needle and balance the needs of communities using our software, developers, community development workers, funders, investors, and charities.
Solidifying and disseminating how we use organisational tools. We have set up a large range of support tools to track all our internal conversations and interventions, including WhatsApp, Discord, GitHub, Trello, Notion and Chatwoot. Our next step is to create a diagram for how this all works as a whole. This is a large, complicated piece of mutual understanding across multiple domains and types of expertise. We are hopeful we have now made serious inroads into this and can publish a formal process for this in the coming year.

What’s next?

As you can probably tell, this is just the start and we are currently laying the groundwork for what’s to come. GFSCs current overall mission is “to work in partnership with people and organisations who share our social change goals to create tools and processes that help us live joyful, connected and capable lives in communities free from oppression”. And we think we are getting closer than ever to making this a reality for everyone.

Please do get in touch if you want to have a chat about our approach. We are especially looking for other philanthropic funders and charities who may feel they’ve funded a lot of tech work that hasn’t really added up to much (perhaps under the “digital inclusion” or “human centered design” banner), or that all the tech work they do seems to never quite integrate with the rest of the organisation. We think you’ll find what we are doing a refreshing approach that compliments ABCD or strengths based approaches perfectly, and doesn’t require separate “digital” processes.

You can also join our community Discord, or subscribe to our email for updates below.

Thanks for reading!

Our definition of ‘technology’ is expansive and based on the etymology which means ‘systemic treatment of an art or craft’. Technology is the systemising of desirable processes, which often involves tools, but our emphasis is on the systemising itself. This means that we see training, documentation, apps, websites, group constitutions, and well designed posters all as ‘technologies’. For more on this outlook we recommend Ursula Franklins’ Real World of Technology (1989) lecture series. ↩︎

Community Technology Coordinator for the Trans Dimension in Greater Manchester

Thu, 22 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking for a freelance part-time community development worker to help establish a Manchester version of our successful London Trans Dimension event listings site (https://transdimension.uk/), which is based on our PlaceCal technology.

We have received funding from Greater Manchester Systems Changers to deliver the Trans Dimension in Manchester. Part of this funding covers a community development worker (this role) who will do the vital ‘boots on the ground’ work of networking with and connecting trans friendly LGBTQI+ groups in Greater Manchester to the new site.

The role includes identifying and talking to trans friendly LGBTQI+ community groups across Greater Manchester to find out who they are, what challenges they’re facing with maintaining an online presence and promoting their events, and how those problems might be solved (or not!) using technology.

After this initial research and networking, you will help onboard groups so that their information and event listings appear on the new Trans Dimension Manchester site.

We are looking for a motivated and proactive individual with strong organisational skills. Basic computer proficiency is a must (we heavily use GSuite and Notion), but training will be provided for any additional systems we require you to use as part of the role.

Given the nature of the groups you will be working with, we are ideally looking for someone who is already embedded within the LGBTQI+ community in Manchester, as some pre-existing connections with this community will give you a head start in this role. For example, someone who is already involved in trans healthcare, queer nightlife, mutual aid collectives, or trans inclusive sports provision would be ideal for the role.

As a studio, our full-time week is 6 hours per day, 4 days per week (so 24 hours per week), and many of us work part-time or alongside other jobs. We all work from home and are based in the UK.

This contract is for 24 days of work at a rate of £200 a day (£4,800 total). We would like this work to be undertaken over a period of 3 – 6 months from commencement of the contract. This would amount to 1 – 3 days work per week, depending on the time period you work over — this may also vary over the duration of the time you work with us.

Role breakdown

Partnership Building (Essential)

Building and maintaining relationships with key organisers in networks across Greater Manchester
Working with our existing Trans Dimension network in London (developed in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence), and supporting us with future expansion to other areas
Tracking and identifying community groups that would benefit from their events on a shared calendar
Reaching out to existing connections and identifying new ones
Following up with organisers at appropriate touch points

Technical support for grassroots trans and queer organisers (Essential)

Discussing with organisers how they record their upcoming events
Identifying how they could have their events listed
Supporting organisers to get their events online in a format readable by PlaceCal

Reporting (Essential)

Creating issue and bug reports and suggestions for the Trans Dimension developers
Track the organising work to bring people onboard and contribute testimony to future funding applications
Fortnightly progress checkins with GFSC to review the process of the project and evaluate changes.

Creating social media posts about your work as you go
Creating short TikTok/Instagram videos about each group you work with
Helping groups write case studies and testimonials

About us

We’re a small predominantly trans, disabled, and neurodiverse studio trying to make a fairer society using activism, technology, and research. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things. Our big thing is about Community Technology Partnerships, working directly with communities to co-create solutions to the challenges they’re facing. Have a look at our website to understand more about who we are and what we do.

How to apply

We had someone lined up for this role who had to drop out at the last minute, so unfortunately we are not able to offer our usual 6 week window to respond to job adverts. We are therefore accepting rolling invites to the role, and will close this advert when we find the right person. We are ideally are looking for an immediate start.

To apply, send a couple of paragraphs about why you think you’d be suitable for the role and your relevant experience to jobs@gfsc.studio. Links to projects you’re involved in are great. We know that CVs encourage bias and don’t generally tell us very much about you or your skills, but if you feel like it would help you show us who you are, then we’re happy to receive one.

Don’t worry about making your application perfect - we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person.

Please also let us know in your email if you have any access needs and we’ll do what we can to accommodate them.

Given the nature of our work we especially welcome applications from trans and non binary people, people of colour, disabled people, and other marginalised groups, especially those historically excluded from technology.

If you have any questions about the role or who we are, or if you’re not sure if you’re the right fit and want to talk it through, please reach out to Kim (kim@gfsc.studio) or Emma (emma@gfsc.studio) and we’d love to chat.

The craftsperson and the scientist

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of developing community technologies with our comrades and clients, we’ve identified two distinct ways of working in our teams, both with their benefits but sometimes bringing tension between them. We’ve come to understand these as something like ‘the creative act’ of the craftsperson and ‘the rigorous method’ of the scientist. The former focusses more on the ‘doing’ and the latter on the ‘analysing’, but both contain elements of one another. Both have their place in researching, developing, and delivering websites, software, and other high quality, timely and impactful outcomes – but how do we ensure these two approaches play nicely together in a team?

The craftsperson

‘Craftspeople’ are skilled individuals who are often used to working on their own. They’ll be looking to apply their experience gained from creating dozens of similar things and to build solutions based predominantly on their own best judgement, rather than looking for external data to back up every decision.

In our experience 1-2 craftspeople can deliver a small-to-medium sized project (like a simple website or a set of print assets) relatively quickly and to a high quality. Scaling this any higher to a larger team though and things can get difficult and risk a ‘too many cooks’ situation – where everyone on a team has conflicting opinions on how to deliver a project, but all of those opinions are based in real, valuable experience. The work of craftspeople can be of a very high technical and aesthetic quality, but by overlooking the benefits of ongoing data gathering risks embedding assumptions about who the audience is and what they want. It can also be hard for others not involved in the process from the start to pick up a project later to continue developing it – they’re not privy to the factors which led to the craftsperson’s decision-making.

The scientist

‘Scientists’, on the other hand, look for data to back up every decision they make. They’ll want to work with external parties (such as users, clients and other organisations) to conduct fieldwork and testing to make sure the right decisions have been made and that what’s been decided is still working.

Scientists are keen to understand the perspectives of others and get information from those with a stake in the project about how things are working (or not). They’re usually happy to accept that outcomes can (and will) change and are committed to constantly iterating based on regular feedback – feedback which generally starts to be gathered much earlier than a craftsperson would seek it. Projects led by evidence gathering generally take longer to complete than the craftsperson approach, but can have more holistically considered outcomes and more empirical management of each stakeholder’s needs. Making the data on which a decision was based visible to others working on a project enables clearer understandings of why specific decisions have been made. This can generally create a much firmer foundation for doing long term projects with larger teams.

A potential drawback from working in this manner is the lack of a singular, distinctive voice. This can lead to outcomes feeling more flat and risk-averse — a common criticism of ‘design by committee’, which has resulted in many websites looking almost identical and the web being more boring overall. It can also lead to ‘consultation fatigue’ and result in people feeling a bit burdened by the feedback process — with sentiments like “isn’t this your job?”, and the phrase “getting into the weeds” which we do often find ourselves using in this studio!

Building on shifting sands

Clearly, both approaches have strengths and weaknesses — so how can they work together?

For craftspeople with significant expertise in a field or discipline (and a lot of experience working alone) it can be challenging to work in a larger team with an iterative, scientific approach. While some constraints are good for any creative work, when the requirements and sign-off process for changes start piling up too high it can take all the fun and creativity of design and result in bland and uninspiring outputs. Sometimes the process of feedback will uncover new information which sends the project in a slightly different direction – seemingly undoing decisions made by those with specific expertise which were previously accepted by the team. This can lead to people feeling demotivated to work on the thing they’re the expert at because it can feel like their work and ideas might just be discarded the next day – even if the reason they’re discarded is because new evidence suggests that the project needs to evolve. For someone more used to working as a lone-wolf specialist practitioner, this can start to feel like a waste of time – like trying to build on shifting sands.

For scientists, a benefit of working in an iterative way is that proposals towards key design choices can be on the table much sooner, authored by a wider range of stakeholders, resulting in more collaborative working across multi-disciplinary teams. By working iteratively, revision, improvement and reframing based on new information is prioritised, rather than being presented with something polished that feels like it’s too precious and coherent to change. This is vital for complex projects with lots of stakeholders whose needs might conflict with each other, as it presents design decisions as negotiations rather than one person just deciding what’s best. Theoretically this approach allows teams to recognise more quickly if things are veering off course due to the continuous feedback, but of course no approach will save you from anything if improperly applied.

Overall it comes down to emphasis. Both methods utilise aspects of expertise and creativity, and both engage with consultancy and iteration – but in different amounts, at different stages of the process. The craftsperson approach can produce good results quickly, but then can be monolithic and hard to adapt later. The scientist approach can ensure all stakeholders feel heard, even if their needs conflict, but can risk being overly time consuming and produce ‘line of best fit’ outputs that make no one really happy.

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

We’re always re-evaluating how our processes are working, in order to try and make them the best they can be (for the sake of both our staff and our clients!) The below outlines some ways we’ve identified which can help reconcile the gap between the two styles of working. This is very much a work in progress for us and as always, we welcome feedback.

Decisions and responsibilities

We have found it important to be super clear at the start of a project where the decision making takes place, identifying who is responsible and who is deciding the structure of the project. This means that everyone involved is on the same page and there can be a ‘point of truth’ to iron out any difficulties which emerge down the line in terms of understanding tasks, timescales, and independent working.

What is fixed and what can change?

Having a clear process for defining what is ‘fixed’ and what can still change can really help everyone on the team. This could mean defining sign-off stages, at which everything completed to that point is considered ‘done’ enough to build on and is unlikely to change (unless some really life-changing new information is uncovered).

Setting time boundaries

To keep projects in check, we’ve found utility in having boundaries around time budgeting for specific elements of the project which aren’t allowed to change. It can seem harsh, but setting a strict limitation on the hours dedicated to a specific part of the project can help avoid burnout, as well as being an important part of budgeting. It’s freeing to know that ‘I’ve given my input now, and if they need further assistance that’s a fresh negotiation’. It also helps mange client and team expectations on how many revisions and rounds of feedback are feasible.

Outlining expectations

Outlining the expectations, limitations and assumptions of the process to everyone involved before the project begins is vital. The clearer things are sooner, the more every individual contributor is able to understand where their work and their expertise fits in to the broader project plan.

Explaining ‘why?’

By underlining the importance of direct user feedback, it’s more likely that everyone will be on the same page and any feelings of frustration at being ‘held back’ or having to repeat and revise work can be ameliorated by an understanding of the benefit to the final product through the insights gained through thorough user testing.

Our approach

At GFSC, we know that clients approach us both because they admire the rigour of our research, and the aesthetic and technical quality of our final outcomes. We are still a relatively young studio and are constantly learning about how to strike the balance between these two qualities in our work, and finding ways to let both the scientists and craftspeople in our team thrive, and produce their best work, in partnership.

We know that it’s not simple to divide people into two ‘camps’, and that in different contexts people might display different tendencies. This post isn’t intending to create a new strict dichotomy to organise around — merely to highlight two ways of working which we’ve found can sometimes cause conflict, even though both of them bring important and valuable insights to the research, design, and development process.

It’s our hope that by talking about these challenges, we can inspire open and honest reflection and communication about how to work together more equitably going forwards, and move towards a better world for everyone (where things actually get done!)

Nextdoor Nature

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021, the Wildlife Trusts sought out a tech collaborator as part of their Nextdoor Nature initiative. This lottery funded project aimed to get 1 in 4 people across the UK ‘taking action for nature’. They were aware that they needed some kind of digital solution to help further the aims of the project, and we were delighted to win the tendering process to work with them on developing this.

As a studio this is exactly the kind of project we love — the client was extremely open-minded about their final outcome, and were keen for us to explore and experiment together in an iterative way, in order to find a solution that would best develop their vital work.

Over the course of the year, we conducted in-depth qualitative research with a wide variety of staff and volunteers from across the country, and undertook a number of collaborative exploratory workshops to try and establish the most important aspects of the digital solution that we were to develop.

The Wildlife Trusts are a collective body of 46 individual regional trusts. The diversity and localised knowledge of each individual trust brings gives the Wildlife Trusts a lot of power to make a meaningful positive difference to nature and wildlife in the UK. However, our research found that this structure could also lead to issues like internal confusion, duplication of work, and some lack of clarity around overarching communications and strategy.

We learned a huge amount about the work the Wildlife Trusts do and the challenges they face, and discovered that one much needed solution was some kind of centralised resource for members of the public who are looking to ‘take action for nature’ in their own neighbourhoods. Resources specifically focussed on grassroots organising and strategy for the environment, which are different to the trust’s more traditional, individualised guides like ‘how to build a bird box’.

When we started the project, although there were lots of valuable resources already out there, they were widely distributed across the Wildlife Trusts’ sites and could be hard to find, and — as mentioned — work on creating these resources was often being doubled across different individual trusts.

There was also a great desire amongst both staff and members of the public to see other people’s stories (both success and failure), to help them learn from the work that’s already being done.

Our Nextdoor Nature Hub brings together these two needs — for a centralised hub of information resources, and a space for members of the public to share stories of their actions for nature.

We developed a beta standalone version of the Nextdoor Nature Hub, which, if successful would ultimately be incorporated into the main Wildlife Trusts site after a trial period.

The Nextdoor Nature Hub has now been live for 9 months. Initial data shows very promising results:

3.02 mins average time spent browsing pages (people are spending time with the site)
59.9% average scroll depth (as per the above, people aren’t clicking away from pages too quickly and are engaging with the content in depth)
67.5% new users, which shows promising uptake in the early stages, but also that users are returning, which means the site is offering a useful resource
We were also interested to learn that the website is visited about three times more often on desktop than on mobile, which is counter to what we and the Wildlife Trusts expected — but luckily the website is optimised for all devices.

The Wildlife Trusts have monitored and updated this beta site, and are using their ongoing review process to build on the learnings from the initial work. The site continues to evolve in style and usability according to the ever-changing needs of their communities, staff and volunteers.

Gendered Intelligence website and rebrand

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Leading trans charity Gendered Intelligence approached us with a number of tech-related issues that were affecting their day-to-day operations. We helped them take an overarching view of the best way forward across all their issues, including the development of our Enquiry Witch enquiry manager, researching their needs and building them a new CMS in Ruby on Rails, developing a new visual identity and information structure, and ultimately migrating their old website over onto this new CRM.

Gendered Intelligence directly supports trans people with a particular focus on trans youth, and develops and delivers training to shift how society at large understands and supports trans people in work, school and beyond. This means their website needs to reflect accurately their offer, and provide clear and concise pathways to accessing resources and support.

Their old website had been built using a number of different interlocking systems layered up over a number of years, to a point where no one in the organisation fully understood the interdependences or how everything slotted together. This meant that day to day, staff were unable to easily make changes to the website. We helped unpick this web of systems, and build them a new website with a new brand identity which will be sustainable and easy to maintain for the long term.

Because of the way in which the old website evolved, the information on the site was often outdated, self-contradictory and difficult to navigate for users. We undertook a full content audit and ran user testing to restructure their website around the needs of the people who use it, rather than reflecting simply rebuilding the same messy structures that had stemmed from over a decade of internal re-structuring.

First impressions are massively important, so we worked with long-time design partner Studio Squid to rebrand Gendered Intelligence and design their new website as well as supporting them to implement the new brand identity in key internal and external documents, presentations, business cards and more. The new branding, in combination with their restructured website and refreshed key messaging, helps Gendered Intelligence to appear trustworthy and knowledgable, as well as friendly and approachable.

Through our longstanding working relationship with Gendered Intelligence we built an understanding of the issues and qualities they most want to project with their website and branding, and used this understanding to collaboratively design and develop their new site. Working from a thorough understanding of their key values means that the site we delivered can best support Gendered Intelligence in carrying out their day-to-day work. It’s now much clearer who they provide support for, and how to access it. The new site is also much easier for Gendered Intelligence staff to update, which means they can keep key information up to date and focus on their on-the-ground service provision.

Working with Geeks for Social Change on the Gendered Intelligence website was a fantastic experience. They understood our vision and provided invaluable input, making the final product even better than we had hoped. We chose GFSC partially from having worked successfully on other projects in the past (such as the Trans Dimension), but also because of their explicit commitment to trans liberation and disability activism. This made a great fit for us, and it was very refreshing working with an organisation with such a high standard of professionalism that also committed to the same social justice goals. This dedication is clearly reflected in the final product, which is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and effectively communicates our mission. We highly recommend Geeks for Social Change to any organisation seeking a partner who combines technical excellence with a passion for social good. Thank you for helping us create a website that truly represents the heart of Gendered Intelligence.

Georgie, Administrator at Gendered Intelligence

GFSC's 2023 roundup

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We thought we’d wrap up 2023 by running through a slightly self-indulgent roundup of everything we’ve been up to as a studio this year. It’s been a long tiring year, and we’ve done loads of stuff, much of which hasn’t quite yet come to fruition – so we haven’t been able to make a lot of noise about it. Consider this blog a little celebration for us, and a teaser of lots of exciting stuff to come in 2024!

We launched Trans Safety Network’s website and rebrand

We were delighted to launch a beautiful new website and brand identity for Trans Safety Network, designed in partnership with our longtime collaborator Mark, aka Studio Squid. By completing a rebrand, we aimed to shore up their trustworthiness as an organisation.

Later on in the year, Trans Safety Network were asked to give evidence to Victor Madrigal, the UN Independent expert on sexual orientation and gender identity in London, along with a bunch of other trans folks doing research in similar areas. As a result of this, Madrigal launched a condemnation of the UK government’s attacks on trans people. This was a really big win for TSN as an organisation and we are proud to have been part of their growth this year.

We hired some new people

We welcomed three new team members this year, both to expand our technical development capacities, and to enable us to better manage the other functions of the studio, like client liaison, copy, bid writing, day to day management, and more (turns out, running a studio is a big job, who knew?) We have grown together as a team and are continuing to learn and develop our collaborative approach as a studio.

We developed our own website to reflect our growth as a studio

It feels a bit meta to talk about our website on our website, but here it is! We did a lot of work to improve gfsc.studio this year, starting with an improved portfolio section, which better enables prospective collaborators to actually explore and understand the work we’ve done. We’ve also improved our blog pages, and have developed our processes to actually expand our blogging capacity and share more of our ideas via social media.

We also added a section to highlight our publications, and teamed up with Pen Fight distro to get some of our physical artefacts out into the world, including zines on accessibility, state violence in Manchester and more in the works.

We continued to develop our flagship project, PlaceCal

This year we’ve put in a load of work on PlaceCal. Ultimately, we hope that PlaceCal comes to represent a ‘log off, go hang out with your friends in your neighbourhood’ attitude and infrastructure. The software offers a really simple way for community organisations to list who they are and what they do. Over the last few years, we have been setting up the necessary community development network around this, and particularly this year, have been growing our capacity and ability to help community groups address their own tech needs, with support.

We recognised one major missing piece in the system, which was the ability to foster communities of interest as well as communities of place. We added a category system to PlaceCal to address this. Now we can add extra partnerships — for example, if you have 10 friends who all run music nights or knitting clubs or cycling groups, we’re making a system where all of you can make your own listings on a shared site that connects in with whatever existing scheduling/calendar software you’re using. This represents a powerful way for communities to take back ownership of their event data, while still equipping them with the tools to promote what they’re doing.

PlaceCal aims to go back to an earlier sort of web — it doesn’t take all your data, it just gives you the information you need. By this time next year, we really hope we’ll be seeing the fruits of our labour, with way more groups signed up and active and the system really starting to show its power.

We continued our research and practice around Community Technology Partnerships

At its heart, the work we’ve been doing on PlaceCal is framed around the idea of Community Technology Partnerships’. So many people say things like “I’m not a tech person”, yet they spend 8 hours a day on a computer. They feel this way because big tech has disempowered people – you can’t really make changes to how Google Drive or Facebook work. This inability to make changes (or even meaningfully express the desire for changes) makes people feel like they can’t possibly achieve what they need with the tech they have.

The CTP approach recognises that not everyone needs to be the tech equivalent of a brain surgeon, or a rocket scientist or whatever. CTPs aim both to foster connections on a human, community scale with those who ARE tech rocket scientists/brain surgeons, to empower those who aren’t and have no interest in being.

Tech is so often framed as a tool for making things that make money (the newest app, or service, or tool) but we want to reframe it as a thing that actually tangibly helps you and money doesn’t come into it. If you want help promoting an event, organising a meal share or setting up a tool loan hub, Community Technology Partnerships would allow you to access the knowledge in your neighbourhood to make it happen.

You hear stories about face to face services provided by councils or other authorities being cancelled or substantially reduced, and replaced with a poor website. This is a prime example of technology failing to work in service of community needs and taking a problem which should be solved in the real world into a tech space. We want to use tech to bring problems back to being solved in a hands on, real world way.

We’re a little over a year into the CTP project — and we want to reconfigure the way tech is talked about. Tech is a world that everyone’s in. We want to ask – who is it increasing capabilities for? and who is it removing capabilities from? In the new year, we plan to really push these ideas out there.

We developed the Nextdoor Nature hub for the Wildlife Trusts

We were absolutely thrilled to work on a major project with the Wildlife Trusts to research and develop how technology should play a part in their major Nextdoor Nature initiative. They want to see 1 in 4 people across the UK taking action for nature and they gave us the task of researching and developing a digital tool or service to facilitate this.

We did a lot of research to help them figure out what they needed, which ultimately led to the launch of the beta Nextdoor Nature hub. This site aims to consolidate all the amazing resource creation and community networking work that the individual trusts are doing into one place where everyone can benefit from it. One of the biggest findings of our research across the wildlife trusts was that a lot of their work was being duplicated, and also that both staff and the public often struggled to find what they need. It was clear that they needed to develop both a space and a system to better collaborate and collate all of their incredible resources and stories.

This beta site still needs more visual and functional development, but it is in testing now and we hope that the Wildlife Trusts will soon incorporate a version of it into their main site.

We launched The Towers, a community history project based in Oldham

We were delighted to launch The Towers: A history of Summervale and Crossbank, after a long collaboration with First Choice Homes Oldham to research and understand the stories and history of two iconic (now demolished) tower blocks, often referred to as ‘the gateway to Oldham’.

The Towers aims to commemorate these two tower blocks, by collecting histories and memories from the area. Telling the stories of areas like this is vital, as they can often be left undocumented and forgotten. Understanding the past of an area can play a big part in brightening its future – so, in partnership with FCHO and MA student Sam Benbow, we undertook a large body of on-the-ground research to try and find as many former residents as possible.

The project was not without its challenges, and we talked about these in detail across our series of three design diary blogs.

There was also a lot of digital exclusion in the area and a big part of the project was aiming to explore this alongside the people who live there – enabling people to both tell their stories and foster the digital skills that would help them in doing so. This was much harder in practice than in theory, but we are very proud of the final site, and the huge amount of work that went in behind the scenes.

As part of this project, we also developed some resources which aim to help other community groups understand Creative Commons and other rights issues with relation to heritage projects. This is often a vital part of funded bids, and so we were proud to be able to deliver this guide in addition to the main project.

We got our Patchwork Gardens concept moving

Patchwork Gardens is an idea we’ve had in the works for a long time. Everyone is familiar with seeing small, underutilised patches of land in their neighbourhood. Abandoned planters, grotty strips of grass, glass strewn verges. Who maintains them? How could I grow on them? Patchwork Gardens aims to start this conversation, and offer pathways to activate this land.

This idea is extremely popular, but getting the funding to meaningfully progress it has been a real challenge. We’ve been extremely fortunate to work with a small amount of funding and support from Friends of the Earth this year. This has enabled us to put together a sophisticated pitch deck (and accompanying body of research) to better approach larger funders and progress the project further, which is what we are endeavouring to do over the coming months.

With the climate crisis and food shortages, we think this work is vital. In the course of our research we have spoken to gardeners, activists, charities, technologists, academics and more — all of whom are united around the same ideas. We need to grow more. We need to grow locally. We need to provide more of our own food. Gardening fosters community and strength and we need to remove the barriers that currently exist so that more people can be a part of this movement.

We worked on a full rebrand and new website for Gendered Intelligence, the UK’s largest trans charity

It has been such a privilege to work on a full rebrand and website for GI, the UK’s largest trans charity. Taking on the website for such a vital charity as this was no small task, and we really wanted to make sure we did the most we possibly could to support the staff and volunteers at GI as well as the people who use their services.

We reorganised a lot of their information architecture, and did a thorough content audit of their huge amount of resources, in order to make everything more clearly findable. Previously, their website was organised by the departments of their organisation, which often ends up happening with charities and other orgs — it makes sense internally, but not necessarily to those trying to access their services. So, we turned everything upside down, shook it all out, did loads of research and restructured the site around those who will be accessing it.

It’s one of the biggest jobs we’ve ever done as a studio, and we can’t wait for the site to fully launch in the new year! As always it’s been a pleasure to work with our frequent collaborator Mark at Studio Squid, who has developed an absolutely gorgeous new brand identity for GI as a whole. Its first application will be in their new website and subsequently rolled out across all of their materials.

We launched the Trans Organisers Fund

Finally, we’ve launched the Trans Organisers Fund to support trans organising infrastructure in Greater Manchester. There is a more formal announcement to come soon – but basically, we’ve been given a grant by Lankelly Chase to directly support trans-led and trans-involving organising in Greater Manchester!

The trans scene can be a stressful one — there’s no compensation, tensions can run high and in a marginalised group that’s suffering some of the most targeted harassment in memory, it’s hard work to keep organising in such a climate.

This fund will be super targeted — going straight to those who are doing trans organising work on the ground in Manchester. We’ve given out grants to the first few groups, plan to give out more, and if it’s a success we’ll see how we can expand it (source more funds and figure out a long term plan).

There will be more information and a mini site to come in the new year which will explain more about the fund, but we are so proud to have had the opportunity to get this off the ground this year and wanted to share this as the last point in our 2023 round up!

Thanks so much for supporting us in our work this year. If you’d like to do more to help out around here, you can donate to our Ko-fi or sign up to our Discord to keep in touch. We have a wonderful community who enable us to keep doing what we’re doing.

Happy holidays and happy new year from everyone at Geeks for Social Change!

What we've learned from working a four day week

Thu, 26 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We get a lot of enquiries from organisations who heard that we work a four day week and want to know more about how it works for us, so that they can try and implement it for their staff. We wanted to reflect on our working patterns and what they mean for our company, to help anyone who might be thinking about reducing their company’s working week.

What our week looks like

We are open as a studio from Monday to Thursday every week. For us, this means these are the only times we’ll ever schedule client-facing meetings, and when we expect all staff to work the majority of their hours. In addition to being a four day week company, we also operate with shorter days, so a full time week is four days of six working hours, or 24 hours total.

We work in cycles of three weeks, focusing most intensely on one specific project for two weeks, with a buffer week in-between to tidy up loose ends and prepare for the next two week sprint. This works like time-blocking but on a larger scale – it helps us all get on the same page, stay focused, and make sure we’re allocating enough time to each project.

It’s more than just a condensed schedule

Because we’re a disabled-led company which aims to be as accessible as possible for our staff, we know that it can be difficult for disabled people (or people with caring responsibilities, for example) to work to a consistent schedule. 23% of working-age adults in the UK are disabled, and around 9% of the population provide unpaid care, which means it’s highly likely that some of the people on your staff would benefit from the opportunity to work more flexibly. Consistent and rigid working doesn’t allow for fluctuating energy and focus, the ability to respond to emergent needs, or a feeling of agency over one’s own time. Informed by this, we have flexible working which means staff have choice and responsibility over when they schedule their working hours.

Working flexibly requires a high degree of communication and trust between team members. We check in with our plans for the week every Monday, and let others know when we’re planning to be away, as well as what our capacity is looking like, both emotionally and physically, on a regular basis. We have ‘core hours’ each day, between 11am and 3pm, where all members of staff aim to make themselves available for key meetings and project planning. We hold daily stand-ups to connect and make visible what everyone is focusing on that day, as well as having quick check-ins at the start of other meetings to highlight the need to be responsive and understanding of others’ capacity.

A lot of our staff work part time hours, which allows for quite a bit of additional capacity to flex on top of our working practices. This means that someone who is contracted for a 0.75 FTE role (three days, or 18 hours per week) is free to split those hours over the full four days if they wish, if it means they’re able to focus better. Obviously this means that tracking time worked each week, as well as paid and unpaid leave, can get a little complicated – we use a time tracking software called Clockify to keep on top of that.

As we all work remotely as individuals based around the UK, we have ongoing open channels of asynchronous communication. We have a staff area of our Discord server, which is where we do the bulk of our communication across all teams and projects. Our daily stand-ups are a key part of keeping everyone on the same page, as well as our shared task database in Notion and tickets in GitHub. When working totally remotely, the need for absolutely impeccable communication, trust, and openness increases, which is only compounded by having a shorter working week as any delays or miscommunications can be costly.

We’re always open to change, based on what we learn as we go

We’re committed to being reflexive in our working practices – at the end of every cycle we have a retrospective to talk about what went well, what could have gone better, and what we need to change going forwards. We also hold monthly Ways of Working meetings which the whole company is asked to attend, where we discuss what’s going well and what we might be able to do better in terms of our structure and how this manifests in our day-to-day work. A big part of the trust inherent in flexible, remote working is understanding what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to change, which in turn relies on honest and open communication between all staff at all stages of a project, cycle, or even any given day.

As part of our commitment to liberatory practices, we’ve been shoring up our internal policies and procedures to make them more transparent, measured, and sustainable both for employees and the company. This means we’ve been looking at how much paid and unpaid leave we can afford to offer for sickness, holiday, and other circumstances, and what proportion of it can be paid in full. Realistic appraisal of the capacity of the organisation is an important part of adjusting working hours – working a condensed week has a material impact on the time available, and how “valuable” that time is to the company.

We want to live in a world where our lives aren’t directly translated into a monetary value, down to the minute. Unfortunately the material reality of living and operating a business in a capitalist society requires that this calculation be done on some level. By implementing a condensed, flexible, remote working pattern, we go as far as we can afford to support our staff in feeling empowered to put their life first, not their job. In return, we know that every member of staff needs to commit to open, honest communication, and a honest effort to use their ‘on the clock’ time effectively in order to deliver the work we know we’re capable of delivering.

Decoupling time from monetary value is one of the key issues impacting activist organising and socially engaged work at every level. In order to have the material resources to be able to support each other, not burn out, care for ourselves and our loved ones, the world asks us for as much as we can possibly give it, for as little as possible in return. By valuing the time of yourself and your employees more highly (by adopting a condensed working week), you risk alienating clients and collaborators who don’t see the ‘justification’ for a higher spend per hour, which in turn means you (as an organisation) could have fewer material resources by which to do the work and enact care. It’s a complex equation which needs to be navigated purposefully on a case-by-case basis, looking at the material reality of what you would like to offer compared with what you can afford.

Transitioning from a 5 day week

We actually started as a four-day-week company from the very beginning, so can’t advise on what it might be like for a company which currently works over five days. We can however, comment on the things which we have to keep a close eye on, due to our condensed hours.

Meetings where everyone needs to be there need to be kept to a minimum (and does everyone really need to be there?)

We talked about decoupling time from monetary value, but when it comes down to it, whole company meetings are actually really expensive. We try and limit them to just key moments – daily stand ups, planning longer term projects or cycles, and coming together to talk about our working practices. Other meetings will just involve the people who really need to be there, to make sure everyone is able to use the time they have effectively. We define ‘needing to be there’ as being directly involved in the project at hand (in a time sensitive way – if you’re not working on it right now, you can catch up later), being able to offer unique insight into a problem or idea, or needing to take detailed notes while others discuss a complicated topic or carry out user research and testing. We often actively tell members of staff not to come to meetings if we know they won’t be needed!

Time blocking can be a great hack to make sure you make time for everything on your list

Time blocking is setting aside chunks of time for specific, focused work (and sticking to it!). If you know you’ve blocked out time just for replying to emails, for example, it makes it quite a bit easier to focus more deeply and get more done in that ‘block’ of time. It also gives you peace of mind that you don’t need to get back to that notification right away if you know you’ll spend an hour going through them later that day. Task switching can be a messy business, but if you’ve planned out exactly what needs to be done and how much time you’re able to spend on it, this burden is reduced. This can be replicated on a larger scale by having dedicated cycles, sprints, or blocks of time for the whole team to work on a specific project, knowing that other projects have enough time allocated to them later on.

Taking a day off can reduce your weekly capacity by quite a bit

For similar reasons to why meetings are suddenly incredibly expensive uses of everyone’s time, if you’re only working four days and have to take one off, suddenly your week has reduced by 1/4. For those who work part time, a day off is an even larger proportion of their week. We plan for this as a studio by estimating our capacity based on planned time off at the start of every cycle. It helps us keep our expectations in check about what it’s realistic to achieve in the time we have.

Have a procedure for re-acclimatising to the working week after a long weekend

We use hub pages and databases in Notion to keep track of ongoing projects and tasks. Hub pages can serve as a handy one-stop-shop to re-acclimatise to the things you have on the go. My hub page shows me: projects I’m leading, tasks which are assigned to me, documents i’m drafting, places people have mentioned me by name, and meetings I’ve attended recently. We also have a whole-studio task database which gets filtered into our cycle planning documents automatically. This lets us get a quick overview of what’s in progress, what’s stuck, and who’s working on what. All hail Notion!

Be kind to yourself and don’t over-promise

If you’re used to the hustle and grind of the 40 hour week, you might overestimate exactly how much you can (and should) get done in a week. It’s important to be realistic when project planning to make sure you don’t over-commit, especially if you’re used to having a little bit of extra time to play with. It’s ok if something takes a bit longer to get finished if it means it was made sustainably – it’s like comparing slow, handmade clothing with fast fashion. Sure, fast fashion buys might be shipped to you overnight and look ok, but a lot of people were exploited in its chain of production and it doesn’t fit you that well…

Decouple time from monetary value (as far as possible)

The nature of condensed working means that practically, each minute of an employee’s time has a higher ‘cost’ to the company. It’s hard to avoid falling into the trap of equating your time directly with a financial value, but we’ve found that quoting for work based on deliverables rather than time spent is a way to ensure that clients and collaborators can be on the same page.

Be honest about how much of your time is actually spent working

The nature of a four day week means that you are necessarily more focused, which can translate to much more getting done in a shorter amount of time, or at the very least, being honest about how much of your work time is genuinely productive. To put it bluntly, we cut the crap! There’s no need to waste an hour messing about with a photocopier or clicking about in your emails because you’ve reached the end of your useful focus, or simply have some time to fill.

This honest treatment of productive time goes hand in hand with remote working – we don’t ask staff to waste time and energy on commuting, or performing sociability at the same time as trying to concentrate, so staff in turn don’t feel the need to pretend they’re spending every second of 40 hours performing productivity towards the “company’s best interests”. With research indicating that the maximum amount someone can focus in a day sits around four to five hours – who really does more than 24 hours or so of productive work in a week?

Flexibility, communication and trust is really the key

If you don’t have good communication practices in place at your company, you won’t feel the benefits of a condensed working week. Make time and space to explicitly ask staff to communicate their plans, needs, and intent at the start of any unit of work – this could mean once a week, once a cycle, or even once a day. Keeping the channels of communication open is vital to ensure time is being used effectively (and also to notice if someone’s overstretching themself, putting way too much time into something small, or if they should really be taking time off but are trying to cram everything in on top).

What we do with our extra day

Different people have different approaches to the extra time afforded by condensed working hours. In our studio, we see staff using their time to run participatory interdisciplinary art studios, teach at universities, run craft fairs, care for dependents, and care for themselves. For some employers, it might be hard to consider encouraging staff to have projects in their personal time! For us it’s totally natural – our studio work emerged from activist organising, which is a landscape full of people volunteering their spare time towards worthy causes. We believe (and see the evidence in our day-to-day practice!) that our studio is strengthened by a team with diverse interests, time to care for themselves and their families, and deep connections with communities and networks outside of their job.

It’s a bit like having a secure attachment style. We trust our staff to manage their time and carry out their commitment to the studio as well as their side hustle, passion project, or rest, and in return our staff feel confident to use studio time to the best of their ability and trust the studio to make decisions which balance their needs with studio capacity. We have a sense of shared responsibility over what we do – everyone is aware that the studio is limited by material constraints on the conditions it can offer, and wants to work to keep things favourable for all of us.

We don’t dream of selling our labour, and the world we’re working towards wouldn’t require that for survival, but under the current system we have no choice. We do, however, have a choice about how we use our hard-won material gains to support and uplift those we work with. Every business with employees has choices about how to make said employees’ material conditions better, which happens through building genuine trust, transparency, and communication at all levels. Your staff were hired because you recognised their skill – give them the agency to feel confident putting their best foot forwards, and to take the time they need to recuperate.

The GFSC Collective Report

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The GFSC collective has existed in some shape or form since long before GFSC became a formalised studio. It started as a reading group, created by our studio founder Kim, morphed into a tech projects group. It has been an educational space for sharing knowledge, an activist space for planning projects and concepts, and throughout, a space of community and friendship. As the studio grows, so does awareness of, and interest in, the collective. But what is the collective today, and what does it, collectively, want to be? We collaboratively conducted research interviews with a number of key collective members, old and new, to try and get a sense of our future direction — what we like, what we don’t, what we most of all want to pursue.

The findings from analysing these interviews have been written into a report by studio and collective member Emma, which we are delighted to share below — we look forwards to poring over this with existing collective members, and welcoming new members into the fold who are inspired by our vision and hopes.

In spring 2023 we conducted a series of interviews with the aim of finding out a bit more about how we understand this thing we call ‘The GFSC Collective’, and what its members want from being a part of it. These interviews were conducted with 14 current ‘members’ of the collective — both studio staff, and wider collective members. We conducted the interviews in pairs, with each person documenting their interview partner’s responses — and we intentionally paired up people who most likely would not have met before. We were keen for these interviews to provide a chance for everyone to air their thoughts, ambitions, ideas, concerns, and anything else collective related, and we hope that this format, and the questions provided, offered a safe space in which to do so.

Questions

The questions we asked were:

Why did you come into the GFSC community?

What do you hope to get from being here?

What do you need to be here?

What current projects would you like to work on?

What things would you like to work on that we are not currently thinking about?

What would you like to be paid for, and/or is there anything we can do to help professionally?

Analysis of the interviews

Once all interviews had been completed, we carried out a qualitative data analysis process known as ‘coding’ — not to be confused with the other kind of coding! In this process, each sentence of each interview is analysed methodically, and any emerging themes are pulled out, with that quote and others which emerge around that theme listed underneath them. Many quotes appear in multiple places, and pretty much everything someone says in an interview will find a way into this coding process one way or another.

During this process, many expected themes will emerge, but if the process is being done well, new ideas will also often appear as well, that the person carrying out the coding may not have expected.

All interviews are anonymised and equal weight is given to every interviewee, though with this particular data set this was somewhat more challenging. These interviews were recorded by a number of different people, with a number of different note taking styles, rather than as direct transcripts (which are the gold standard for this practice, but which would have been too time consuming to create). This means that, while all interviews were around 15 minutes long, some have extensive notes, while others are far lighter.

Nonetheless, I hope that most people will read this report and feel that the findings which have emerged resonate with them.

Emerging themes

The answers to the first two questions ‘why did you come here’ and ‘what did you hope to get’ tended to merge substantially.

The core areas were:

Community/friendship

People are seeking out connection and friendship. A few people were also interested in ‘networking’ connections — to further their work or professional practice, but the vast majority of people framed it first and foremost as a desire for friendship. (There are of course much bigger and more complex conversations to have about how we define ‘community’, but that probably falls outside the remit of this report).

Many people, further on in the interviews, expressed a strong desire to meet more people ‘face to face’ (i.e. in video calls, like our monthly collective meetings) and even, where possible, in person. This was expressed with sufficient frequency and sufficient enthusiasm that it certainly feels like a key theme.

Political/activist/organising

People are here because they want to connect with others with similar politics, activism/organising backgrounds, and be in a space with people where they expect alignment of opinions around key issues. Our studio areas of focus include community building, software development, environmental justice, trans liberation, police and prison abolition, and other creative and liberatory practices — all of these are areas where interviewees expect there to be compatible attitudes within the collective.

The intersection of tech with the above two areas

‘Tech’ is of course a key part of GFSC’s focus, but crucially, interviewees were not here purely for tech. Everyone who mentioned it, mentioned it in relation to politics/activism, and/or community — being interested in tech from the perspective of social change, and wanting to find a community of others who see it from the same perspective.

Getting stuff done

Several people cited a desire to make projects happen (around the above themes — activism, tech and community), and view the collective as a space for progressing projects. However, as answers further on attest, what is less clear are the processes and support needed for this to actually happen. At the moment it is clear that most people see the collective as a predominantly social/learning/connecting space, even if there is a desire for projects to make progress at some point in the future.

Survival

Very few people referenced this but it is doubtless important to note — some people in the collective view this space as part of a supportive infrastructure that enables them to survive, specifically with regards to autism (and high rates of unemployment amongst autistic people) and ADHD. Carving out a space where it is safe and accepted to be these things is important. A certain ‘amorphousness’ as one interviewee described it — where there are no expectations or pressure, but that, where needed and wanted, there can be frameworks in place to facilitate collaboration and action that work for those concerned.

This theme of ‘amorphousness’ emerged again in a broader way as we moved on to discussing what people need to be here, and/or what support people need.

Flexibility/no pressure

Many interviewees cited the importance of the collective being a flexible space. A space where it is okay to come and go, where there are no demands made, and where people can feel safe being present no matter where they’re at that day. (Or, as it may be sometimes, NOT present). A supportive, non-judgemental space, where people can form connections and ideas in a low pressure way. People specifically asked for ‘patience’, ‘empathy’, and ‘understanding’. Some of these sentiments were rooted in previous bad experiences in activism/organising, while others simply reflected the exhausting world we live in in The Year of our Lord 2023, and what kind of space we want to build in order to challenge this.

Collaborative and non-hierarchical

Throughout the interviews, people mentioned their desire to collaborate with others, meet people (in real life if possible!), learn from others, and work in non-hierarchical ways. People valued honesty — ‘tell me if I fuck up!’ and appreciated how much working in a team can reduce pressure points compared with working 1:1. There is some potential conflict between people’s desire to collaborate, and people’s desire to come and go (possibly without warning), but the overall vibe was that people want to form structures that mean these two points aren’t contradictory. Structures that facilitate freedom of movement, distribution of energy, and mean that projects, ideas and conversations do not have to stall if key members need to step aside for any reason, for any amount of time.

Desire to learn/be mentored/be supported

When asked what support they would like, many interviewees cited a desire to learn from others, possibly in some kind of mentorship style framework. It is worth noting that not one interviewee stated a desire to BE a mentor — but fortunately (while we wait for some willing mentors to join our community, or for those within our community to realise their potential as mentors), other structures for learning were also mooted. People valued the Ruby learning club that we assembled previously, and would be interested in other co-learning scenarios — which include both more technical skills, like code languages, and more conceptual learning.

What do we want to work on?

Part of the interview process was to ask participants which of our current projects were of most interest to them, and what areas they would like to work on that we are not already.

The clear leader was ‘Don’t call the cops’, a project to put together location-specific guides to alternative support that are not connected to the police or state, which at least 5 people cited.

Other projects noted were the activist safety zine, activist tech training, clean air con, UnReadingGroup, the podcast, PlaceCal, Enquiry Witch, and Trans book swap. People recognised that with PlaceCal in particular, they would need very thorough guidance in order to be able to contribute in any useful way.

A few people noted that they were less worried about contributing to any project in particular, and more keen to give their specific skills to any project which needed them.

Several people were also interested in contributing towards the collective as a project in itself — community building, Discord moderation and administration, and so on. They were keen to figure out how we can empower ourselves to act, how we can support and uplift each other as friends, and how we can audit and amend our existing tools and processes to better fit the needs of the collective (and maybe also the studio?) at this moment in time.

We also asked people about broad areas of interest that we are not currently working on. Again, the theme of ‘the collective’ in and of itself emerged strongly (interesting that some people perceive this as a project we are already working on, and others don’t!)

Other broader themes included COVID related projects (support for those with long COVID or those still shielding), housing precarity (around renting specifically), unionisation (including radicalising co-workers), and ‘tools and systems’ (specifically, tools and systems to support any of the above causes, but this emerged as a theme in itself because so many people were interested in framing projects from this perspective).

There were also a number of other smaller projects which I will not note here, but which I would absolutely encourage collective members to bring to everyone’s attention if they’d like to progress!

Payment

We made a specific point of asking people what (if anything) they would like and expect to be paid for as part of their time with the collective. A number of people responded simply with ‘no’, and noted that their time here is facilitated by well paying day jobs, and they simply want to ‘pay it back’ so to speak.

However a number of other people — especially those in early/mid career — were very positive about opportunities to be paid for their work as part of the collective. Some people only felt comfortable being paid for work they felt they were already accomplished at, but others were keen to make opportunities to both grow their skills and earn some cash on the side. Being ‘paid to learn’ was viewed as something of a holy grail by some (with one employee of GFSC noting how much they valued opportunities to learn on the job).

Broadly the skills most notably on offer for payment in these interviews were writing (including transcription and admin as well as more creative writing) and coding, but this does not represent a comprehensive audit of skills available within the collective, which is another project we wish to undertake, and does not fall within the remit of this report.

Concerns and challenges

At various times during the interviews, people offered their concerns, and expressed challenges which they believe the collective faces. These broadly fell into the following categories

Muddiness between studio and collective

Interestingly, this concern was most often noted by studio staff, and less by wider collective members. It was also not always viewed entirely as a negative thing — the interesting structure we have grown here also offers a lot of potential. Mostly, concerns revolved around how the collective can contribute to studio tasks, and what point this is in danger of becoming extractive. One collective member mused on whether they would be ‘absorbed into the studio like lots of other people have been’. But it seems clear that defining a line between the studio and the collective is of more concern to some than others, and mostly of concern to the studio.

Capacity

This ties into the earlier theme of wanting a flexible/low pressure space. Many people were concerned that they lack the time and energy to contribute as much as they would like, and that they haven’t had the ‘headspace’ to engage to the extent that they deem sufficient. Other members of the collective (mostly those who are also studio staff) feel overwhelmed with studio and collective tasks, and feel the collective is not getting the attention it deserves. Overall, a lot of people want to do more/better, but are being realistic about what is possible.

Location

Many interviewees expressed a desire to meet in person, but recognised that our distributed locations make that challenging. One interviewee also noted that they wished they were closer to Manchester (the studio’s stated base, though in practice studio staff are also widely distributed) so that they could better identify hyperlocal projects to collaborate on. It’s important to note that our distribution presents both challenges and potential — having a widely distributed network offers many potential avenues for collaboration with communities across the country.

Friendship

People have been burnt in the past by friendships lost in activist circles. One interviewee felt particularly concerned about lack of recognition/acknowledgement/celebration of labour, so it is worth noting that we may want to focus on building our culture in this area. There were concerns expressed about the challenges of managing disagreements that occur within projects, particularly those undertaken on a voluntary basis, where people are free to walk away if they are unhappy. “It can leave you with questions about where you stand with people [if people vanish with no or little explanation]".

Funding

There were both positive and negative thoughts which fell under this category. Some people were concerned about the long term funding of the collective, and our ability to undertake projects meaningfully without financial backing (see earlier section on payment). However it was noted that academia and other large institutions hold both money and power, and if we play our cards right, some of that could head our way (and has done previously!) All of this though, does require work, and once again questions emerge around whether this is work for the studio or the collective.

There were also a few other individual concerns noted, specifically with regards being part of the collective when you are from an institutional background, and not wanting to reproduce systems that have previously caused harm.

Conclusions

Overall, the majority of the interviews struck a very positive tone, with the main points of challenge/anxiety being burn out/exhaustion of some founder members of the collective, and how we define the split between studio and collective.

Now seems like a good time to reflect on what the collective is, and what it wants to be, and, given the frequently emerging theme of capacity and energy — what we can make it.

Community

It is abundantly clear that pretty much everyone interviewed craves a space for connection, community, and common interest. A space of kindness, empathy, patience and understanding. A space where we can learn from one another, and lift one another up. It is also fair to say that the collective is already doing quite a good job of providing this, but it always benefits us to ask how we can do this MORE and BETTER.

Projects

There are also grand ambitions bubbling under the surface of the collective, with plenty of skill and enthusiasm to back them up, but much less time and energy. The collective is a space full of ideas — what challenges us as we go forwards is how to start putting some of our ideas into action, in a way that remains true to our desire to be patient, kind, chill and supportive. How can we build frameworks to progress and facilitate projects that respect the collective’s stated desire to be flexible?

It is often substantially harder to figure out what to do than it is to actually do it — and bringing the collective into the ‘how and why’ as well as the ‘doing’, is a challenge for us as well, going forwards. How can the collective support itself to follow through from having an idea, to figuring out how to implement it, to actually doing the work? At the moment there are a lot of ideas, a fair amount of people who say ‘if I just knew what to do I’d do it’, but what may be missing is the in-between step of facilitation.

There is a huge amount of potential within our community, and these interviews represent only a small section of the wide diversity of people who are more and less active within our space. We hope that this report will serve as a tool to stimulate further conversation and planning as the collective moves forward.

Announcing GFSC Publications!

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been really quiet on the social media front the last few months. We’ve expended a lot as a team — from being just Kim in 2020 we now have 11 staff across 2 organisations in various capacities, from half a day a week to our full time 4 day work week, as well as a thriving community on Discord and in the wider world.

We’ve spent a lot of this year reflecting and working out how to standardise what we do, so we can really scale up our big projects and start getting serious about making an impact in the areas we care about.

Like everyone else, we’ve also seen social media go from feeling like something that felt fun and engaging – a place to share photos from nights out and exchange memes – to its true form: a fairly terrifying piece of the military industrial surveillance complex that’s threatening to end life as we know it on Earth. We got pretty bored of what billionaires think and do, so in “relaunching” ourselves on social media are trying to work out how to embed our ethics more in the ways we communicate.

While we develop that methodology (and we welcome your input via our Discord server, or maybe follow us on Mastodon?), here’s a little roundup of a big addition to our site:

Publications!

As a studio with our hearts in DIY culture and arts, we do really love a physical thing you can touch and hold. We’ve made a few actual objects over the years and are delighted to announce you can now buy them from our new distribution partner Pen Fight (or download a copy for yourself and print at home).

Pen Fight is a feminist and queer shop and small press based in Manchester, UK. Independently run since 2015, they sell zines, radical books, badges, and other DIY and small-run art and craft. We love Pen Fight and are thrilled to have them as a stockist!

“The Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events” zine and Trans Dimension badges

At the end of last year, we launched The Trans Dimension, a collaboration with Gendered Intelligence listing trans events in London. This is entirely automated and built on our PlaceCal technology that we will be relaunching next year. This site is doing really well and has had over 4,000 visitors since then!

Part of this project was to work with trans and disabled people to make a guide to how to make events more inclusive for everyone. Working with Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People and Gendered Intelligence staff and volunteers, we produced this zine that takes you through all the steps of thinking about venue and event access holistically, and gives you a set of prompts to make a comprehensive accessibility statement.

We haven’t been able do as much with this as we would’ve liked, but we’re hoping that (pending future funding) we can run some workshops and work with groups to start getting this knowledge out further into the world.

You can get a copy of the zine on Pen Fight, download the PDF from us, or read a plain text version. You can read more about the zine in our portfolio.

We also had some pin badges made!! These were mostly given away at the launch but we have given a small stock to Pen Fight to sell. Any proceeds from this will go into the project fund.

Order a badge from Pen Fight!

UnTechCon zine

Last December we ran our inaugural UnTechCon event, where we invited people to think about an anti-capitalist tech future. We’re planning on running another one soon, but in all the chaos the first go round forgot to mention that artist and writer honor ash (who now works for GFSC!) made a zine summing up everything we talked about.

You can buy the zine on Pen Fight, download the PDF directly from us, or read a plain text version. You can also read more about UnTechCon in our portfolio.

Resistance Lab “A Growing Threat to Life: Taser Usage by Greater Manchester Police” zine

Back in 2020 we worked with Resistance Lab collective to publish a groundbreaking piece of work with half a dozen local activist organisations, combining local abolitionist organising with high quality research and data science to create a report on the threat posed to life by police with Tasers. This report was a major news story, covered by Channel 4 and ITV Grenada, Vice, The Voice, Manchester Evening News, and The Meteor, among other sources.

Kim found a box in her conservatory. You can get them (for free!) from Pen Fight or read more about the project in our portfolio.

Making a place for technology in communities: PlaceCal and the capabilities approach

In this academic paper first published in Information, Communication & Society in 2020, Stefan and Kim explore how a ‘capability approach’ to information technology in neighbourhoods with low social capital can create embedded and sustainable Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs). These can connect residents and institutions together, reducing barriers to social participation and collaborative action.

The paper also explores the initial implementation and early success and potential of PlaceCal, with insight into its potential future, and challenges it may face. It’s been available to read online for a while, but we made a snazzy new PDF version and are highlighting it in our portfolio for the first time!

Podcast page

Finally, we didn’t have anywhere on our website you could see all our podcast episodes! This is now fixed and you can see all the episodes and transcripts from one place. The podcast finally has a home!

We will be relaunching our podcast before the end of the year! Visit the podcast page in our portfolio.

Looking forwards

It’s been great to finally get around to cataloguing and archiving all our past work and this clears the deck for us to work on new things. We have some big plans in motion and would love you to be part of them. If anything here attracted your interest or you’d like to work with GFSC, please do come say hi on our Discord, message us on one of our many social media channels, or drop us an email.

RAFTT design diary #3

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the final instalment of this mini series of blogs about our recent local history project undertaken in Oldham. Here’s part one and part two, plus you can view the final project website at towersoldham.uk.

To recap in brief, RAFTT stands for ‘Rise and Fall of Two Towers’, which was the project’s initial name. It ended up being titled “The Towers: A history of Summervale and Crossbank”. Summervale House and Crossbank House were two tower blocks of flats built in Oldham in the 1970s. Slated for demolition and replacement with low rise housing which was more needed by the community, GFSC worked with the owners of the Towers, First Choice Homes Oldham (FCHO), to put together a funded project proposal, which was ultimately supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The project’s aims —

to collect and document the history of the area, which might otherwise be lost as the towers residents end up scattered far and wide
To involve the local community with a specific aim of increasing their digital skills. It was unclear at the start of the project how this might manifest, as it depended to a great extent on the interest and existing digital skills of the community.

Ultimately the project was not very successful in tying parts 1 and 2 together — but First Choice Homes Oldham did begin running some beginners digital skills workshops for local residents which are still ongoing, and will hopefully continue indefinitely.

This blog focuses specifically on the ‘documenting’ aspect, which occurred at the final stage of the project. You can get a deeper look at the challenges we had on the ‘collection’ side of things in RAFTT Design Diary #2!

Structuring the site

In RAFTT Design Diary #1 we had already started to consider the underlying structure of our final explorable online archive of content. We asked questions about the narrative flow of the site, and considered what would be the most appropriate interface for people to explore the gathered data. We ruled out ‘Pincushion maps’, mostly because we don’t like them (see this article by studio founder Kim for more on that) but also because, given the data is concentrated in such a small area, it wouldn’t be relevant for this project.

We did talk about wanting to try and do something a bit more creative than a ‘timeline’, but — hey ho — a timeline is ultimately where we ended up.

The main reason for using a timeline was the comparatively small quantity of content we were able to gather, compared to what we might have hoped. Although the quantity of content was relatively limited, what we had was distributed widely throughout the last century.

We had been hoping to meet a fair number of former Towers residents and build up a rich tapestry of memory about life inside the buildings, spanning their five decades of use. What we actually ended up with was a smaller number of residents, few of whom actually lived inside the Towers themselves, but were instead in the very close surrounding neighbourhoods. A couple of these women had memories of the area reaching all the way back to the 1940s, long before the towers were built or even conceived.

We realised that a timeline structure would offer the best way of visualising the area’s rich history both before and after the towers arrived, and this time-based ‘split’ was something I was keen to emphasise in the design of the site.

We also mentioned in the first design journal that we were excited by the idea of shaping the site around ‘themes’. We have offered theme filtering in the final site, but this is a secondary navigation device, as ultimately the themes which emerged from the stories were a tad less evocative than we might have hoped. For example, ‘Deprivation and Challenges’ wasn’t really something FCHO were keen to go into too much depth on. The themes serve more as a navigational tool (e.g. ‘I want to read a particular person’s stories’, or ‘I only want to read stories about the surrounding estate’) rather than the rich seams of connection we had hoped for.

Designing the site

Unfortunately, due to scheduling delays caused by the challenges of gathering content, we were much more pressed for time than we would have liked when it came to actually designing and building the site. The lottery had a deadline for when they needed to see a live site, and so we were obligated to work to this.

Despite this end-stage pressure, as a designer I had of course been thinking for some time about some key details of the site.

Towers and clouds

One of the most exciting design decisions for me was how to differentiate between the ‘before the towers’ and ‘after the towers’ phases. I had a silly idea while falling asleep one night of creating an ‘infinite scroll’ illustration of the Towers, so as you move down the site, you can see these (very tall) versions of the buildings in the background. I wasn’t sure whether to pursue it or not, but, unprompted, one of our dev team told me he’d had the same idea, so I decided to push ahead with it!

It proved surprisingly difficult to create a totally seamless version of the illustration — so don’t look too close, okay 🙂! You’ll see that the Towers appear during the 1970s, when they were actually constructed.

Another ‘silly’ idea which ended up making it to the final site was ‘clouds’ for the images. There was something quite entertaining to me about the phenomenal height of these background towers illustrations, so I figured that the tops of them would almost certainly be sitting up amongst the clouds, right? So I put all the imagery into cloud-shaped cut outs, and ultimately it brought a bit of life and fun to the site, so we decided to stick with it.

Colours and typeface

I was keen to choose a colour scheme and typeface that felt in keeping with the era the Towers were built. It would have felt somehow disingenuous to make a site that felt too visually cutting edge and contemporary, and I also felt that by using some (currently) less used type styles and colours, it would feel like something a bit different — somehow both nostalgic and fresh.

There’s a particular typeface/type style that sprang to mind for me during an afternoon out on the South Bank — that chunky, bold, outlined all-caps slab serif you often see on building signage from this era (or possibly even before, I found it hard to date — sometime between the 50s and the 70s, I think!)

You can see it here in the Royal Festival Hall signage:

The only other example I could readily bring to mind was this classic old shop signage near Victoria Station (screenshot from Google streetview) — but hopefully you, like me, are familiar with this style, and have seen it pop up on buildings all over the country!

I spent some time attempting to figure out what typeface this was, and with help from the GFSC collective and my own design networks, we established that the closest match was Clarendon URW Bold Oblique.

I have a license to use this typeface to create graphics, but unfortunately it is not cheap or easy to get a web licence. As we try and build our sites to have a long life, and the only options for licensing Clarendon were rolling subscriptions (based on number of page views), we used a flat graphic for the main titles of the site and added alt text for accessibility and SEO. This felt like a bit of a hack, but there was nothing else quite like Clarendon and particularly nothing we could easily license!

For the remainder of the site’s typography I have used Roboto Slab, a classic slab serif which crucially is a Google font, so licensing isn’t an issue!.

In terms of colours, I wanted the palette to feel like it fitted with the Clarendon typeface. For the filters you’ll see I’ve used a similar blue to the Royal Festival Hall, and also pulled in some other slightly ‘dirty’ versions of various brights — to both differentiate clearly between the themes but still feel broadly in keeping with the overall 70s style.

For the main colour of the site, perhaps controversially, I’ve gone with this lovely (?) mustard yellow or ‘baby poo’, as one of our devs less charitably put it 😂. I think this is an under-appreciated hue and one which speaks very strongly to me of municipal buildings, signage, furniture, fashion and more from the 1970s.

For just £477 you can buy this chair based edition of the site: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/698082102/mid-century-mustard-yellow-armchair-b310

David Bowie knew what was up https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2013/mar/12/david-bowie-eight-classic-looks-pictures

Accessibility

We are always mindful of accessibility in our site design, and strive to meet at least AA standards in all areas. This meant a fair bit of tweaking to the theme/filter colours to ensure peak legibility in all contexts.

Another aspect of accessibility which we particularly cared about was clarity of navigation for those who might be new to the internet. Several of our ‘storytellers’ made clear that they had little interest in going online, or that they were daunted by it – which was part of the motivation behind the aforementioned digital skills workshops. We wanted to make sure that were any of these people to visit their local library to get online and visit the site, they would have the best possible chance of using and understanding it.

For some people who are new to the internet functionality that is very much taken for granted (like scrolling) can be new and unknown. It is of course hard to avoid this, but I tried to design the site in such a way that, at its most basic level, little other than scrolling is required from the user.

One common feature of modern websites (particularly ones with similar themes to ours) is a design which focusses on big splashy images, and hiding copy behind clickable pop-ups or drop-downs. One key principle I designed to was to ensure that all copy is visible. As a designer it is easy to be lured in by big, beautiful image montages and fancy effects like parallax scroll and pop-ups, but we have steered clear of all of that here. As well as impacting the accessibility for those who don’t know to click through, sites with a lot of moving parts pose an issue for many people with vestibular dysfunction, who are susceptible to things like migraines or motion sickness.

The site opens with a clear summary of what the project is, and a prompt to simply scroll, as well as mentioning the filters for those who want them. Users who are initially daunted by the filters or do not understand them can ignore that aspect entirely and just view the whole site.

Those who wish to explore using the filters have the option of browsing by either contributor or type of content. For slightly more advanced users, there is a ‘+’ to the top right which, when clicked, offers a handy navigation tool to jump to different decades in the timeline.

My only slight regret is that in order to turn off a filter you have to scroll back up to the top. I wanted a sticky header that stayed with you as you scrolled offering a ‘close’ function, but this caused issues on mobile, so we had to avoid it. This makes the filters slightly less user friendly than I would have liked, but still hopefully on balance a worthwhile feature.

We also realised that we would need to build in some pop-ups specifically for the images on the site. We got some lovely archival photography and old album photos from some of our contributors, and needed to strike the balance between not making the site an incredibly long scroll (by putting all the images directly into the timeline at full size), and not making it too confusing by requiring the user to click too much.

Hopefully the little magnifying glasses in the corner of the clouds make clear to any user that they can view the images bigger, and the lightbox is of a sufficiently simple design that any user would easily be able to close them and return to the main scroll.

One of our devs did reflect to me that modals (pop-ups) like the lightboxes are really complex for screen readers to parse, and as he was considering that aspect of accessibility in the build, it did prove challenging. He said he’d prefer to avoid building them in future if possible, so this is certainly something for me to reflect on when designing future sites. How can we achieve a balanced flow of image and text, and get to the highest possible level of user accessibility?

Conclusion

Overall this has been a challenging but fascinating project from start to finish. It was the first project I worked on at GFSC, and that is unfortunately a slightly damning indictment of how far behind schedule it ended up falling — I have now been working here for two years!

Most of these issues are due to the challenges we faced gathering content (as documented in RAFTT Design Diary #2), which were broadly out of our hands, but reflecting on the process from our end, I think it would have been helpful to start designing earlier. Even though designing without content to work with is challenging, and we didn’t want to define the final shape of the site until we understood everything we were working with, it may still have been better to take that risk and rushed less towards the end.

The site has been built for a long lifespan — the lottery funding is contingent on it remaining live for five years, but we have tried to ensure it will have a life beyond this timeframe, as we do with all static sites we build.

Mostly it has just been a pleasure to get to know this community and its varied history. I would have loved if we could have accessed more of that history, but what we have managed to gather here is far more than would have been secured otherwise. It’s my hope that this site will be stumbled across by many more curious Oldham residents in the years to come.

The Towers

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Geeks for Social Change collaborated with First Choice Homes Oldham to carry out a digital history project to understand and document the lives of those who lived in and around Crossbank and Summervale towers, which were demolished in late 2021 to make way for low-rise, affordable homes. We worked with them to apply for funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to make this project a reality.

Local history is an area GFSC has a lot of experience with. Every neighbourhood on Earth has a plethora of stories that are completely unknown outside of it. We want to find ways of telling and sharing these stories which are compelling, well presented, accessible, easy to use, and crucially — are designed and owned directly by the communities they’re made with.

From doing this work we know first hand how much the community history of structurally disadvantaged areas can often be overlooked and lost, which prevents people from being able to make sense of where they are and the impact of the state on their own community. By sharing memories of place and experience, a greater sense of solidarity, connection, and community can be fostered amongst residents — past, present and future.

Crossbank and Summervale towers had stood since 1975, and FCHO recognised that these towers were more than just bricks and mortar. They contained many hundreds of people’s memories and experiences from the 45 year period they stood, and for many thousands more, these towers served as a visual ‘Gateway to Oldham’.

There was very little existing oral, photographic, or other history of the area, save for a limited selection of articles in the council archives. This required significant research in the community, with poster and flyer campaigns, community events about the project, and one-to-one conversations with community members on the ground. We were able to gather a number of key ‘storytellers’ who shared rich and detailed memories of living in or around the towers.

We worked with University of York MA Cultural Heritage Management student Sam Benbow to collect stories from key participants, using a combination of written statements, spoken interviews, and collection of artefacts like photos and newspaper clippings. We then identified key quotes and themes from the interviews, using the stories to put together a timeline of the area around and including the towers from the 1920s to the present day.

The resultant website is purposefully easy to navigate, just requiring a simple scroll to see all of the content — while also accommodating more powerful navigation through the use of filters and a clickable decade selector, for those who are more tech savvy. It was vital to make sure the end product was easy to use for people who have lower digital skill levels — several of our ‘storytellers’ said they avoid using the internet, or are daunted by it.

For local history to be compelling and inviting, it needs to tell true stories in ways which are coherent and meaningful. Ensuring that the stories are legible, accessible, and well-presented means that the experience is more akin to reading a good book than it is shuffling through a drawer in someones desk filled to the brim with loose papers and photos. When local history is cared for and presented in this manner, it means more people can appreciate what came before, and how it informed what’s coming next.

We were faced with the challenge of turning a loose collection of stories into one coherent narrative, to pay respect to and champion the lives of those who lived and worked in and around these towers for the almost half-century they were standing, and allow them to share their stories beyond the limits of dusty photo albums and desk drawers. We worked together to create a lasting resource, made with access, structure, and style as key concerns.

GFSC Podcast

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Our podcast aims to explore the many themes and topics that are of interest to us as a studio, via a series of conversations with our friends, collaborators and co-conspirators. We focus on navigating technology, ethics, and activism in our day to day lives and work.

We also include some special episodes — members of the studio occasionally deliver talks or panels at external events, and where possible, we aim to record these for our podcast so that they can be enjoyed by a much wider audience.

In a 2022 survey we discovered that over 60% of our extended community regularly listen to podcasts. Many members of the studio also find podcasts a vital and enriching medium for knowledge sharing and entertainment.

Our podcast does not currently operate to a fixed schedule, as this enables us to ensure the highest possible quality and relevance for each episode (basically, we make them when we feel like it!) — be sure to subscribe via your podcasting service of choice, to make sure you never miss an episode. We also publish transcripts to our blog – you can find those below!

You can find us on Spotify, Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or Spotify for Podcasters, or subscribe via RSS.

Everything we want to tell you about your funding scheme...

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Subscribe via RSS, Sticher, Spotify, Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or Spotify for Podcasters

When facilitating community projects, one key question is ‘how do we make this sustainable?’. The answer, supposedly, is to look to funding bodies for financial assistance, by applying for funding bids. This talk explores the realities of relying on funding like this to carry out projects, where things fall through the gaps, and the impact this has on the work that we’re all ostensibly here to carry out.

This episode of the Geeks for Social Change podcast was recorded as part of an NHS Start With People event on March 30th 2023. As this was originally delivered as a talk with slides, there are audio descriptions of each slide as they come up.

To share this podcast, use the hashtag #StartWithPeople.

You can listen in the player above, or watch it on YouTube. You can also find it on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, and Amazon Music by searching “Geeks for Social Change”.

Episode information

References

Credits

Music: Cooking, Sharing, Happy Seasons! by Megan Arnold
Audio recording: NHS Citizen #StartWithPeople event
Audio production: honor ash
Transcription: Amy Ní Mhurchú

Transcript

Intro music 00:00:19

honor: Hello and welcome to the Geeks for Social Change podcast. This episode is a recording from a talk that Geeks for Social Change gave as part of an NHS Start With People event on March the 30th 2023. As it was originally delivered as a presentation I’ll jump in and give an audio description of each slide as they go up, or you can watch this podcast on YouTube at the link in the description. As always a transcript of this episode is available on our website or linked in the description. My name is honor ash and I am a writer with Geeks for Social Change. This talk is called ‘Everything We Want To Tell You About Your Funding Scheme But Are To Afraid To Tell You Because We Can’t Afford To Piss You Off’ and it’s delivered by Dr. Kim Foale from Geeks for Social Change and Rachele Evaroa from STEAM Hubs and Pubs CIC, based in the Old Abbey Taphouse. There’s a brief mention of suicidal ideation in the context of community resourcing and some explicit language used throughout the talk. You’ll also hear briefly from the host of the session Jamie Keddie when responses from the live audience are solicited. 00:01:13

Music 00:01:31

Kim: Hello. I’m Kim. I set up a little studio called Geeks for Social Change. I think we technically started in 2016 but we really got going in about 2020/21. My whole thing as a human being I guess, is I’ve always been a sort of, community activist. I think originally, like a lot of us, who really grew up around sort of early noughties and this is how I know Rach, through the DIY punk scenes and then as we got older we found what we were doing had a lot of other community benefits than that, you know, and also did software on the side, did a PhD and then kind of combining all those things together is how I started this practice. So basically our practice is about trying to engage directly with community groups and their needs and sort of how to work together to figure out what they need rather than more tech led approaches which tend to centre the software itself and the product itself and the development itself. Oh yeah and I use they/she pronouns! Hello. So that’s me. Do you wanna do a little intro Rach? 00:02:21

Rachele: Heya. I’m Rachele Evaroa. I’m the director of, actually, Steam Hubs and Pubs CIC. So we’re a science focused social enterprise and we’re based in a pub but we do lots of different community works and we do some youth work, we do catering, we do food and it’s because a pub is a traditional space for communities to come together and it doesn’t have the invisible boundaries. And I’m really proud to say I’ve worked with Kim for about ten years on community projects in our area. 00:02:48

Kim: I was gonna say too, just so people know, it’s in Manchester, in the science park and if you’re there you should go and have a pint. 00:02:50

honor: A slide titled ‘What is community development work?’ with the sub-heading ‘Share your thoughts with us.’ 00:02:59

Kim: So I think the first question we had for everyone, cause I think like, one of the things we’ll get into a bit later as we often find we’re saying the same words and meaning completely different things, we’re kind of going to open up to the room a bit. What do people think of as community development work? We’d love to hear specific examples if anyone is feeling brave. Helping out and improving. Yeah. 00:03:17

Jamie Keddie: Helping communities do more for themselves and sort of part of that is realising the limits of what the NHS and other public sector bodies can do and actually sometimes it might mean stepping back and letting people do more for themselves, is more the point I was trying to get across. 00:03:32

Kim: Yeah. 00:03:34

Rachele: Well it’s harder to define a community. Is it locally based? Or is it? 00:03:38

Kim: Yeah

Jamie: Yeah. It could be. Or it could be nationally as well, couldn’t it I guess. Sort of communities of interest and, yeah. 00:03:44

Kim: Yeah. I’ll read a few more out just for the recording too. Understanding strengths of communities. Defaulting to ideas within the framework of asset based community development. Yeah, so like, asset based strengths based, uh, too. Yeah. They get used interchangeably a lot I think. We use them a lot.

Supporting grassroots organisations support their communities.

Mobilising material support and access for people already working on the issues in the community. Yeah I think the material thing is really important. I mean, we’ll get into it in a bit but I find a lot of the time what we end up doing is we’re sort of like, I guess it took a long time for me to think about what we were doing as community development, Rach, I don’t know about you? [Chuckles] So like if you’re just putting on events and like doing nice things for people or like, organising stuff and then very often we’ve got all these other people coming in and then their main job is to measure what we’re doing or write it down or sort of just be in the meetings, right? I think this split seems to happen quite a lot where it’s like the people who just sort of get their hands dirty and do the washing up and the ones who are there to kind of write down and monitor?

And yeah, another one. Exactly! Definitions are important. I work in a community of co-producers nationally but I am equally aware that most people see their community as their local area. Yeah. 00:04:47

Rachele: Yeah, I think I’ve got an anecdote. I had meetings for two years with this big developer and when I was talking about the community I meant the local community, the people from the council estates, the people who use the assets and it took me a year and a half to realise they meant the business community. And then you can say, cause it’s such a loosely defined word, quite often you get talking to stakeholders, they can say ‘well you haven’t got enough voices from the community’ because there’s such a vague definition. 00:05:12

Kim: Or I think the other one that happens a lot is there’s a presumption that there isn’t a community and they’re going to start a new community. Right? They’ll say community development work but what they mean by that is people turning up to my meeting. 00:05:23

Rachele: Yeah! People who agree with what I want! 00:05:27

honor: A slide with a venn diagram. The circle on the left is labeled ‘GFSC projects’ and has three items in it, which are ‘Trans Dimension’, ‘imok’ and ‘UnTechCon’. The circle on the right is labeled ‘Old Abbey Taphouse projects’ and has a further three items in it, which are ‘Family Meal Time’, ‘Len Johnson/Breaking Barz’ and ‘STEAM Radio’. The intersection between the circles is unlabeled and has three more items in it which are ‘TV Dinners’, ‘PlaceCal’ and ‘Hulme History Day’. 00:05:55

Kim: So some of the projects we’ve done, there’s a bunch that GFSC have done, there’s a bunch that Old Abbey have done - we’re in the same ward in Manchester too which was quite serendipitous, we didn’t plan it, it just worked out really well. So some of the ones we’ve done as Geeks for Social Change, our biggest project is called PlaceCal, which is in the middle, and we developed this community calendar software that’s based on, rather than everyone having to log into a central thing and put all their information in, like all the kind of council and housing association sites, we support people where they are to list events using whatever they have now, so like Google calendar, Outlook, Facebook, might be meetup, or Eventbrite, or whatever, and then our site aggregates it all into one central place. And it’s been a really long development process over a few years. The biggest one we just launched is called The Trans Dimension and it’s a listing we made with a charity called Gendered Intelligence in London and it shows all the trans events in London but like I say it’s all completely automated, it’s all pulled in from external sources and now it’s also mapped onto a real life partnership of the groups, who are actually working together, so less siloed, it’s this overall strategy approach.

A couple of the other ones that we’ve made. We made a little bot called imok that was to support people doing sign in support for asylum seekers. The way that asylum works, or sort of works a bit less now cause of Covid, is there’s kind of a parole system. You have to go to these horrible industrial estates in the middle of nowhere and sign in to say you still live here but if they decide to deport you they very frequently refuse you a call, whisk you off to the airport. So volunteers for ages were just sitting outside and marking people coming in and out and anyway, we made a little bot to automate this kind of process that allows all that data to be controlled by the group doing it.

And then finally we do a lot of work around this bigger mission we’ve got. So, UnTechCon, we ran online last year. We’re about to start an UnReadingGroup we’re calling it, cause you don’t have to do any reading you can just show up, but just having these conversations about how tech isn’t really serving people right now. The word we hear a lot is like ‘I’m not a tech person’ but like everyone spending like eight hours a day on a computer at the moment and has been, probably, since about 2020. I mean a lot of people are right? Or we’re on our phone, or both at the same time And I think a lot of the software we use day-to-day has been designed to make you feel like an outsider. So we’ve got this situation where there’s this new kind of oppression going on and instead of it being seen as like a group thing, everyone individually feels like they’re just being stupid and they don’t get it and it’s kind of by design. So we’re trying to start discussions around this kind of, helping people understand and helping people generate autonomy over what it is that they want to do and build the tools together and involve people more in it and this is what we’re trying to start with this conference series.

Do you wanna talk about yours Rach? 00:08:13

Rachele: So one of the reasons we chose a pub to base our social enterprise in is invisible boundaries that stop people going into other spaces and a lot of the new build community centres have those. So a lot of the work we do, we operate as a traditional pub but we do loads of community work on the side and, for example, Tuesday is a big day for our community work. In the first week of lockdown we realised lots of the elderly people in the two estates next to us couldn’t get any food cause ASDA was selling out and we also realised there was a problem with information getting to people and if you weren’t tech savvy there was a lot of miscommunication going out in our ward in Hulme and a lot of rumors. So the pub, PlcaeCal, or Geeks for Social Change, ACORN Tenants Union and Gaskell Garden Project, we all came together and knocked on all the doors, handed out leaflets and set up a food distribution. So it’s a two course hot meal, every Tuesday and we’re doing that since lockdown.

Heritage has been really important. Our pub is the last building left of the Greenheys estate and we do a lot around memory and people remembering the heritage of this area. One of the best projects we ever done is to get all the old maps from the 1950s and bring a lot of elderly people who are near the end of their lives back to their old houses that don’t exist any more to show their families and tell their stories.

We’re also the pub where Len Johnson overturned the colour bar. Len Johnson was an absolutely amazing fighter. He probably was the best British boxer we’ve ever had. He wasn’t allowed to fight for Britain because he was black and he came back to Manchester with his best friend and became a bus driver and he did loads of activism in Manchester and part of that was - there was a horrible point of time where there were signs in pubs Manchester that said ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ and this pub was one of them and Will, Len’s best friend, told Len about the colour bar at the Abbey and asked Len to come down and order a drink and it was extremely brave on top of the fact that Len didn’t even drink alcohol. So he came down to this pub, he wasn’t served by the landlady. Him and Will went and got a load of supporters, they went to the Mayor’s office, they got some press attention and they came back a few days later and the landlady had to serve Len and it broke the colour bars across Manchester. From the moment we found out that fact we made a big celebration about it. We started having a moment and a drink for Len Johnson and it built up organically. About two years ago, in lockdown, we managed to run one under the Covid rules and all these young people turned up and they all had creative poetry and rap and pictures about Len Johnson and so we decided to give them their own night. So a lot of young people in the area have launched a night around Len Johnson, which is a kind of grime, hip hop night for specifically young, Black youths, to celebrate his legacy and it’s been phenomenal. And I feel that some of the key of our work is taking information and letting people do what they want with it.

STEAM Radio was another thing that came out of lockdown. We got a cultural community around the pub. It’s really active. It’s, a lot of people who maybe wouldn’t engage, don’t feel like they have access to music. When lockdown happened we didn’t want to lose that community so we set up a radio and we made some little DIY guides on how to record from home, in your bedroom, and we managed to get forty shows by people who never done any broadcasting and we’ve kept it going since. 00:11:19

Kim: Yeah, and I think like, the key point to all of this, right, it’s like this, it’s obviously a lot of self promotion for us and our projects, but I think the point is that these aren’t projects that we dreamt up. Or like, we’ve obviously had a big input in them but they’re projects where people came to us with a problem and we use the resources we had available to us to try and fix it. So it’s very emergent, right. We’re working with people who are our neighbours and we’re working together to try and do something that’s then bigger than all of us, right? 00:11:39

Rachele: I chose those projects too because they’re the ones I’ve struggled to get funding with, even though at the time, those were the buzzwords. So, in lockdown, it was emergency food support was the biggest buzzword and everyone was trying to fund food projects. 00:11:53

Kim: We’ve had no local funding for any of this. We’ve - [Chuckles] 00:11:56

Rachele: Yeah, no funding for the food support and we still send out a two course meal every Tuesday and hamper of food and I’m seeing more need and the problem with funding - the last bit of funding that came out, they wanted to fund fridges and food. But there’s tonnes of fridges and tonnes of food but what I need is funding for staff and electricity at the moment. 00:12:14

honor: A slide titled ‘It’s time for Buzzword Bingo’ with a table below it. The table has five columns and four rows which read, left to right: Storytelling, Social isolation and loneliness, Age friendly, Climate justice, Warm banks, Covid-19 response, Food poverty, Suicide prevention, Digital inclusion, Homeless prevention, EDI/DEI, Metabolic justice, Social prescribing, Levelling up, Northern Powerhouse, Asset-based working, Social impact, Impact evaluation, Social enterprise and Cultural communities. 00:12:51

Kim: I mean we’ve had funding from, sometimes national sources, sometimes innovation, but we’ve always had to go outside of our local authority, outside of our local NHS, like, we don’t get any support for any of these projects that for us are very integral to ourselves, our lives, our communities. And it’s not just that we don’t get funding, there’s not even conversations happening around how these could be integrated with wider sort of, health and social care agendas. And usually then what we get, is this stuff, right? So every new fund that comes out, or there’ll be a new neighbourhood link worker or community navigator or whatever they want to call, or like, there’ll be a new housing association initiative that’ll have come from the council and all of a sudden, ‘oh, right yeah! We want to do a digital inclusion project’ or ‘we want to do a food poverty project’ or ‘we want to do a social enterprise project’ or some other word that feels like it’s just come off a desk as a priority list and then all of a sudden we have to rewrite everything we’re doing in terms of that one concept. But like, in reality, most of the things we do, probably hit a third of this grid, if not more. 00:13:49

Rachele: It’s hard because every year you pitch almost the same projects to tackle the same thing, which is hyper-capitalism, insecure housing, insecure jobs, insecure food and the impact that has on people’s lives and yet every year we’ve got to figure out the new buzzword and then pitch it to the buzzword and it’s almost like an algorithm. I know that there’s funders who won’t read your application unless they see those words, regardless of the content of it. 00:14:14

Kim: Yeah and it feels like the main thing we’ve got to flatter is the person who made the form, not the people we’re trying to work with locally, right? 00:14:20

Rachele: Yeah and it makes everything very project based. So there’s an amazing community centre in North Manchester and every three or four months they’ve got to come up with a new project so they can keep the lights on in the community centre and they’ll get loads of funding to buy assets. So they’ve got loads of laptops that they bought, the software on it, they have to pay a fee for and that’s run out. So all those laptops are absolutely pointless and they’re sat there and they can’t be used by anyone because they can’t find the money to pay for the software on them. And in the same way, they don’t have any space there, they’re putting on projects and having to get rid of this equipment to have more space to do more projects. 00:14:54

Kim: The device thing is unreal and there’s even times we’ve applied for digital inclusion projects for a PlaceCal rollout, which we keep getting asked for the information that our software would produce by everyone in the neighbourhood and then we’ll be like ‘do you want to give us some money so we can do the community development work to roll it out’ and told ‘oh apply to our fund for digital inclusion’. Then, I think the last time we applied for digital inclusion fund, we matched all their criteria perfectly and then they just said ‘oh no, we’ve got to do homework clubs for kids now, so all this money has to go on laptops’ and it was like…You know when you’re just like, ‘what do you want us to do here?’. And then I think two weeks later they were asking us again for the information that we would have been able to give them if they had funded us and it just goes round and round and round like that for years sometimes. 00:15:32

honor: A slide titled ‘Would your last fund have funded these projects?’ The body of the slide reads: If yes - what would we have had to do to get the funds? What hoops would we have had to jump through? What reporting would we have had to do? And: If no - why not? 00:15:45

Kim: So I think this is the key question for us. Obviously, again, we’re a little bit self-promotion mode but I think it’s really worth - if you’re organising a fund, or putting a fund together, or starting a new initiative - just thinking through like what projects are there in the community already, what do you know about? Would your fund be able to have those funded? What hoops would you be making people jump through to be able to apply to them? I honestly feel like no one ever considers this questions when they design a lot of these things, of just like, starting from the perspective of what’s already out there and what can we support? And then how can we make a thing which matches up to our institution. 00:16:20

honor: A slide which reads: Our relationship with institutions and funders - it’s not great. Why?. 00:16:26

Kim: So as you’re probably getting the gist for, our relationship is really not great. It’s been very antagonistic for a very long time and I think especially it’s got a lot worse over the last few years. Like Rachele is saying, hyper-capitalism, the public sector is just being demolished, the NHS is being demolished. We all know it. It’s all awful right now and I think a lot of the time you end up in a situation where there’s a lot of institutions that feel like they’re critically failing and it’s really hard to engage with them meaningfully. So… 00:16:51

honor: A round sticker reading: Due to the power funders hold, it’s hard to be honest with them, appears in the middle of the slide, obscuring some of the previous text.

Kim: I think like, the number one thing is just, it’s really hard to be honest. Usually when you’re the one doing the work on the ground, you’re the one who faces the actual problems and you’re the one who is accountable to the person who has the problem and helping them fix it. So we get very stuck in these ways where we have very clear signs if something’s working or not but usually the people we’re working with, who are funding us, they’re only accountable to their boss. They’re not accountable to their local community. So we’re very often in this position where we’re having to be the truth teller, right? A lot of people don’t want to be told the truth. 00:17:29

honor: Another sticker appears, which reads: Funders have no accountability. 00:17:33

Rachele: One biggest thing I’ve noticed since lockdown is, before, if you were a community worker for a big housing association, you were expected to be out on the ground but since lockdown’s happened everyone’s gone from ‘work-from-home’ and I just really don’t believe you can be a community worker, working on zoom meetings all day and that’s one of the issues I’ve been having with some of the housing associations, is they bollock me for not going to the meetings on zoom or online, which they do all day. And you’ll get the same people going and just going to the zoom meetings, sat at home who haven’t actually been out in the community. And a lot of us who have been actually working on the ground, we’ve had to make so many cuts in our organisations because of the electricity bills and stuff, so we’re doing even more than we normally do, and we told off for not going to these meetings, which then decide how the funds are going to go and I just don’t think you can do community work from home. Especially if you’re from a different class of the people you’re trying to serve. 00:18:28

Kim: Yeah, a lot of those meetings end up being like, eight community development workers, all talking between themselves and the community left ages ago. 00:18:33

honor: Another sticker appears which reads: Institutions are often actively creating the harms they are funding you to fix. 00:18:39

Kim: And I think this is another one. So very often we’re dealing with institutions who are actually causing the harms that they then want us to fix but evidently without acknowledging the harm is happening. So I mean some really big examples of this are kind of NHS transphobia, which very famously resulting in these enormous waiting list times that are resulting in high suicide rates, right? And there’s obviously some reforms on the way, it’s not in anyone’s control but there’s sort of this lack of acknowledgement that a harm is happening and then a fund will come out and you will have to pretend like this is so wonderful and benevolent and great and it’s actually, right, I’d rather just remove the harm than me trying to go for this other thing. 00:19:09

Rachele: On that note too, as well, I’ve completely gone 360 on what I think is most effective community work now. We’ve been seeing more people feeling suicidal turning up at the pub and had to deal with maybe three young men and it’s - they’re in crisis mode and the services available when you’re in crisis mode, we need a bit more than a telephone line. We need more services where people actually go out. And I had this one young man who was threatening to jump off a bridge and I just couldn’t get any agency to go out to talk to him. The police had gone out and tried and it escalated the situation and luckily in my other job I had a meeting with Shelter and the person from Shelter went out in a personal capacity and talked this guy down from the bridge. But I just felt like in that moment, although we had all these services and prevention lines and this, there wasn’t actually that person to go and stop this person jumping off a bridge. Which is what we really needed. Not an advisory line. Not a workshop. Not a mindfulness class. 00:20:04

Kim: A chatbot - the worst. 00:20:05

Rachele: Yeah and then when I raised that with funders they tell me I should make more professional boundaries but I’m a pub maybe we direct people into these services but it’s not really what I set out to do. I didn’t set out to do the emergency food but I can’t stop it now because the need’s gone up and because we have this reputation of looking out for people, people do turn up in crisis mode and I can normally help them but it made me so frustrated to hear this from funders going - you need to set more professional boundaries - like if you turn up at your workplace and open the front door and someone’s there trying to kill themselves I can’t be like I’m setting a boundary to say I need to have a cup of tea and I think that lack of understanding of what it’s actually like to be on the frontline and see people in crisis is missing. 00:20:47

Kim: Yeah. People don’t access services in the way that the institutions want the services to work, right? People access someone they trust, someone local, someone they care about. They talk to friends and family and local institutions and places they trust. And so they’re the places that need the support putting around them to deal with this. Right? 00:21:04

Rachele: That’s what I’d say, like even someone ringing up some of the numbers at Christmas, last Christmas I bullied the council into making a flyer of all the emergency food support around Christmas cause we were shutting and some of the other food banks were shutting. But having had some lived experience of what it’s like when you have to ring those numbers, I now sit and ring all these numbers on leaflets to check the reaction people will get. The first number I rung, this woman was awful! She was like: ‘Nah, don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t know about this emergency food.’ And I wish there was that level of checking. You know, if you’re going to send out a leaflet, check with the organisations whose numbers you’ve put on. Check that they know how to answer the phone properly to people in need. Because if you get a negative reaction you’re not going to engage with the service again and then it takes lots of work on the ground for people like me and support workers to get someone at that level to engage again with that service. And yeah, that lack of understanding, lack of compassion, for that, gets me. 00:21:55

Kim: Social prescribing has been awful for this. Cause what’s that meant in practice is more and more people are just directing people to places like us or the Taphouse but there’s no resource or core funding attached to it. So we’ve usually got people earning like 50 to double what we are just to point people at us, without giving us anything and it’s just like…it doesn’t feel like social prescribing, it feels like getting the community to do work for free. Which doesn’t feel great. And again it’s funny because we’re all in this because we care about it, it’s our neighbours, it’s where we live but yeah. 00:22:20

honor: Another sticker appears, reading: The overall time spent applying for any one fund can be vast. The stickers now almost totally cover the original slide. 00:22:28

Kim: And I think just to acknowledge too that a lot of these funds, the time involved in applying for them is pretty vast actually. It takes a lot of concentration. Usually the turnarounds are way too tight. Not only that, if you look at the overall amount of effort that’s gone into everyone who applied to the fund it’s probably actually like a net negative to the community and I think there’s something really difficult about that, that’s not again, possible for any one person to solve because obviously budgets are tight, but a lot of forms you can tell there’s been no real thought gone into what it takes to fill it out, how long it takes, what the overall impact of this is and if there might be a better way to do it and we’ll get onto some suggestions later on. So I think we’re getting to it right now! The funding process really feels back to front to me. 00:23:05

honor: A new slide, which is titled, ‘People who live in a place are the experts in that place’. The body of the slide reads: Understand we are the ones that live here – you’re just visiting, and will stop caring whenever you get a new job. 00:23:18

Kim: Fundamentally, and I think people have mentioned asset based and strengths based in the chat so maybe we’re preaching to the choir a bit here but the people who live somewhere are the experts in that place and not only that but like I say, they’re the ones who are accountable to like their friends, their communities, their neighbours. A lot of the time we’re dealing with people, you know running projects, there’s like link workers, who don’t even live in Manchester, where we are. And they’re kind of, they’ll all gatekeep these funds and be really difficult and obnoxious with you and then the second it’s five o’clock they go home and then…I’ve been in weird situations where we’re trying to do like, we did a big community project in Oldham around these tower blocks that are being demolished and, you know at first glance it looks like a great room and you’ve got a community day together and you’re there talking heritage and one by one, it’s like, ‘oh right, yeah so you’re from the housing association, oh do you live in Oldham?’ ‘No I live in Didsbury.’ and it’s just like, over and over again, it’s like, so does anyone in this room actually live here or are we just all institutional workers talking to each other. There just seems to be a real blindness around this and a real lack of understanding about what the make-up of the people in the room is. What the power dynamics is. 00:24:14

honor: A slide which is titled with a quote from Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, which reads: The more value your job to society, the less you get paid, and yet no one listens to the most low paid. Below the quote the slide reads: A very common experience in our line of work is being the only unpaid person in the room and the only one actually doing the hands on work. Often big choices are made at closed meetings during office hours by people who don’t actually live in an area. 00:24:41

Kim: You know it sounds a bit like sour grapes but actually, like David Graeber’s wrote a fantastic book on this called Bullshit Jobs and basically really clearly makes this point about how, generally the more society needs your labour, the less you’re going to be paid. So what do we need the most day-to-day? We need people making food, we need nurses, we need healthcare, we need people changing the bins and like, doing all this manual labour that no one wants to do , or like, in our case, right, like doing this really like hands on community work. So I think for years, me and Rach, had this shared experience where we would be, trying to get involved in something, like I’ve done a lot of queer history stuff, you sort of start a thing and you kind of start doing it and then it’s like all the institutions, you know academics, or whoever else will catch on, they’ll like set up a meeting in the day and be like ‘oh we’re starting a committee around this thing that you’re doing’ and you’re ok, so you turn up and then there’s never any interest in realisng that they’re just sat there to talk and you’re the one doing the work and you’re the only one not being paid and it just makes all these really weird dynamics that again you would think would be the first thing to talk about. Like, what are we trying to achieve here? Yeah, I’ve been in these situations, where it seems like it’s easier for people to get MU to buy a lunch to cater the meeting than it is just for people to meet in the evenings, so I don’t have to take a day off work, right? 00:25:50

honor: A slide which reads: Demanding project-based work when we need core funding - this is very demoralising. If we are core funded, we can work with you on the projects! Instead, we are often having to retrospectively translate what we do into your language and do all the research to match up to your buzzwords. 00:26:09

Rachele: I think there could be a case for giving like a community bursary to community activists. Cause I actually think had I been given, like ten grand a year to live off, most of my projects were self funded for the first five or six years and it’s only in the last few years I’ve figured out how to do funding bids and actually most of the time I’d prefer not to get funding and be able to self-fund my projects and just do them with the community and it’s only in the last few years the pub itself, we used to only have to take ten percent grants and the rest we’d turn over by trading and then put back into the community and now with the rise in operational costs but also what I’m angry about is social enterprises get used, so in lockdown we all stepped in, not just my social enterprise, my friends’ social enterprises, especially the food ones, everyone stepped in to feed the community because Manchester failed so badly, people were being - Muslim families were being given sausages and beans as their food provision - and unfortunately the centralised food provision for Manchester, they gave it to an academic who had never worked on the ground and they didn’t listen to any of the people who had been working on the ground with communities for ten years around food poverty in Manchester and then we all had to send out meals and food and then we got stuck sending out food to people and the funders have turned around and saying they don’t want to do a hand out model, so they want to see payment for food but we’re seeing more and more need for food and also what I’m most shocked about is, sometimes the people who do the funding or who have got the nicer jobs, they’ve still got this idea that the people in need are people on benefits who are lazy. Actually the need I’m seeing is from working families. Your mum and dad working and struggling to pay their bills and access food. So I wish that would be addressed a bit more. 00:27:55

Kim: Yeah, I think this is the key thing, right? So we get emailed, I think both of us get emailed constantly about local projects and wanting us to get involved in a project or do a thing and it’s like, from the amount of contact we get, I can see you’re recognising the value we give but that never seems to be translated into something tangible for us, it’s just another hour meeting we wanna go in, to talk to someone who’s just started a new project and then they’ll promise the earth and then there’s no follow up. And it’s like can just someone just fund our time to sit in all these meetings with all these project staff that turn over eighteen months at this like, a dozen institutions. 00:28:25

honor: A slide which reads: This is despite the fact that we hear a lot about “hard to reach communities” or “underrepresented communities”. They’re hard to reach for you, not us – presumably you want to work with us because we already have these connections, but for some reason this is never made explicit. You can’t “reach people” and do community development work firing off emails from home in Didsbury — sorry not sorry. Pay us to do it! 00:28:49

Kim: Yeah and I think this is, this is what Rach was saying earlier, right? That you hear a lot about hard to reach or underrepresented communities. They’re not hard to reach, you just have to go and talk to people, like there’s a wonderful health food and herbal medicine shop in Hulme high street run by this Black woman who’s like a herbalist and she constantly gets told she’s hard to reach and it’s like, I literally have a shop. On the high street. Like, what do you mean I’m hard to reach? Do you know what I mean? Of course you can’t reach people if you want to work from home in Didsbury. And this is presumably why you want to work with us because we’re there because we live here. There’s some real sort of like, missing common sense here a bit, it feels like, right? 00:29:22

Rachele: And on that note, I don’t know if you noticed, Kim, I know you’re an academic but there’s a period -

Kim: I don’t work in a university, so I’m not an academic!

Rachele: - every single academic is out in the community trying to find a community groups to work with and I didn’t know that they actually get funded, they get big pots of funding for this research where they have to connect with a community group and often they don’t tell the community group this. So someone gets paid a lot of money to engage with the communities that this group’s already made the network of. 00:29:48

Kim: It’s like they’re ‘can I have you address book?’ email right? You’ll get emails just being like ‘can you introduce me to any of the groups?’ and it’s like, ‘I don’t know, why should I trust you?’. Again, conversations that are hard to have, right? 00:29:56

honor: A slide which reads: So what can you do? 00:29:59

Kim: I mean we were told to put some positive notes in. I think we were just going to moan for ages cause it’s quite refreshing. I’ve never put all of our moans together in one place before. It feels good. 00:30:08

honor: A slide which reads: Give us the earliest opportunity to talk to you. (AKA don’t waste either of our time), and be an active part of the process of writing the funding application. Come visit us! Work with us! Let’s not interact through webforms! 00:30:20

Kim: This is like the simplest thing, I think, and a lot of people are moving towards this but basically like, a lot of funding, it’s really just all based around the form and it’s usually some crappy web form in Office and you have to click through all the pages and it’s really poorly designed, everyone hates it, and you also have to email and be like, ‘can I just have the questions before I start an application? And then, ‘can we talk to anyone?’ and it’s just like, scrap that. So I think like these two stage application processes, where step one is just some really simple eligibility to get you in a position where you can have a chat as soon as possible, that’s really good because presumably people don’t want to waste their time reading, we don’t want to waste our time writing so - a lot of the central ones are really bad for this, like Innovate UK has something like a five percent success rate on their flagship fund and honestly, like that form takes like, a week to fill in, full time. Minimum. And it’s just like, why are we all doing this? Why is there so much time being wasted filling in the form for this thing? I’m sure that that fund costs the economy money overall just because of how much time it takes to fill in. Thing is, if you want to work with us the conversation should revolve around how are we going to make this work? Like, what do we need to get down on paper so that we can convince my host institution to fund this and not ‘here’s this form, fill it in, good luck, bye.’ 00:31:30

honor: A slide reading: Give us core funding so we are on an even footing. This requires you to identify what partners you need and take us seriously as equal partners. Could you just pay a stipend to key activists you want to work with? 00:31:42

Kim: Like we said a lot now, I think just, there’s one philanthropic group we work with. It’s really hard to get core funding. It tends to be something you can only get after a few years of a social enterprise. There’s some really big foundations like Paul Hamlyn and Esmée Fairbairn who have very weird and specific requirements and it’s kind of like, it almost feels like you already have to be turning over, you know, half a million quid before you can even start thinking about going to these foundations for core funding but actually like, you almost need it more at the start, when you’re trying to get going, when you’re trying to get off the ground and that DIY ethos that me and Rach are talking about, like there’s so many people who have come up through that like punk DIY scene, doing shows, putting on things like Ladyfest Festivals, or like queer events or just like through the arts and culture and those things end up, like we say, they take up about a third of the buzzword bingo box but no one in those circles thinks of what they’re doing in terms of social enterprise. It’s just not why they got into it. It’s anathema, that’s like the language of the man, right? And I think if there was just more of a focus on identifying these core community institutions that are clearly reaching the people that you think are hard to reach and just finding a way to give them core funding so then you can spend some time together to work out, I think we would be in a very different starting position that didn’t feel this antagonistic from the off. 00:32:51

honor: A slide which reads: Look into participatory budgeting and the ladder of citizen participation as more equitable forms of budget distribution. There’s a link to a blog post about this in the podcast description. 00:33:03

Kim: I think there’s some real good theory around this too that no one seems to have heard of. So I can drop some blog links in the chat. I think participatory budgeting has to be the future. The current situation is it’s usually, like, you know, there’s an institution that has a pot. They get an employee to gatekeep the pot, usually through a form that goes to the community but it doesn’t have to be like that either. It is possible to set up a fund and again it’s like a board, so there’s a commitment there. You probably need to pay for people’s attendance. The best funded project work in Hulme came out of this project called Age Friendly Hulme and Moss Side and there was four areas in Manchester that had set up an age friendly board in each of the four neighbourhoods. So this was an actual, like, resident board, but unlike all the other ones, they then gave the other half of the budget for the residents to spend on what they wanted. The striking thing about this again was, most of those projects were completely unfundable through other sources. So it would be things like, you know, the community centre needs a new hob cause, of course they do. Like what possible fund would that have come out of? But without it, like, all this other community activity can’t happen and instead usually what happens is they just get derelict, or like the example with computers earlier, right? There’s probably about four computer labs in, where we live, one of them is always like, well the computers are off the sheets but no one quite knows why. There’s one in the library but you need to like book and have a library card and do all that stuff. Like they’re all in various states of disrepair and again all these digital inclusion things they just want to buy more laptops, or chromebooks is the new solution to everything, right? Again there’s just this lack of willingness to first figure out what your real, on the ground assets are and work from there. 00:34:26

Rachele: There’s another issue, so all the housing associations have built all these cafés with really well stocked kitchens in loads of their buildings but there’s not the revenue for the big traders they wanted in to run the cafés so now these cafés are sitting empty but they’re too big for a community to take over and run themselves. So we’ve got these state of the art kitchens, with about fifty grand of equipment in that no one’s using. Or they’re saying the community can’t use them because they haven’t got level two. Which only costs a tenner and is a three hour, online course, or something to do with insurance. So it’s like, mismanagement of assets and not allowing people who need it to use them. And then the other thing I’d say, which I find really disappointing and I’m not, into these gender issues but I quite often find, you’ll find loads of women doing a lot of free things in the community, or running a lot of these community groups and I never see any men until there’s a paid opportunity. What does that say? And I know that a lot of women care and do a lot more roles outside of their jobs to look after people but I feel like that’s a really sad state of community development that you only see men, normally, if it’s a paid role. 00:35:32

Kim: I’ll just reiterate this too. The only time that trans groups get support from cis people is when there’s a paid role. Oh, all of a sudden, loads of people applying for that. That’s interesting. Basically a lot of these small groups don’t necessarily want funding initially. Institutions are coming to the groups and expecting a thing from them and not doing it that way, so it’s back to front. People aren’t thinking, ‘oh we’re a small org, we can grow, we want funding’, it’s that people want these groups to do project work but they don’t want to give them core funding to be able to engage in that conversation around what the project work is and I found, I don’t know about you Rach, but I’ve had zero contact from any of these third sector support organisations since covid started and in fact they’ve been just another source, to me, of like, here’s the latest form, here’s the latest initiative, here’s the latest loan you can get. 00:36:15

Rachele: I think Salford CBS is really good and Stockport CBS and unfortunately Manchester hasn’t supported it’s social enterprises or charities for the last ten years and lots of people won’t engage. I still personally will engage but a lot of the, like part cafés that were given to charities have been treated really, really badly by the council and there needs to be trust rebuilt. 00:36:39

Kim: Cause I think the other thing is, like, we’ve now learned all this infrastructure and all these names and all these organisations but most people don’t know that. Most people in the community they have no real idea of where these things that are being done to them are coming from. So I think yeah, just to go through these slides then, and we can have a bit of a discussion. 00:36:53

honor: A slide which reads: If you must get us to fill in forms, improve accessibility for application processes. These are very often online, don’t give you questions in advance, too short turnaround, too wordy, too long and clearly written to make the office staff’s life easier, not ours. 00:37:11

Kim: So I think this one we’ve mentioned a lot, like, just with forms, make ‘em short, make ‘em easy, don’t expect us to translate into your language. I think people often are expecting this knowledge of things like impact evaluation and research and being able to express things in terms of like, institutional outcomes but that’s just a whole other load of things you’re expecting people to do on top of all this other stuff they’re doing day to day, right. It’s just not helpful and I think it’s like at some point the institutions have to say what it is that they want to support and then we can write around that but when you’re trying to pitch into the void, as if we’re pitching what brand of coke, you know what I mean? It doesn’t feel good. 00:37:44

honor: A slide which lays out a few different points. These points are: Fiscal hosting vs funding application model. Understanding the difference between mutual aid and charity. (See Dean Spade’s work Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next)). How can we do good work if people aren’t eating properly? Or have an unheated house or no internet? Understand the poverty of people responding to your fund. Solve the basic needs before expecting people to jump through more hoops. And UBI (Universal Basic Income) would solve 90% of on the ground capacity problems and make our lives 100 times easier. 00:38:19

Kim: So just a few final thoughts, on other ways this can go forward. I’ve not really looked into this a huge amount yet but there’s a model in the states that I think we should use more because they have , they don’t have this sort of like, professionalised, middle-class infrastructure for managing grants, like VCSE thing is pretty much there. It tends to be the really big grassroots groups that grow and get off the ground. They then become fiscal hosts for other groups around them. So they will be recognised and then be given things that those groups can then distribute how they want. I think this could be a really good way to work. I would love to see the Taphouse to be given funding to have it’s own fund to give to all the projects you’re trying to get off the ground, right? Because you’re in the perfect place to do it. We’re the same in Geeks for Social Change there’s probably about a dozen projects at any one time that people in our collective are interested in and how it is right now is we have to apply for, we can help people apply for them all individually, but honestly, if someone just gave us a large grant we could dedicate loads of time to helping get a dozen projects off the ground and then give them the precise support they need. Rather than trying to do this massive admin.

This Dean Spade book - Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) is excellent. Its a really tiny book. It doesn’t take long to read. It’s on Verso. He’s also got a load of reading on his website, if you want to look up Dean Spade, they’re very recommended. I think it really sums up the difference between the mutual aid and charity models.

I think this is something Rach said earlier but, sometimes you need to deal with the prerequisite step before you can deal with the latest hype thing. So like, how can we do work, or do projects if people aren’t eating? Or they’re not heating their house? Or they don’t have internet and a lot of the times this is just directly blocking people from being able to engage in any of these things we were talking about. So I think sometimes stuff gets really ahead of itself and we need to backtrack a bit.

main

And then finally just to say it again, this is more of a national campaign, I know none of us have the control here but ironically, during lockdown, when we had the furlough scheme, which said that anyone who has got an office job can maintain their salary because they somehow deserve more money than other people, we had the kickstarter scheme but just allowing institutions to get workers in to help out, it’s amazing, you can just get things done. You just have hours to apply to problems and you don’t have to think about it and because most of this work we’re doing is work we want to do anyway, that they’re already doing for free, but that makes it perpetually unsustainable. So if we had a Universal Basic Income, I think that would have the single biggest health impact of anything else I can imagine on a policy level. I mean, I don’t think the tories are probably gonna do it but, there you go. 00:40:34

Outro music 00:40:38

honor: And that concludes this episode of the Geeks for Social Change Podcast. Thank you very much for listening. If you’d like to find out more about what we do, head to our website, which is at gfsc.studio. You can also join our Discord community, sign up to our mailing list or follow our blog via RSS to stay up to date. If you’d like to contribute financially to help us keep going, we’re on Ko-Fi and Open Collective, all of which are linked both in the podcast description and on our website.

If you enjoyed this episode do share it on social media with the hashtag #startwithpeople and tag us @gfscstudio on twitter and Instagram and @gfsc@social.gfsc.studio on the fediverse, which includes Mastodon. 00:41:16

Outro music 00:41:28

RAFTT design diary #2

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a few months since I last wrote about RAFTT — the local history project we have been working on with a housing association in Oldham.

As a quick recap, RAFTT stands for ‘Rise and Fall of Two Towers’. The two towers referred to are Crossbank House and Summervale house — two iconic housing blocks which were situated on the western edge of Oldham. During the course of our research, these were often referred to as ‘the gateway to Oldham’, which sort of sums up their importance to the local and wider community. They were a wayfinding tool, a welcome, an unavoidable feature of the landscape, ever since they were built in 1975.

First Choice Homes Oldham (FCHO), the housing association who have managed and run the towers since 2011 made the decision in 2018 that the towers needed to be demolished. They were no longer fit for purpose, and it was felt that the local people would be better served by lower density, non-high-rise, family housing to be built in their place.

And so, in early 2021, the demolition of the towers commenced. However, FCHO recognised the significant place that the towers might well hold in the hearts of the local residents, and wanted to find a way of exploring and documenting that — both to commemorate the towers, and to engage with their residents and the surrounding community. GFSC worked with them to apply for funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, so that together, we could build a hyperlocal digital history project focussing on the towers.

I am continuing to refer to the project as RAFTT in the title of this blog for clarity and continuity, but since I last wrote, FCHO have decided to change the name of the project, and it is now titled: “The Towers: A history of Summervale and Crossbank”.

The aims of the project

The aims of the project were twofold —

to create a digital space that tells the story of the towers, their residents, and the close surrounding area, and
to involve local residents in the project in ways which would increase and develop their own digital skills.

Firstly, we have always been imagining some kind of stimulating and easy to explore online archive containing old images, news stories, and — most importantly of all, first-hand stories, anecdotes and memories from people who actually lived in or near the towers. Local storytellers have first-hand verbal histories, which can so often be lost if specific efforts aren’t made to gather them.

Our original goal was that we would be able to support some of these storytellers to learn digital skills that would — in the first instance, aid them in telling us their stories (and get their stories into a digital form so that they are storied and documented for posterity) — and in the longer term, generally be useful to them in their day-to-day lives.

Some concrete examples of this might include:

Using a word processor to write down their memories
Using a voice-note tool on their phones to record verbal stories
Scanning old photos and other artefacts, and learning how to safely file and store them digitally
(For more advanced folks) using basic photo editing tools to enhance their old photos.

And other similar tasks.

The project progress to date

As mentioned in the ‘gathering data’ section of the previous blog, the plan was for FCHO — using their in-depth local knowledge of their residents and the area — to identify a number of potential storytellers, meet and interview them, and use some of the (limited) archival materials which the council holds on the area as talking points. These materials include things like old photos and news stories, which can help elicit stories and memories from residents. FCHO would also organise and facilitate relevant digital skills workshops with those participants who would be interested in learning more.

Sadly, neither of these areas have gone as well as we might have hoped.

Some of the greatest challenges that FCHO have faced in their search for storytellers are data protection issues. Data protection laws of course exist for a reason, and GDPR regulations mean that people’s data cannot be used for purposes that they have not explicitly consented. This meant that FCHO have been unable to access records of, let alone directly reach out to, any former residents of the towers — and have instead had to rely on community outreach to try and draw in former residents to get involved with the project. This has had fairly limited success.

Based on the original plans drawn up, GFSC have had limited involvement with this ‘data gathering’ phase of the project, and have sat more as interested/concerned onlookers to this process.

FCHO have tried a number of community outreach efforts, including poster and flyer campaigns, community events about the project (perhaps the most successful), as well as one-to-one conversations with people they meet during the course of their work to try and spread the word, but they have still struggled to identify many former residents of the towers, let alone those willing to ‘storytell’ for the project.

The towers stood from 1975 – 2021, and each of them contained over 100 flats. While of course many former residents will have moved well beyond the area, many will most likely remain… Our great frustration has been — why aren’t we reaching any of them, and/or why aren’t any of them willing to get involved with the project?

Through our own research, we found a wealth of more general Oldham history/nostalgia content online — in places like Facebook Groups, and the comments on relevant Youtube videos. There are a significant number of people out there who are actively interested in, and engaged with, the history of Oldham (including our specific area). The comments thread on the demolition video I shared above was a particular eye-opener. Comments included:

“One of my school friends lived in crossbank house in the 80’s, it would of been about 12 years old then and it looked old, I remember them replacing all the windows with upcv ones.”

“my sister lived there in the 80s”

“Lived on the 6th floor in summervale for a short period 20yrs ago.”

All these people — why can’t we reach them? (And again, for GDPR reasons, FCHO weren’t able to, for example, reach out directly to them off the back of these kinds of comments, and in Facebook groups that were identified).

We flagged that a lot of the discourse and interest in the history of this area was happening in these very particular online spaces, and suggested that FCHO (or representatives of) join these communities, to share the project and its goals, and to try and see if people would like to share their stories in a way that would contribute to this exciting local history project — but unfortunately FCHO had a lot of internal permissions hoops to jump through which meant this didn’t happen until very late on in the process, and when it did, it was much less proactive than it could have been.

I talked a little bit with others in the GFSC collective about an appropriate analogy here, and we agreed that it’s a bit like hosting a house party, not directly inviting anyone, but still hoping people will show up. Some situations need that proactive inviting process for potential ‘guests’. Even if not everyone who is directly reached out to actually shows up, on the whole people are much more likely to get involved with research, voluntary opportunities, and other unpaid but potentially rewarding projects when they are directly asked, rather than when they need to reach out to the organisers themselves. (Being invited vs. inviting oneself — I know which is more appealing to me!) For a wide range of reasons (many documented above) FCHO were not able to be proactive in this way, and were instead relying on people coming to them, which was not as successful.

I mentioned in our previous blog that the wonderful Colleen Morgan (part of the Anarchist Archaeologist Black Trowel Collective) recruited University of York Cultural Heritage Management MA student Sam Benbow to assist us and FCHO in the data gathering stage of this project, and to make it the focus of her MA. Her MA dissertation[1] has turned into a bit of a ‘why do these kinds of projects sometimes struggle to recruit participants’ analysis, and it was fascinating to read her thoughts. It helped inform our key findings, which are below.

Why do these kinds of local history projects sometimes struggle to recruit participants?

As evidenced in the various online channels mentioned above — people LOVE to tell their stories, share memories, and compare notes with other people who might have shared life experiences. The goal of this project was to facilitate that, and start to share these stories in a way that even more people can enjoy and learn from. If people love to talk about their own stories — why don’t they want to share them with us?

We started to drill down a bit into the key issues:

1) You can’t find the people you want

a) They are not geographically where you expected them to be
b) They are not in the engagement spaces where you expected them to be

2) The people you want don’t actually exist

a) They are all dead (from old age or some tragedy that may relate to your project)
b) The ‘community’ you have defined doesn’t actually exist

3) The people you want don’t want to engage with you

a) because they feel they have no time (what the project is asking is too great a commitment, or appears that it might be)
b) because they are not interested in the project
c) because they don’t like and/or trust whoever’s running the project
d) because they don’t understand the project and/or the project doesn’t reflect what they see as reality
e) because they would expect financial remuneration for their time, or some other more tangible reward

4) You’re not actually allowed to contact the people you want, even if you’re available to identify them

a) because GDPR or other legislation prohibits the use of their contact information for that purpose
b) because works were not done to proactively reach individuals at times when when it has been appropriate to use their information in this manner

To consider some of these potential challenges in more depth:

1a) We had hoped that a significant proportion of former residents from the towers over the years would have stayed in the area. But perhaps this simply isn’t the case to the extent we had imagined? Particularly at the end of the towers life, there may not have been enough local housing for the residents to stay in very close proximity to the towers, and so they may have simply moved outside the radius of the on-the-ground outreach FCHO have been doing.

1b) As described above, we had to face the possibility that our project simply wasn’t reaching the right people. Despite being shared in the local newspapers, poster campaigns, word of mouth, local events and so on — did it reach those enthusiastic youtube and facebook nostalgia sharers? Possibly not. It is a real shame that FCHO weren’t able to reach out more directly on those platforms — in the exact spaces where people go to intentionally share exactly the kind of content we were looking for.

2a) The area which the project focusses on is a deprived area with many challenges, including lower life expectancies and more risks to health like drug use and crime. That said, the towers were only demolished in 2021, and many children and younger people will have lived in them throughout their life. There should still be a large group of former residents who are still alive and well, they are simply, as mentioned above, distributed or hard to reach.

2b) For some time at the start of the project we struggled a bit to define exactly what community was being explored in the project. Is it JUST about the towers, or is it also about the surrounding area? If the latter, how do we define the edges of that surrounding area? What is the cut off point? Are we trying to create a ‘community’ that doesn’t exist? At one point it was suggested to simply draw a half mile radius around the towers and for that to be the area of consideration — but that isn’t how real communities and connections exist! For example, on one side of the towers, the community is cut off by the large overpass roads that mean social connections on either side of that road are much weaker. But on the other side, housing that extends beyond half a mile in another direction might have much closer social and emotional ties to the towers. Ultimately, given our challenge to recruit storytellers, we have kept the geographic framing of the project intentionally vague, which isn’t ideal, but does keep our options a bit more open in terms of involvement.

3c) We had to face the possibility that, for better or for worse, FCHO may not be a well loved entity by many in the area. It is inevitable that any body which operates from a position of power (which housing authorities undoubtedly do), will come under scrutiny, and criticism, from those who are subject to, or who observe that power. Regardless of whether FCHO are a well run and managed entity or not, they are ‘the man’, and many people may not want to engage with ‘the man’, regardless of how worthy or interesting the project might be. Would we have had better results if we had been able to frame the project as being facilitated by another source (for example, a research project by a local university, or a more community led research project?) — we will never know, but it is a possibility.

3d) Another interesting issue that emerged from Sam’s conversations and research was the dissonance between the stated goals of the project and the reality of the area concerned. The project is meant to be a ‘celebration’ of the history of the towers and local area — but the reality is that this part of Oldham has a long history of challenges and deprivation, and many of the stories that centre around the towers are quite dark. Take for example, the murder of Debbie Remorozo in her flat in 2002, or the fact that one of the ‘penthouse’ top floor flats was for years occupied by one of Manchester’s most notorious drug barons before he was sent to prison for multiple murders and other crimes. Perhaps the contrast between the upbeat tone of the project’s promotional materials, and most local people’s knowledge of some of the lived realities of the area were too contrasting to square.

4b) As Sam uncovered, ‘FHCO had not asked to keep the residents updated about the future of the flats when they were doing consultations and moving out (Benbow, 2022 p.66). This lack of foresight meant that many residents who were able to be identified, weren’t able to be contacted for inclusion in this project as they’d not explicitly given their consent under GDPR. It was suggested that ’this was likely in part because FCHO were unsure whether they would get the funding. The lack of confidence implies that more could be done by funders […] to make heritage projects become accessible as it is much harder for a “lasting difference” (Heritage Fund 2019, 13) to be made if the organisations they are hoping to support are unconfident in being granted the funding.’ (ibid.)

But, moving forwards…

It’s not all bad news

We do have some storytellers. FCHO’s community events and other initiatives over the last few months have welcomed a small number of people who were excited about the project and willing to share with us, albeit not as many as we might have hoped for. (Another issue is that none of them were especially interested in the ‘digital skills’ side of the project, which would probably take a whole ‘nother blog to discuss. FCHO are hitting this funding criteria by instead running digital skills workshops with other groups of residents who are interested in learning more digital basics, but are unrelated to the towers and the storytelling aspect of the project).

These people have shared their stories, verbally and/or in writing, and after one final push with one last event in late 2022, as well as a workshop with our already recruited storytellers to facilitate more memory sharing, GFSC is cracking on with the task of actually figuring out the shape of the final outcome, based on the source material we have to work with. The site will be going live, and shared with the public, at the end of May!

The process of getting to this point has been so interesting, as well as challenging. The insights we’ve gained along the way will go on to inform our approach to future projects.

Benbow, S. (2022). An evaluation of community heritage projects to consider how successful they are at achieving their aims [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of York

UnTechCon

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

UnTechCon 1 was our first un-tech un-conference. It took place on our community Discord server on December 10th 2022.

As well as being a studio, GFSC is also a collective. The collective is made up of a diverse range of practitioners from many fields, with a shared interest in working towards positive and collaborative social change. Our focus is on helping each other to create socially impactful and useful tools for a better society, and having conversations about how tech can shape this work. The collective has moved through many phases, from a book group, to a discord, to active fortnightly meetings, and has spawned a variety of collaborative projects. During the pandemic, the collective struggled — as many other groups and organisations did — to maintain momentum and focus. Latterly, these exciting conversations have started to happen again, and it was in the collective that the idea of hosting UnTechCon was first floated.

What is an UnConference?

An unconference is a conference where there’s no preset agenda or speaker list under a loose overall theme. The lines between attendee and speaker are blurred and all attendees are encouraged to give talks, lead discussions, run workshops, etc, with the schedule open for anyone to place their own thing in. Attendees are also welcome to just listen if that’s their jam, too.

What does UnTech mean?

We don’t really know! We just found that anti-technology wasn’t quite right as a lot of us really do like technology - just not when it’s owned by global megacorporations to do evil things. UnTech therefore leaves the door open for creative interpretation whilst letting us be critical of how it’s used in the world today.

We documented the talks using detailed note-taking, and created a zine which has key takeaways from all of the talks, as well as references and a thematic diagram showing the crossovers between all of the emerging conversations we had in the space. The zine is available as a PDF download, a print edition (distributed through PenFight) or to read in plain text.

Join our development team!

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We at Geeks for Social Change are looking for a developer to join our team. We’re a small predominantly trans, disabled, and neurodiverse studio trying to make a fairer society using activism, technology, and research. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things. Our big thing is about Community Technology Partnerships, working directly with communities to co-create solutions to the challenges they’re facing. Have a look at our website to understand more about who we are and what we do.

The role

We’re looking for someone with some prior experience working as a software developer. You’d need to be a confident enough programmer to be able to start from a vague bug report or feature request, turn that into a ticket, pick up that ticket, do nearly all of the development involved in that ticket on your own, making small decisions as you go, and see your work through to deployment and release. You wouldn’t always do all the parts of that process, but you would need to be able to do any part of it, often picking up from where someone else left off. You do code review as part of your normal practice, not as a gatekeeping process but as part of working collaboratively with your team. Ideally, you’d also be comfortable helping to work out what we’re doing, taking an active role in planning.

We primarily use three different technology stacks depending on the context of what we’re doing.

If we’re building a complex application where we want server-side features we usually reach for Ruby on Rails.
If we’re building a client-side application that relies on existing APIs (ours or others) we use Elm.
If all we need is a static content-rich website, we use Hugo.

We’re not constrained to just these stacks, but they are our defaults and what you’d be working with most of the time, so you’d need to already either be comfortable using Ruby on Rails to build complex applications or be able to turn designs into web pages using frontend technologies including accessible semantic HTML and CSS. As part of a small team, you’d also need to be interested in learning new technologies (those listed and others) as needed according to the current focus of work.

The offer

As a studio, our full-time week is 6 hours per day, 4 days per week (so 24 hours per week), and many of us work part-time or alongside other jobs. We all work from home and are based in the UK. For this role, we would need someone working remotely able to work at least 3 days per week (though that doesn’t mean you’d have to work a full day on all of those days if that’s not what you want) and we’re happy to work around other commitments you might have or make adjustments you might need.

The annual salary for someone working full-time (24 hours per week) in this role would be £28,000 with 24 days of holiday per year plus UK bank holidays, prorated for part-time working if applicable. We have a company pension scheme with up to 5% matching contribution from Geeks for Social Change. We plan to review and improve our benefits in the new year.

As a small studio funded by charity clients and philanthropic funding, we’re not interested in the usual capitalist growth at all costs model seen in the tech industry. We set our salaries according to the rates we charge (and vice versa) and we’re transparent about what everyone earns internally. We are continually working to dismantle and work without hierarchies and we’re in the process of working out if and how to become a worker-owned cooperative. So you’d join a team working towards more horizontal management with a high degree of autonomy and the responsibility that comes with that.

How to apply

If this sounds like an interesting opportunity for you, please send an application to jobs@gfsc.studio with the subject line “Developer application”. Please include a couple of paragraphs about what interests you about working at Geeks for Social Change and why you think you’d be a good fit. Don’t worry about making it perfect - we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person. If you’re able to also include some links to source code in the wild that you worked on, that would be great, but we understand that not everyone has open source software they can share, and if you sound like you could be a good fit, we’ll find another way for you to show us your skills. We know that CVs encourage bias and don’t generally tell us very much about you or your skills, but if you feel like it would help you show us who you are, then we’re happy to receive one.

Please also let us know in your email if you have any access needs and we’ll do what we can to accommodate them.

The deadline for applications is 11:00 on 16 January 2023.

If you have any questions about the role or who we are, or if you’re not sure if you’re the right fit and want to talk it through, please reach out to F (f@gfsc.studio) or Katja (katja@gfsc.studio) and we’d love to chat.

please note gfsc are on winter break now until January. We will respond to any messages then, thankyou for your interest!

We’re looking for someone good with words!

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We at Geeks for Social Change are looking for a writer or content designer to join our team. We’re a small predominantly trans, disabled, and neurodiverse studio trying to make a fairer society using activism, technology, and research. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things. Our big thing is about Community Technology Partnerships, working directly with communities to co-create solutions to the challenges they’re facing. Have a look at our website to understand more about who we are and what we do.

The role

We’re looking for someone to help us communicate more effectively about what we do and why. There are two angles this could take, but we wouldn’t need you to be able to do both.

One option would be publishing focused. Your work might include helping write bids for funding, posting on social media, writing articles or blog posts, creating zine content, or any number of other word-centred activities. You wouldn’t need to have done all of those things before, but you’d be interested in doing some combination of them most days.

Alternatively, the work might lean more towards more content design for web services. You’d have experience designing accessible content that’s easy to understand, clear, and consistent and working with developers and other designers to deliver it. You’d have worked directly on static site content using Markdown before and know a little about using version control software like Git (no need to be an expert, though).

These are two options for what this role might look like, but we’d also be open to other interpretations, so don’t feel constrained to them if you can see another way you could work with us.

The offer

As a studio, our full-time week is 6 hours per day, 4 days per week (so 24 hours per week), and many of us work part-time or alongside other jobs. We all work from home and are based in the UK. For this role, we’re ideally looking for someone working remotely in for around 12 to 18 hours per week, but can be flexible for the right person. We’re happy to work around other commitments you might have or make adjustments you might need.

How to apply

If this sounds like an interesting opportunity for you, please send an application to jobs@gfsc.studio with the subject line “Writer / content designer application”. Please include a couple of paragraphs about what interests you about working at Geeks for Social Change and why you think you’d be a good fit. Don’t worry about making it perfect - we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person. If you’re able to also include some links to your writing in the wild, that would be great, but it’s ok if you don’t have anything to share. We know that CVs encourage bias and don’t generally tell us very much about you or your skills, but if you feel like it would help you show us who you are, then we’re happy to receive one.

Please also let us know in your email if you have any access needs and we’ll do what we can to accommodate them.

The deadline for applications is 11:00 on 16 January 2023.

please note gfsc are on winter break now until January. We will respond to any messages then, thankyou for your interest!

UnTechCon 1 FAQ

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are a research and tech studio, who are interested in the gnarly challenges that present themselves where real-world, grassroots communities and technology collide. Our work began in Hulme, Manchester, but we now work across the UK with structurally disadvantaged groups.

Our practice is rooted in community organising and development — projects centred around fighting state violence, supporting trans rights, widening accessibility, combating environmental harms, and exploring untold community histories (amongst many other things) are what get us excited.

Our approach differs from a lot of purported ’tech for good’, in that we strive to be rooted in the communities we work with — and we do the work with, not just for them.

Why are we using Discord?

We use Discord to run our day to day studio operations, and it’s also where the Collective meets and chats — we are hosting here at the request of the Collective. A lot of people are using it locally, and we are invested in being where people actually are, rather than where we wish they were.

Crucially, it works really well and has a lot of nice features for this kind of event. It also means we’re able to lean on the experience of other organisers who have run these kinds of events. Ultimately, we are keen to minimise effort spent on tech so that we can concentrate on providing the best possible experience and content for attendees.

It’s also worth noting that Discord has pretty great accessibility features, which is an aspect of the event that’s really important to us.

Why are we not using `<insert software>`?

We absolutely hear all the arguments for why Discord is not the best place for a conference about questioning and challenging big tech. However, for all of the reasons mentioned above, we feel that Discord is the right place for this first event.

The conversations we’ve been having there have been feeling increasingly vital and important in the current times we live in, and we decided we wanted to have the conference sooner rather than later in order to get this stuff out there, rather than potentially tinkering internally for another 6 months trying to find another viable space in which to host.

Part of the challenge is that we don’t even know what alternative we would use. We are pro open source but find the options for video-streaming very limited, and the technicality of many alternatives would put off a lot of our target audience (which is communities in Greater Manchester and the UK, not FLOSS communities).

That said, we are currently looking into other options for future events, including a presence in the Fediverse, but this is what’s worked best for us so far, despite all its flaws.

We know this answer probably won’t be good enough for some folks who are interested in this event, but we would like to assure you that we hope this event will be the first of many, and we don’t imagine they will be on Discord forever.

We absolutely welcome suggestions for the hosting of subsequent events in different spaces, so if you have any expertise in running anything like this, please reach out to us and share your experience (or even do a talk about it :)

What accessibility features will there be?

There will be speech to text transcription for talks via the SeaVoice Discord Bot.

Discord also has some great accessibility features, including support for screen-readers, text scaling, keyboard navigation and more.

Please let us know if you are planning to attend and have any other requirements, and we will do our best to provide the support you need.

Will sessions be recorded?

This unconference will not be recorded. This kind of event is specifically designed to welcome a wide variety of people, including those who might be anxious about speaking, or have done limited preparation for their sessions. This is the fun of it! Recording such sessions could put people off contributing, so we want to keep the event as welcoming and low-key for speakers as possible.

We hope as many of you as possible will be able to join us live on the day, this will also contribute to making the event a more fun place to be!

I’m having trouble making a Discord account, what do I do?

Oh no! We’re really sorry to hear this. Discord can be a little heavy handed with its initial moderation of newly created accounts. If you are struggling to get set up, please reach out to us by email, and we will try and help you troubleshoot!

What kind of talks are you looking for?

We are pretty open minded about any talk which falls within the broad themes the conference addresses. We listed some concepts on our flyer to act as inspiration, those were:

If in doubt, reach out to us with your idea before the event, and we’ll let you know if it fits (the answer will almost certainly be yes!)

We’re particularly keen to hear case-studies of things you’ve actually done. We don’t really want straight-up sales pitches though, and neither do most of our audience for this event. The way we want to hear about your specific project is in the context of a genuine case study of your work, which explores topics that the unconference is addressing in a meaningful way. Case studies: Yes! Pitches: No.

How will it work on the day?

It’s an unconference so anything could happen, but we’ve outlined some details in Information for Attendees including Eventbrite sign up page, schedule, code of conduct etc.

Announcing: UnTechCon 1!

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For some time now, we’ve been trying to figure out how to bring some of the exciting conversations that happen between the Geeks for Social Change Collective and our friends and collaborators to a wider audience.

About 18 months ago we set up a Discord server (which you should absolutely join btw!) as a space for people to start formulating and discussing thoughts around some of the messy, complex, fascinating, sometimes horrifying edges where tech meets community meets abolitionist-anarcho-trans-feminist politics meets the increasingly exploitative and dysfunctional world we live in today.

In pre-Covid times we ran an ethics and technology reading group, for which the discord became the spiritual successor (we still really need to do a writeup of some of this). An optimistic but realistic space where anyone who’s interested in these intersections can come to plot, scheme, ideate, and collaborate.

We’ve recently been feeling that we’d love to host a more open space to have these conversations with a wider audience, so with that in mind, we’re super excited to announce…

UnTechCon!

UnTechCon is a one-day unconference about creating community digital autonomy, challenging big tech, and creating a future worth living in.

Information for Attendees including Eventbrite sign up page, schedule, code of conduct, FAQS etc. We can’t wait to see you there!

The conference will be held on the GFSC Discord Server on Sat 10th December, 11-5. Register on Eventbrite.

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is a conference where there’s no preset agenda or speaker list, under a loose overall theme. The lines between attendee and speaker are blurred and all attendees are encouraged to give talks, lead discussions, run workshops, etc, with the schedule open for anyone to place their own thing in. You’re also welcome to come and just listen if that’s your jam, too.

We felt that this format would offer the most exciting and accessible space possible for what we’re trying to do here. It lowers the bar to both entry and participation, by offering a dip-in/dip-out style event where hopefully any attendee might feel able to host their own thing.

And what about ‘untech’?

We opted for ‘untechnology’ rather than ‘anti-technology’, because actually a lot of us really do like technology — just not when it’s owned by global megacorporations to do evil things. UnTech therefore leaves the door open for creative interpretation whilst letting us be critical of how it’s used in the world today. Maybe we can come up with a better term on the day?

Come join us!

All you need to do to join is sign up on Eventbrite. We will have a separate area of our Discord server set up for the conference to keep it nice and intimate — so everyone needs to register, even our regs.

All you need to do is show up! We actively encourage lack of preparation — the best talks are often spontaneous and unprepared.

We hope to have conference software set up to manage the talks and make sure that there aren’t too many things happening at once so everyone gets heard.

If you’re unfamiliar with Discord we are happy to help get you set up - drop Emma an email and we will be in touch. You can join the server whenever you like.

Want inspiration? We’ve put together this nebulous list of potential topics that might be covered — we’re especially keen to hear case studies of things you’ve actually done!

Possible topics

Here’s a list of some concepts to get the creative juices flowing. A special note that we are especially keen to hear case studies of things you’ve actually done!

How much does it cost?

UnTechCon is free if you want it to be. As we build creative interpretations for the future of UnTech we’re also engaged with rebalancing the economies that have fuelled and funded tech monopolies. That said, we also want to resist funder-led models that rely entirely on grants to support liberatory tech so if you have the means we would welcome your financial support. If you come and feel moved to donate after, you can also do so on Ko-Fi or OpenCollective, or through a bank transfer (we will share our details nearer the time).

We suggest £0 for unemployed or minimum wage workers or anyone who wouldn’t come if they had to pay, £3 for low waged, £10 for higher waged, and £100 if it’s coming out your work conference allowance anyway 😎. Anything left after covering our costs will go into our (currently dormant) OpenCollective account to fund future projects.

Hope to see you there!

Still have more questions?

Check out our FAQ or get in touch!

Creating a national network of Community Technology Partnerships

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’re delighted to announce that Geeks for Social Change, working in an ambitious partnership with C2 Connecting Communities, Manchester School of Architecture, The Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, and half a dozen friends and allies, have collectively won £220,000 from The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

This funding, from the Growing Great Ideas programme, will help establish a national network of Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs), which we hope will revolutionise the relationships between people, place, technology and culture.

Anyone who’s been following our work for a while might have heard us talk about this concept, which we originally mooted in 2017 and published a journal paper on in 2020, following us winning two major awards for our work on the PlaceCal platform.

This article explores what a CTP is, what this initiative is all about, and how it differs from other approaches to these topics. We’ll explore what we’re hoping to do with this award over the next couple of years, and how you can get involved.

What is a Community Technology Partnership (CTP)?

In real life we know that people help other people in their communities all the time.

But this doesn’t happen in the same way on the internet, where tech giants like Facebook have designed their systems to harvest data and generate profit. The online world is shaped by an imbalance of power and driven by a profit motive which is at odds with the work being done all over the UK by grass roots community organisations.

What we want to do

Our dream is of a network, or ecosystem, of local partnerships across the UK where communities can share the problems that they want to address, and we can work with them to co-create digital solutions to help achieve their goals.

All over the UK there are local groups who want to improve their communities — for example, by clearing up the streets; reducing loneliness; welcoming refugees; making spaces safer after dark; or a million other community inspired and community led ideas.

For too long, disadvantaged communities have been seen as ‘the problem’ - when we know in fact that they understand the issues they want to address better than anyone else.

“Disadvantaged communities and their people are not the problem – they are the solution”

– Hazel Stuteley OBE (Chair C2 Connecting Communities)

GFSC have an established track-record of helping communities transform themselves and their environments by developing digital solutions to support community action. However, there needs to be a step-change in supporting the digital autonomy of local communities. We need to build momentum.

Here’s some examples of our work locally:

PlaceCal. Older people in Manchester said they were lonely, isolated and had nothing to do. On investigation, it was found that there were actually lots of activities for older people ranging from yoga to knitting to IT and language classes. The challenge was finding out about these activities. We worked in partnership with the Age Friendly Hulme and Moss Side to develop a solution, an online calendar called PlaceCal which is owned and populated by community groups. It’s simple to use and no log in details are required. This software was recognised internationally as outstanding, winning second place in the 2018 AAL Smart Ageing prize.
Taphouse TV Dinners. During lockdown, a small group of people in Hulme, Manchester became concerned about local residents who didn’t have access to, or couldn’t afford cooked meals. This particularly applied to older people who lived alone but also anyone else who was struggling. We helped them to set up Taphouse TV Dinners, a volunteer led project which supplied free or subsidised meals to people who wanted them and also reduced local food waste. We set up a website to connect people who wanted meals with volunteers and supermarkets with excess food. This has now delivered over 5,000 meals directly to residents with no support from local government or institutions.
‘imok’ (or “I’m OK”) is a simple bot designed to support people undertaking potentially risky activities. It was designed in partnership with No Borders Manchester to protect asylum seekers who have to ‘check in’ at a Reporting Centre, with the knowledge that at any point they may be detained and taken to the airport for extradition with no way of informing friends or family. Originally, No Borders volunteers accompanied asylum seekers to every check in, but this was unsustainable. We worked with them to develop ‘imok’. In the event that someone fails to check out from the Reporting Centre within a reasonable amount of time, volunteers can mobilise quickly. The bot can also be useful to support protestors at risk of arrest, women and LGBTQ+ people walking home at night or going on dates, emergency workers in dangerous situations, and potentially even more applications.

How will it work in practice?

In each community, we will help establish a partnership between local tech experts and community organisers.

Together, these partnerships will create a culture that breaks down the currently insurmountable barriers between community organising and tech development, so that people are able to work together to identify and overcome shared problems. Our team will help develop creative digital solutions which will then be owned and managed by the community.

We will take a collaborative approach by sharing solutions, using open source software so that communities can build on one another’s success by using the digital tools which have been developed or by repurposing them. In this way communities will be empowered to understand and engage in every aspect of tech creation, rather than being extractively consulted when it’s already too late for input.

Why not just use existing technology?

This isn’t an either/or thing — we are committed to working with what people already have.

We know that thousands of community groups use Facebook, WhatsApp and Google to organise, communicate and publicise events. They use these apps because they currently have no choice. These tools will be community organising mainstays for a long time — our goal is to give people choice, education, and digital autonomy.

At the moment the tech industry is focussed on making privatised tools (often ‘cloud’ services run for profit) where the whole business model is about restricting access to the tool and extracting data from people without their knowledge.

We want to disrupt existing power structures by developing a manifesto to get back to a more kind, community-oriented tech culture, like the internet of a lot of our childhoods. To do this we will work with communities and neighbourhoods to co-create new digital tools, resources, ideas, capacity, inspiration, and connections.

We believe that if people had more of a choice, they would organise tech differently and more inclusively. They would prefer things that don’t require a log in unless necessary, that don’t sell anyone’s data, that have been designed with the community in mind, that are non-profit, community owned and hosted locally. And they certainly wouldn’t be having to ‘pivot to video’ to get their groups to show up on social media. They would spend more time learning how to use things they already have, and adapting them to their needs. Perhaps most of all, they would be finding ways to use less time and less technology to get the same job done with less effort, giving them more time to spend on actually caring for each other.

We want to change the idea of technology from being about ‘apps’ made by mega corporations, to thinking about the hundreds of small activities people do every week, and helping each other find creative ways to overcome them. We want to make it easier to talk about, adapt and commission software. We want communities to have the language to force tech creators to centre community needs and advocate for themselves, as well as critically evaluate their existing tools.

Our work will create a transformational network of communities where people share solutions for the benefit of all. The network will share ideas and solutions which can be accessed online, reused and repurposed by other organisations. In this way, disadvantaged communities will create an open source library of digital solutions, ideas, skills, knowledge and case studies which is available to communities across the UK. By pooling resources we can develop software which it wouldn’t be easy to make individually. We can establish community data trusts on co-owned hardware and software that is transparently owned in the public interest — again, very hard for communities to do individually.

Our goal is not to harvest clicks on a website or installs of an app, which is how most technology organisations work. Our goal is to build a thriving empowered community where people have the information and skills they need to live happy and healthy lives.

How do we differ from existing ‘digital inclusion’ approaches?

Digital exclusion has possibly never been worse in the UK. Despite enormous spends on the concept at every level of government, and the increasing insistence that we live in a connected, digital world, these benefits are simply not felt in many communities. Where I live in Hulme, there are community centres that don’t have proper WiFi not half a kilometre from buildings that we are told are the most ‘high tech’ in Manchester with 100GB upload speeds.

The underlying logic seems to be we need a kind of ’trickle down’ digital economy, and that simply by having huge companies and providers and initiatives, these benefits will be felt by the most structurally marginalised. But just like the real trickle down economy, it’s a neo-liberal myth with no basis in reality. In fact the reverse happens: digital exclusion increases as each new tech fad comes and goes, and each new initiative suddenly demands more of people, creating a further gap between the tech-haves and tech-have-nots.

This means that life is harder than it’s ever been for most regular people trying to start a nice community group. Somehow the array of tools and takeover of digital is bigger than ever, and yet the country is perhaps the most unequal it’s been in our lifetimes.

We’re already hearing about both a mass exodus from Facebook, as it increasingly doesn’t do what community groups need, as well as a general dip in community organising following two long years of Covid-19. More than ever, people need to come together in real life, and yet do not have suitable tools to do this. Only by tackling both together, in an embedded and networked community of passionate people, can we have any hope of solving both digital exclusion and social inclusion.

Digital inclusion programmes usually focus on addressing skills barriers to access existing systems. Often, face-to-face services are quickly and poorly replaced with online or digital services as a cost-saving measure by both public and private sector, bringing with it a raft of ‘Key Performance Indicators’ which are more about surveillance than support. People’s inability to use these badly designed tools is then dismissed as ‘digital exclusion’, with the suggestion that the barrier to entry is one of cost, education, or interest. Digital exclusion is just exclusion, and in a modern computer-controlled age, there is no meaningful separation between the social and digital.

This results in nonsensical policy objectives like "[Making] Greater Manchester a 100% digitally-enabled city region". Does this mean that we won’t rest until every grandma in the city is playing Fortnite? Or that children need to be taught about Bitcoin in schools? (Actually, please don’t answer that). Not everyone needs every digital skill just as not everyone needs to learn to wire up a house, fly a plane, publish a magazine, or perform open heart surgery. What’s important is that together, in communities and through our public services, we can get support for these things collectively.

It’s not that we don’t think digital inclusion has it’s place. It’s just that without defining what it is people are being excluded from, and who or what is doing the excluding, the real causes of the harm are obscured. A common refrain is people saying something like “But I’m not a tech person!”, even though almost everyone’s work and social life is now accessed in large part through computer systems — from checking emails, to using digital calendars and messaging apps, photo sharing, and finding out information.

Community Technology Partnerships will readdress this power balance and let people decide what’s important to them. You can read more about our approach in our journal article.

The Partnership

We have set up a dedicated non-profit — Place Health Technology CIC — to own and deliver this work.

This CIC is in the process of figuring out what collective ownership looks like between GFSC, Manchester School of Architecture, C2 Connecting Communities and The Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health.

Thanks to the National Lottery funding we’ve hired three wonderful people to work on this project, each two days a week. They are:

David Hayward, project manager. David also organises Feral Vector, where he makes videogame developers do non-digital stuff and go outside. His background includes running hackspaces, community events, and commercial events.
Rachele Evaroa, community organiser for North of England. Rachele is the landlady of the Old Abbey Taphouse, and was recently voted the most eccentric landlady in the UK.
Coral Freeman, community organiser for South of England. Coral founded Idle Games Club, a Community Games Lounge located in South Devon, and is also the Volunteer Co-ordinator at Torbay Domestic Abuse Service.

The project is currently three months in and we are discovering so much already about how, why and where tech is failing people locally.

We look forward to sharing our progress with you as we go!

The Rise and Fall of Facebook Events

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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In the early days of Facebook, the Events feature was the bedrock of a lot of community organising. It was free, all your friends were on it, and it worked well. Events you were organising showed up right in the stream of pokes, icanhazcheezburger and failblog memes, and commenting on your friends’ “it’s complicated” relationship updates.

Fast forward a decade and it barely works. Facebook’s insistence on video content, the effective closure of their APIs for community groups, and increasingly exploitative business model means it’s harder than ever to get small community group’s events in front of people’s eyeballs without paying Facebook a hefty sum for the privilege. As a result we are seeing a mass exodus from the platform and feel like the impact of this for community organising is not fully felt yet.

In this podcast, Kim talks to two highly experienced event organisers: David Hayward, founder of Feral Vector festival, and Rachele Evaroa from The Old Abbey Taphouse in Hulme who was recently voted Manchester’s most eccentric landlady. We discuss what the future could look like and our plans for our own PlaceCal platform.

You can listen to it in the player above, or on anchor.fm. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, and Amazon by searching “Geeks for Social Change”.

“The really weird and slightly esoteric thing about all those platforms is that they can generate shareholder value by making life harder for their users”

– David Hayward

“One of the big issues I have with tech is it’s making it harder and harder and harder to do something that used to be quite simple

– Rachele Evaroa

“How are you gonna scale this [innovation] to a million people? I don’t know actually, I’m just doing it with my neighbours first.”

– Kim Foale

Episode information

References

Credits

Music: Cooking, Sharing, Happy Seasons! by Megan Arnold
Audio recording: STEAM Radio @ The Old Abbey Taphouse
Audio production: Ray Mitchell
Transcription: Amy Ní Mhurchú
Thanks to Amy Ní Mhurchú and Gabrielle de la Puente for their invaluable support and feedback

Transcript

[Intro music] 00:00:20

KF: Hello and welcome to the Geeks for Social Change podcast where we talk about tools and processes for community liberation.

I’m Kim from Geeks for Social Change and I’m joined today by David Hayward and Rachel Evaroa to talk about the rise and fall of Facebook Events. 00:00:36

[Intro music] 00:00:42

KF: Sweet. Hello. I’m Kim Foale and this is the second episode of the Geeks for Social Change podcast. It is the 6th of July, I’m in the Old Abbey Taphouse which is a wonderful social enterprise pub that does lots of cool things in Hume, that you’ll hear about in a little bit. I am joined with Rachel Evaroa and David Hayward. Today we’re gonna talk a little bit about some of the new work we’re getting up to and where we’re at with PlaceCal and how that’s all going but first I’ll get my guests to do a little introduction. So do you want to introduce yourself Rachel and tell us who you are and the kind of things you like to do. 00:01:18

RE: Hiya, I’m Rachel Evaroa. I started off as a kind of person who didn’t really know what they wanted to do in their lives and I still don’t and I manage to make a living out of putting on events and working in the community and five years ago me and my best friend Craig managed to open a community pub, which is a social enterprise, in Hume and alongside that I’m also very passionate about music and community. 00:01:42

DH: Hi, I’m David Hayward. My background is in events management for the video games industry. For the past ten years that was largely about trying to create culture within an extremely blinkered capitalist environment. 00:01:59

KF: Cool, so yeah, we’ll get onto some of the details of this shortly. I think the topic for today’s podcast, so the idea for this podcast is to talk about tools and processes for community liberation, is how we’ve been describing it. I think anyone who’s been sort of reading the stuff we’ve been putting out for a while will know about something we’ve been working on called PlaceCal but I’ll do a quick description again. So PlaceCal came out of some work we did, starting in 2017 with Manchester School of Architecture, working with local Age Friendly Partnership in Hulme, Moss Side and some other Age Friendly Partnerships in other parts of Manchester. They found out there was a real issue where all the people just simply didn’t know what there was to do in their neighbourhoods. So we sort of dug down and did some research and we found this kind of, these three main issues. So one was to do with, uh, people just weren’t working together. Like every institution had its own platform, that met its own needs with its own categories that, and these were mostly, seemingly for the institutions benefit rather than the community groups they were working with. Then the other side of it is there’s the big platforms like facebook that are kind of really just selling advertising space for the most part and especially this has gotten a lot worse in recent years. The second issue was that, there wasn’t any sort of integration between the social and technical so, like, people weren’t going out and training community groups up in how to list events and what that means and engaging people in a larger network and that leads onto the third part which is people are very digitally excluded. Most of this software isn’t actually designed to make your life easier, it’s designed to sell off adverts. We found a lot of people were actually already using something like Google calendar or Outlook, or Facebook but often they didn’t know how to use them or they saw them as more of a burden and they didn’t really see the benefit. And we found out generally that they were right because people weren’t working in connected ways. So we designed this three tier approach to fixing this which was, working on a strategic level with the partners together to try and fix the problem, we trained partners up to list events using the software they already had - so you’re Google calendar, Outlook, you know, things that were generally already on people’s phone or in their workflow and then we built this PlaceCal platform to aggregate all of this, to add in the extra data about where it was and all the rest of it. So you can read a lot more about this, we’ve got other articles about it that I’ll link out underneath with the context for this. So we ended up building this platform that worked amazingly well. We did a really solid prototype. When we were at our peak we had about 250 events a week in Hulme, which is about ten thousand people who live here, which blew everyone’s mind. And we organised a couple of winter festivals where we managed to put flyers through people’s doors that events from, I think, you know, up to 16 local community groups. The funny thing that happened then was we found out this went down amazingly well with community groups and front line workers but we just couldn’t get it funded. We were basically hitting this same issue that because there’s a lack of joined up strategy, there wasn’t joined up funding. So a lot of the funding we were going for, it was like “Oh no, it’ll go to that person, go to that person”. We then kind of hit Covid and everything obviously ground to a halt, we were a platform about getting older people to hang out in real life. That wasn’t very popular for those few years. We’re now back on the road. We’ve got some funding to really expand this idea again, over the next couple of years. We’ve been funded by the National Lottery. David and Rachel here, who are both really good friends, I’ve known for a really long time, they are both working on this project, along with Carol Freeman who is shortly to be helping for the south of England but we all live pretty near each other in Manchester so it’s easy to do this podcast today. And I think, the rest of this episode, really what we’re going to talk about, a bit, is sort of this failure of - it’s not even necessarily a failure, but you know, these big tech companies like, you know, the Facebooks, the Microsofts, the Googles, they don’t really care about you, they’re there to sell their software. And it’s increasingly feeling like something that is just there to extract data, the models are getting more extractive. So it’s really no surprise that I think event promoters are finding it kind of harder and harder to sort of like, know what to do. So I was going to headover to Rach, here who has been promoting events for a really long time on a range of platforms. I don’t know if you want to talk about, like, when, how you did stuff, how stuff’s changed, what you like now, what’s really annoying. 00:06:29

RE: Yeah, so I have to say, I think I probably made my career because of Facebook events. So I started putting on my first gig when I was 16 and when I was 21 I opened up my first bar and that was just when Facebook was kind of kicking off with Facebook events and the way it worked then was that it was really easy to see the events your friends were going to and then once you were in a subculture, kind of network, of different events with different promoters, you’re events would get flagged up so it created really good subcultures to begin with, Facebook. And then when I was really good at it, I would have to read the blogs every week and there was all, there was all these talks about the different algorithms, cause each week Facebook changes its algorithm and you’d have to read up on the blogs to work out how to share your event to the most amount of people. And then, I think it was about, maybe it was 6 years ago they, Facebook completely changed their algorithm and it was the death knell for lots of different people and since then Facebook events is still one of the main ways for live music and club nights to promote their events. TikTok and Instagram don’t really cater for events, even though you can share your events on there like a flyer, you can’t really get a sense of who is going to your events. And the last few years Facebook’s made it harder and harder and harder to list your events on Facebook and get them noticed so I don’t know if you’ve noticed, even if you share a birthday party for your personal friends it’s really hard for you to find out about your friend’s birthday party. So we’re all struggling using Facebook events but nothing else has really come along to fill the gap. And then when Facebook went down, last year, we had a massive panic here at the Old Abbey Taphouse because again we list our events on Facebook and there was a feeling at the time of “what other platforms can we use?”. In the last five years, lots of platforms have sprung up but they’re about selling tickets and they take a percentage from you. So five years ago, or no, about seven years ago, I decided to build myself my own website to sell tickets so I could keep the data and I could keep the revenue and I did really well out of that for a bit but I needed to use Facebook to then advertise to send people to my website and Facebook is making it harder and harder to have links that go outside of Facebook.So for example if you share a YouTube video on Facebook it’s really hard for that to get traction but if you upload the video to Facebook then you’ll get more traction. And the last few weeks we’ve had to pivot mainly to videos so we’re not even really listing our Facebook events, we’re just doing videos that we have to pay quite a lot of money to marketing on Facebook to get them seen. So within the live music and club night industry there is a big issue with how, with selling tickets at the moment, there’s a huge issue with attendance to gigs, people are pulling gigs if they can’t sell the tickets, which we didn’t use to do, people would still go ahead with gigs and hope for people to turn up at the door but the rise in costs means most people can’t take that risk. And then all these other ticket sellers that have jumped up, so we’re using FIXR, it’s pretty good but it takes a decent cut. I’ve seen some other apps come up, like Dice. Dice, I’m not against it but it really annoyed me, I bought some tickets with it the other day and you had to download the app to get access to the tickets and I think we’re moving into this really dangerous zone where people who don’t have smartphones who might like live music or just wanted to pop out to see some live music will be put off because of all this technology that you have to access to be able to get a ticket when it’s quite a simple process. And the other part of it that I don’t like about it is that it’s removing the personality. So when people buy tickets to come to my venue the more steps in between them and me, the more it removes that, the experience that I’m giving them. And of course if you have a third seller, if you have any issues then it has to go through the third seller and people can’t contact you directly. So just for example we’re on UberEats. That’s one of the worst platforms. If someone orders something off UberEats I can’t talk to them directly, I have to talk to someone in India who then talks back to the customer. So this is one of the big issues I have with tech is, its making it harder and harder and harder to do something that was actually quite simple and tech always says that it’s the solution to make things simpler but at the moment within events and events world, it hasn’t actually made our lives easier, it’s made it harder. 00:10:43

DH: It’s kind of hilarious that all the big platforms have run out of ways to copy each other so Facebook are just doing pivot to video…again! Like, I was doing a freelance gig news writing for a magazine in 2015 around the first time they pivoted to video. 00:11:00

DH: And it was really interesting to get to see inside that whole dynamic for a few months. Like, that magazine has a publisher who is very into online advertising and figuring out those systems but everything changed every week and I ended up quitting because the overheads of actually writing news to exist online just kept going up and up and up. Like, every week I’d get to work and be told - “Oh, every post needs this much body text now and this many images, and for this platform they have to have captions but for this platform they can’t have captions so this week we’re prior…” and it was just a mess! And over time you could see Facebook just eating this magazine publisher’s business. Like, you roll up and at first your videos are getting loads of engagement, which apparently they were, allegedly they were lying about anyway, and helping you build a massive audience. Their page was like getting close to five hundred thousand followers but they found every big milestone, the rate at which they acquired followers had slowed down and it was just so much being toyed with behind the scenes and they got to the point where they were having to pay Facebook to access their own audience whereas before they had been independent, had it all running through their own website. And they had to really fight to rebuild their audience on that website and through their own channels rather than be dependent on Facebook. ‘Cause the really weird and slightly esoteric thing about all those platforms, I think, is that they can generate shareholder value by making life harder for their users. 00:12:41

RE: On that point too, as well, I’ve worked on so many events where, on Facebook or Instagram, we’ve had thousands of likes but the actual engagement in real life doesn’t happen. So it’s not actually a good indicator for anyone running an event of how busy it’s going to be. You may get thousands of people sharing your video or your event but they’re not necessarily in Manchester. They’re not necessarily gonna come down. It’s easy for people to share things, it’s actually harder in real life to come down. So, it’s weird how if you’re in that sort of job where the publisher is more keen on the likes rather than actually how many people have read the article. Cause you can get a lot of likes but it might not translate to reads. Yeah, it makes this weird world where you’re, kind of, pandering to an audience that’s not really real, if that makes sense. 00:13:28

KF: I was also just going to add, I think, it’s interesting all this stuff too because, you know, because I don’t think any of us here are really doing what we do for the money. That’s like how we have to exist in the world. And the events we’ve talked about so far, all, they have a money aspect right, you sell tickets to an event cause that’s what you need to do if you want to put on a party. But the vast majority of the events we’re looking at in PlaceCal, they didn’t have that, they were a coffee morning, they were a mutual aid group, they’re a special swimming club for older people. Like, so, it’s no wonder, really, that like, even for the people who are doing it the way the platform is designed to be used are struggling so how is anyone else got any hope if they’re, if they have, if they don’t care about, they just want people to know about it, to be able to find out about it. It’s like it’s literally made impossible. 00:14:09

DH: Yeah

RE: Totally agree with you on that. Like, my, one of the reasons I was most interested in PlaceCal is about twenty years ago my mum had a listings magazine called The Family Grapevine. It had all the schools, all the school activities, the nurseries, the playgroups and it went to social workers, schools, doctor’s surgeries, it was in the local supermarkets and it was free but it would go, as soon as my mum put it out it would go because everyone loved it because everything was in one place and you could just sit there and see everything and where they missed out is, they had a website designer build a website but he didn’t give them access to the website and they couldn’t put online listings and they got locked out of this website for three years and in that space of time Facebook came along and it kind of killed their business. But if they’d been able to move their listings online and publicise it, I think they would have done really well. But I think there’s a gap again in the market from what I’ve seen for a new events platform. 00:15:10

DH: Yeah, everything I’ve seen through events over the past sixteen years has either been really open to abuse or really difficult to use. 00:15:20

KF: Do you want to talk a bit more about your sort of background in events David and the kinds of things you organise? I know we’re all pitching our projects a lot and it may be good to hear. 00:15:27

DH: I think that a bunch of the non-commercial stuff I’ve done is more interesting, or definitely more aligned with what we’re doing in terms of community groups. So, sure, I have a background in commercial video games events and still do a few of those but mostly I’m bored of them. Industry oriented conferences tend to just be on this repeating loop of survivor bias and copy the rich person. None of that’s interesting, none of that improves anything, none of that builds community, none of that advances culture or advances creative meaning in any way I don’t think. But as well as that I’ve been involved with hack spaces and things like board game nights. Do I need to explain what hack spaces are, if I’m going to mention them? 00:16:13

KF: Yes 00:16:14

DH: Ok. Hack spaces are member-led community workshops and the model that functions on can vary but the idea is basically everyone has a single workshop where they can go to do stuff and use big tools they might not necessarily have at home. So like, laser cutters, plasma cutters, CNC mills and so on. The one, in fact I’ve set up several with friends, one in Nottingham that is now pretty huge. They have nearly seven hundred members, I think, and another one somewhere smaller, which seems to fluctuate around a dozen members. It’s a really interesting contrast to have been, like, setting both of those things up. And along with the games nights, software is a really weird thing for those groups to deal with. Like, every group develops its own way of doing that kind of stuff and there’s this huge disconnect where any big platform or service meets those groups. So like, games nights I’ve run, it would be like we had a wordpress blog and the event is on the third Thursday of every month. Like, it literally has to be that simple to keep any kind of stability. Whereas, the bigger hack spaces I’m involved with had a sufficient number of people that it would, bespoke software would basically spring into being to achieve stuff. Whereas a smaller hack space, it tends to be people will, has people just technical enough to commit to software development projects that they’ll never finish and everything ends up a bit broken but there’s nothing out there that really caters towards these kinds of groups or has the flexibility required for all those different things.00:18:03

KF: I think the other thing you just brought up, it’s something we think about a lot too. I think, a lot of the original funding and the design behind PlaceCal was sort of about social isolation was the main thing and there’s a lot of funding about that. Like, social isolation and loneliness is a big one the funders love and they’re quite interesting concepts to really think about because, you know, you always get questions about, like, “Oh well, how many socially isolated people has it reached?” And it’s like, well we don’t know because they’re socially isolated, like, we don’t have a meaningful definition of this. People don’t just tell you and actually if you want to make things more inclusive the key barrier to overcome is getting people to go to their first thing. Because, like we’ve said a lot of things are, once you start going, it’s the third Thursday of the month, but you need to go the first time. So we actually hit this, one of the sites we’re working on with PlaceCal is called the Trans Dimension, which is a group of Trans groups in London, and it was honestly pretty far through this, we had a page that was resources that we were trying to put up and it was like, it wasn’t really clicking and then we realised that actually the thing people need the most, that obviously wasn’t at the front of anyone’s mind who has been working on this, we’re all trans people, we’re all out, we all work at trans led organisations, was just going to your first thing and how terrifying that is and it’s hard to remember you know, you fall in with a group of people and all of a sudden you don’t really need these network sites anymore because you’ve found people and they’ll tell you on other networks but, and I think especially over Covid, the way we theorised a lot of the PlaceCal stuff is there’s kind of, communities of place, which are your natural neighbours, the people you walk past every day, the shops you go into, your local coffee shop, right? And then, there’s communities of interest which are kind of, your DnD group, the kind of music you’re into, it might be based around a fake group or something like that and I think, especially over Covid, these communities of interest have become much easier to become a part of and communities of place have become much harder to be a part of and we’ve now seen, you know, students especially who all come and the architecture in Hulme, that they’re literally fenced off from the rest of the population, so those connections are hard to make at the best of times, but we’ve now got students who have kind of come, done a few years of uni but not been able to make these physical connections. So it feels weird now, feels very segregated, it feels like, I don’t know, and I think we need to get back to this community of place thing a little bit because that’s often where the actual, you know, cross pollination happens and we don’t all just stay with our own friends and our own annoyances getting angry at each other. 00:20:32

RE: I think that’s one of the reasons me and Craig opened up pub, those pubs were the traditional spaces where people got to meet their neighbours and if you think again, people living in smaller, smaller houses and smaller and shared houses where its harder and harder to socialise at home but there’s less and less spaces for people to just meet naturally and I think in Hulme there’s three pubs left, we’re the only ones, well we’re open the most out of all of them, there’s no community centers left. We get approached about wakes and funerals and eighteen year old birthday parties because there’s no - these natural spaces where the community used to meet. So even figuring out where these spaces are to go to, cause quite often, churches are doing quite good at renting out their community halls and putting on events but yeah, it’s really, really hard to figure out where you actually go to meet anyone.00:21:19

KF: I feel like there are community centers but they all seem really closed and I don’t know if that’s real or not but it’s like, you know, or a lot of them, like the big one’s in Hulme, like, they just, the Big Life Centres, they just don’t seem like somewhere approachable. It seems like that’s where the health authority and all the providers go to do their events, it doesn’t feel like somewhere, where, I as a resident, would go and book a room. I don’t know why that is. 00:21:41

RE: I did some work on this two years ago and they put in these weird conditions which aren’t that hard to overcome, so like, they won’t let people use the kitchen unless they have Level 2. Level 2 takes, costs ten pounds and someone can do it on the internet but they make it out to anyone hiring the venue that it’s this really hard qualification that you can’t get and they also put on big fees onto the hire fees which didn’t used to be there I think. Yeah 00:22:07

DH: I found a lot of that is about who is in that place as well. Like, who is able to meet people there and kind of guide them into whatever is going on. I’ve run a range of events for people from student age to kind of like, middle age, are usually middle class people and it took me a long time to kind of be able to state this and a lot of the friends running things with me didn’t get it and in fact one event no one really understood what I was doing but as soon as I left the whole thing just collapsed within six months. And basically, a lot of people have this self-image of like, I’m a good person, we’re all good people here and at worse that will be a thing where they use that to be like “Why do we need a code of conduct we’re all good people here” and then something really terrible happens and they learn that actually we weren’t all good people here and then maybe they do put some rules in place and then, without thinking through, like, “what do we do next time?”, they just write the rues up then they think, “ok, now we’re all good people here” but there’s a more subtle level of that which is about inclusion and unless you have someone involved in your event who is willing to make the effort to meet anyone who turns up halfway, you will develop this dissonance between the “we’re all good people here” self image of the group and what actually happens when someone who doesn’t automatically fit in turns up. So one example was a board game night a couple with learning difficulties turned up. And no one wants to be the prick who doesn’t want to sit and play a game with a couple who have learning difficulties but at the same time a bunch of people have turned up, they want to relax and chat to their friends, they don’t want to be doing anything that feels like work, so someone has to be willing to kind of, create a bridge across that divide. And once someone does and you introduce them to some people, they make some friends, everything is fine from that point on pretty much but its just having someone who is able to spot those kind of situations and stop them from becoming problems is a huge part that software basically can’t help with. 00:24:24

RE: Yeah, totally agree with you on that. There’s all these people skills you need.00:24:30

KF: I think this comes down to something we’ve been thinking about a lot recently around that, you know, the other big trendy thing people are talking about at the moment is digital inclusion. But actually like, I just increasingly don’t see any difference between digital and social inclusion. ‘Cause usually the model is, we have a physical service that we provide at the center and there’s a human you can talk to who is nice - “Yeah, we’re gonna fire them and we’re gonna make a shit website instead and then we’re going to tell the people who don’t like the new service that they’re digitally excluded” and it’s kind of like, you know! 00:25:02

RE: I went to one of our own XR museum and it was about making museums more inclusive to people but then they digitised it and you had to have a virtual reality headset. So how does that make it more inclusive because the people who couldn’t physically go to museums, I don’t think, would also be the people who could afford a virtual reality headset. And then it’s removing that, it’s taking away more physical spaces, which, where people meet each other and get to learn and feel like part of the community.00:25:28

KF: It just feels like there’s some real big category errors going on, do you know what I mean, it’s like, “Oh, do you want to be inclusive? Download the inclusion app on your phone”. 00:25:35

RE: Well this is, well with tech they, tech could be good or bad depending on how its used but they never seem to come up with any useful ideas, so that’s why I thought PlaceCal was so interesting because it’s actually useful and something that’s needed and is not going to be evil. 00:25:50

DH: There’s also just the hype inherent to tech and the tech industry in general, like, I have exhibited VR games at a bunch of events over the past decade and sure, people make interesting things with them but the tech in itself just puts up huge social barriers. Like, you have to be willing to put yourself into a form of partial sensory isolation in a room full of strangers. And like, even at one point, I lived in a place that had a big barn attached and someone sent me a HTC vive and I borrowed a PC that could run it and we had room scale VR set up for two months. Everyone I put into it kind of, noodled around, for an hour and went - “hm”, and even living with it I think I used it twice in those two months and it’s like, I literally couldn’t be bothered to walk upstairs and put the special headset on to play a game. I’d rather sit down and do it but it’s, it’s subject to this constant hype and boosterism of like, VR is the greatest. I have a huge rant brewing about like, video games and immersiveness, where the industry idolises this quality of ‘more immersive’ but they mistake that for being more photoreal, more in your face, louder and that’s not it at all. Like, there are people within the video games industry for whom the concept of a book being immersive is unthinkable. Like they don’t understand it’s about which bits of your brain are engaging with any given thing rather than the tech itself and after so long of people hyping VR I saw some research last month that delighted me, which was studying the use of VR in education and it’s a first finding obviously it needs to be replicated and so on, but they basically found that the spatial reasoning requirements of being in VR undermine learning. So this games industry concept of this is immersive, therefore it must be better at teaching people stuff is just wrong but it’s like, its like if I was just shouting really loudly at you, I’m not shouting, I’m just making the conversation more immersive. 00:28:05

RE: I went to a festival at the weekend and at a certain point they have a silent disco and it really really kind of knocked me and my friends heads a bit cause, you’re there, with your friends, trying to dance but then you put those headphones on and then you just become very internal and you can’t hear what anyone else is saying to you and you could be dancing to different music and I ended up having to think about it for a good couple of hours of why it sat so weirdly with me and it’s like, what is this point, to have this moment where I’m worried that they’ll be like building these virtual reality festivals, where maybe they’ll have like the stages but then you’ll go and put on a, the headphones and a thing, but then why are you going to go to these events because you could just sit at home? It just, like, it made it very individual and that’s the opposite of the experience that you want when you’re out socialising. 00:28:54

DH: So like, you’re cutting sound and vision off when you put a VR headset on so the only way it works at events like expos and so on is if someone is running the actual VR game and is sat there with you. Or you’re in a private room with it but just putting it on in a crowd of people is a no for most people. 00:29:13

KF: I think all this probably goes into the, maybe this, I’m trying to think of a way to segway this back to the events, not that we have to obviously -

RE: Oh but there’s kind of like tech -

KF: I think it’s the more -

RE: - individual -

KF: yeah -

RE: we want the complete opposite, we want to be together

KF: It’s all the idea that what the point of tech is, is to have more of it, right?

RE: [unclear] (A VR headset is?) one per person so everyone has to have VRs.

KF: So yeah, there was a tweet I saw, I think it might have been Mar Hicks who did it, who was saying, you know, Mar Hicks they’re a professor of Science and Technology Studies but they said that, you know they get all these guys saying “Aw technology’s neutral, it doesn’t have anything” and then they’re saying, “Well think about the difference between a potato peeler and an atomic bomb”. They’re both technology, right, but you can’t say they’re not political. And I think all these things we’re talking about come down to this, it’s like, what the tech industry wants is more. “That thing that was really simple? We’re going to make that really complicated and have loads of things in an app and tracking cause that’s our business model” but actually most people don’t want any of that, they just want to go and get pissed in the pub.

RE: Yeah. And also with rising electricity costs, I always think, can anyone afford to have a VR and a projector and a Playstation 4 and three computers and a flat screen tv, like I just, and the amount of energy, no one seems to talk about the energy the games community uses. We’re talking about sustainability and carbon neutral-ness. No one’s mentioning…VR must do a lot of electricity. 00:30:38

DH: I mean it’s built out of conflict minerals and yeah there’s huge issues with the global south in terms of the physical product of the games industry. 00:30:46

RE: I’ve only heard one person talk about that, that side of the tech industry or the gaming industry, about that side. Even though it’s big on the agenda of lots of other people. 00:30:55

DH: Yeah, I probably know maybe four or five people in video games who talk about that. There must be more thinking about it but they’re the people I’ve seen actually mentioning it publicly. 00:31:05

KF: I mean, I think, yeah, and video games is mad now. I saw like, cause you know, first person shooters have always been sort of, like, low key, like, army stroke gun propaganda, right but like I saw a tournament the other day for Valorant I think it was, and it was literally sponsored by the US army so I was like they’ve obviously seem like, “Ah yeah shoot people in video games? Why don’t you do that in real life? And it’ll even be the same gun you know from your favourite games!” 00:31:28

DH; I mean yeah they’ve been doing that about fifteen years and yeah, it used to be you could kind of, I mean you still can get away with, sort of like satorising brands, but all the car and gun manufacturers are in there with license agreements now. So any, any real world technology you put in your game, if you don’t license it you’ll have the manufacturer’s lawyers chasing you. 00:31:52

RE: I heard that the drones they use in Afghanistan to kill people, the controllers are almost like PlayStation controllers. 00:31:59

DH: Oh, it was the same during the Iraq war. A lot of bomb disposal robots and things would use XBox 360 joypads to control them. ‘Cause it’s an interface soldiers in their early twenties knew. 00:32:10

KF: And they’re cheap and high quality and mass produced. 00:32:12

DH: And robust. 00:32:14

KF: But yeah, so maybe it’s a scaling back you know and I think this sort of potato peeler vs atomic bomb thing is interesting because whenever people talk about technology now they do always mean VR and even like the School of Digital Arts that’s just opened, you know, I don’t know if it still is, but their website, their flyers, their kind of like very thin, attractive people of colour wearing VR headsets. Like, that’s all the publicity they put out as if that is what technology is and when we talk to people about saying, you know, I think there’s a principle in engineering that’s the principle of least power that basically says the simplest and easiest way a job can happen will be how it eventually ends up happening if it can. And there just seems to be, it has to be literally violated for anyone to have these massive empire-like monopolistic models. Like, you can’t, you know, Facebook’s model relies on putting all this cruft around us, they have a load of interactions that they can turn into an AR model (Transcribe: Autoregressive, not Alternate Reality) so they can sell to someone else and it’s just mad how much it’s worked! Like it’s maddening. 00:33:10

DH: It’s also interesting how that technology is sold versus how it’s used. So like, I knew people who worked on the original Connect for Microsoft. I shouldn’t say who they were but basically, everyone was excited when they first saw Connect about the kind of, wavy arms style interface, that looks like a piece of science fiction. Even the engineers working on it said to me, like, “yeah we were really excited about that at first but to be honest, after the first five minutes your arms get tired and you just kind of want a joypad again”. But someone waving their arms and stuff swooshing around on screen looks really exciting in a trailer, that’s a great way to sell some technology to someone. But actually, what works is something you can use fine motor control with and very little energy cause that’s, that’s kind of one of things we’re designed to do as humans, is minimise energy use and do things efficiently. Well, you know, whatever we think is efficient. 00:34:09

RE: I don’t mean to disrespect either of you, you work in tech right but sometimes I -

KF: Disrespect us! Disrespect us!!

RE: When I hear about these tech ideas it feels like maybe the people who haven’t got the biggest imagination and maybe the biggest life experience? Do you know, it feels to me sometimes the people who kind of had quite a sheltered upbringing, maybe who were quite geeky, so didn’t socialise a lot, went straight to uni, again, hid in their bedrooms quite a lot, then went straight into a tech job, so they were never that bothered about social life - and it’s not a bad thing, some people are set up differently, and then all of a sudden they’re the people deciding the technology for everybody but everybody’s different so you have a small group of people kind of projecting what they want and they’ve read a lot of sci-fi so I see - and I love sci-fi - but quite a lot of the ideas, sci-fi used to be so exciting you know, if you read Ursula Le Guin, she was dreaming of different worlds but the sci-fi we’ve had in the last ten, twenty years, like The Circle, is very short sighted and seems to be reflecting our society. So there’s not much imagination in tech. 00:35:14

DH: It’s so much worse than you think.

All: [Laughs]

DH: There’s someone else I did some work with a really long time ago around a feature on a game development website, where he’d interview a game developer every week and ask them “What’s your inspirations?”. He got depressed doing that because in two years of doing that once a week he had two game developers bring him, like, a really diverse set of influences, like, here is some painters I like, here an obscure 30s Jazz musician, all of these things are things I build into my video games work in one way or another. Absolutely everyone else, when asked ‘what’s your inspirations?’ said “Uhh, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings”. So it’s like, “Ah, the two flavours of video game” and that’s it. It’s like so much is just recycling concepts from those or that sort of - 00:36:11

KF: I remember you telling me too about when Nintendo bought out the Labo which is like this cool, cardboard cut out kit of like these models and you put your bits in and they had all these cool things you could make like a piano and the demo looked really fun and then there was someone on, did you see the Reddit thread where someone was like, “I found out how to make a gun” and it’s like - 00:36:30

DH: Oh some of the jobs I do where you’re like, looking at two hundred video game trailers and picking a line up for a show. It gets really jading when you open like the thirtieth trailer in a row and it’s some beautifully rendered scene full of people beating the shit out of each other. It’s like “Ah, cool, our collective imagination, great stuff”. 00:36:49

KF: I think too like, cause obviously I think, what you’ve said is totally right and it’s kind of weird right cause if we didn’t live in this horrible capitalist world that, then it wouldn’t matter that those people lives are making other people’s difficult, but the problem is that we’ve got this situation where there’s this thing called California Venture Capital and those people because they’re twenty-something, white, rich people can go and get someone to give them millions and millions of pounds to develop these prototypes cause there might be money in it and there’s a whole economy based around sort of like, you know, white men giving other white men money for gadgets that they might quite like to have but then this has taken over the world economy like, quite literally. It sounds like an exaggeration and now we’re in a place where, if you want to make an app, or if you want to make anything technically, that is like the standard that people are thinking of in their head. So you know, I’ll freely admit, like a lot of our software is rough around the edges, we’ve got issues, we’ve got stuff we need to work out together but its like, yeah because, because we’re all immersed in this and we have all these things, you know, Uber is the example I keep coming up with right, like Uber’s business model requires Uber, if they want to make a profit, they have to be the only form of transport on Earth and like, and every Uber, the reason it’s cheap is cause it’s hugely underwritten by some Saudi investor who thinks they’re gonna make money one day. Uber picked one of the lowest hanging fruits there is, which is, it’s quite annoying isn’t it, to sort out hailing a taxi and paying the driver, that’s annoying and they’ve still not made money. So even with these, like, ultra simple, bottom of the things we want, it still doesn’t work and it’s and to do this they’re kind of like, you know they’ve had this black ball system and they’ve also developed this app to sort of underwrite labour markets and underwrite unions and do all this union busting stuff but then like we have all these charity, if you work in web tech, there’s all these charities and they’ve got twenty grand and they sort of expect something that’s at that standard and there’s just something that’s not adding up right now, you know. 00:38:50

DH: I think my favourite is WeWork managing to go bankrupt by trying to be landlords. 00:38:56

RE: I loved the We Crash. I remember cause we’ve had the pub for five years and we’re based in the science park and we came through the Innovation Hub so I’ve been up against the graphene people, WeWork, not directly but all these people who were branded as innovators and disruptors, is that the word? DISRUPTORS! INNOVATORS! GAME CHANGERS! And I laughed because my little pub that me and Craig had set up, with our amazing team, we’re still going. We beat quite a few companies. But UberEats is horrendous and Uber is horrendous and they just want to flood the market, don’t they. 00:39:30

KF: And it’s funny cause then the thing you usually get right, and we found this too like, every time I’ve tried to make a tech product, we’re always trying to make it, and I think, you two have actually been great at getting me to slow down, like we go slow and you guys have gone slower but it’s like, you’re launching it and people are already asking you about like, “oh, so have you got, like, this visualisation or that visualisation?” or “How are you gonna scale it to a million people?” and it’s like, “I don’t know actually, I’m just doing it with my neighbours first.” But it’s like this mentality and I imagine with the pub, no one sees you as, like, amazing innovators cause like, “Well how are you gonna scale that?” As if like, and I think that is the real sort of like, capitalist cancer kind of thing, right. It’s like, people aren’t interested, if they can’t take what you’ve done and stamp it in other places, but the thing is, you probably could, if someone invested in you, right? 00:40:46

RE: The thing is you can replicate this model in other pubs around the country. 00:40:20

KF: Maybe talk about this a bit cause I think it’s really important. 00:40:23

RE: Oh yeah. So we’re trying to open a second space and what we’d like to do is be like a holding company and we could take it on and we could train up members of the community and then you can run your own pub and we’re getting to that stage, it’s just, it’s so hard to find property in this day and age. And say we do a lot of innovation. We all use, sort of, apps and I’m always trying to use technology to take away boring, mundane jobs that I could pass on and I think one of our successes in lockdown was working with Geeks for Social Change. So we decided we’re going to feed all our neighbours and it was us, ACORN, Geeks for Social Change and Gaskell [Garden Project] and we all worked on different parts of the project but the phenomenal bit is Kim built us a database and we were sending out texts and ringing people and loads of people who set up these food projects thought it was only going to be a couple of weeks. So if you’re feeding people for two weeks you don’t really need a system, you can kind of do it ad hoc. We’ve been running that project now for two and a half years and you definitely needed a system and it was so amazing because those seeds were there at the very beginning and Kim had given us the right tools we needed to build off that and these are the tools I want to give to the community because they were so, I mean it would take maybe, half a day maximum to train someone up to use it but it’s been phenomenal and one of the insights I had from it is that we could kind of get a, capture how the community was feeling that week by, ringing round, texting people. But, I’ve lost my train of thought. 00:41:49

KF: No, I was gonna say, it’s funny because this was just an example we say a lot where it’s like, it didn’t take a lot of tech. We used Airtable as off the shelf. It just needed someone who knew how to write up a service design and put that bit of rigor in and this is again, like, this could be what tech looked like, it doesn’t have to be these big apps. It could be, and it’s funny because we’re in Manchester Science Park, there’s probably like, a thousand coders within two hundred metres of here and what, where are they? Why don’t they help out? Why are they never in the community spaces? It’s kind of wild. 00:42:18

RE: But then this blew my mind because when we were in this, these tech spaces, with the pub, everyone talks about community and then I talk about community and for me, I’m an activist and my community is literally the local people around me and it took me two years of talking to the Science Park to realise they meant the business community and even the way we use the word community, like you were saying community of locality, community of interest, that’s a new one for me. I don’t think even community, community people even think about the theory so much, I think, sometimes you get to this layer where tech people are maybe more academic so, thinking about the theory of community rather than just, doing, the community. 00:42:56

KF: I think, as I was going to say too, the real hard work that went into this which you guys like, ringing people, that was the cornerstone of the whole project. It was ringing this list of people who really needed the support, well some of them didn’t, most of them did, some of them didn’t, every week and just checking in and the amount of stuff that came through that and it’s been wild because this project, Rach doesn’t say it, I like to say it all the time, has like, zero support from local institutions, the council don’t get it, some of the other institutional partners we’ve got don’t get it and it’s just wild to me because it’s like, this should be your gold dust, this is the thing you wanna know, like you know, we keep having these projects about social isolation and loneliness, like, we know the people are, we know what they want, they’re right here, we have the data and no one wants it! 00:43:33

RE: I have to say, it was a combination of tech and community because we needed the tech to send out the text messages, which would have taken hours, to send out emails, to collect the data and make the spreadsheets and make the delivery lists and that would have been a pain in the arse job for anyone. No one would have enjoyed doing that, would have been very stressful. The tech made that really simple but the most important bit is the people side. So you had me and Ella at the beginning ringing everyone up, Shakira and the CIC staff have been running it, but we’ve been sending the same delivery driver every week and nobody feeding back to me or Shakira about how that person feels, so you can get a real sense that week about how that community feels. And you know sometimes you have a bad day and then you see your friend and their having a bad day, that is the sense that I get in communities. Like, one week everybody will have a cold and be a bit run down. The next week everyone will feel really positive and in all my community work it’s how people feel, if I feel amazing, I can get up, I can access a service, I can try and sort my debts out. If I feel like crap that day I’m not going to get out of bed, I’m going to ignore all that stuff. I feel like where the council, the institutions, tech is missing is that bit about how people feel and so tech is useful but you always still need that person to check in on that person’s feelings which tech can’t seem to capture. 00:44:44

KF: Well actually, we have an algorithm which will process it…

RE: Oh god

All: [Laughs] 00:44:48

KF: The apps are telling you you’re suicidal and…oh god! 00:44:51

DH: There are a few clients who I’ve worked with who, like, they’re trying to do stuff with communities or local delivery in a rural community in one case and firstly what they found was, like, for all those deliveries in a kind of hilly, rural area, all the route building software they could find was built around the premise of - you are navigating a city, and not only that, that you’re doing it in this specific type of vehicle and like, they’re riding up and down hills on cargo bikes, like, the entire, everything is backwards in that sense. But what they found was, there are so many edge cases in an environment like that, that you just need people who know what they’re doing to work with the software but still there was this mindset of - we want someone to build an app or some sort of back end that just does it all for us. And sure, that’s the dream but actually when you’re dealing with a really complicated environment or a complicated community the software can’t, you need people to fill in those gaps. 00:45:48

RE: We did actually have that as, Kim has designed this amazing system but it wouldn’t give me, the chef, the chef just needed the numbers for the meals and we couldn’t make it do that so in the end I’ve gone to Google Docs and the same, we’re still using Airtable so, I totally get where you’re coming from. I feel like tech seems to be built very generically as a one-fits-all solution and you kind of need that - 00:46:09

KF: To be honest, that was the other good thing about doing an Airtable in regards to [tech] closing doors perhaps, was just like, there was a point where I got ill and like, I couldn’t do any more and you’d also, you’d simplify the use case and the Airtable wasn’t up to date, but because I’d just, we’d designed it using these simple tools and not a close piece of software you could take all of the design and then make what you’d wanted without needing me or someone else and that, now that feels like a skill that you have and you can teach someone else. And I was going to finish this with a sort of thought about, there’s a concept that Ursula Franklin, whose one of our favourite Geeks for Social Change authors, has about reciprocity and the idea that like, you know, how you make equitable systems, as things need to be reciprocal, like we both need to have input in them. It shouldn’t be one person just decides and to the other person, it happens. It should be that, I say something, you can feedback, we work together and that feedback loop is what keeps things going. And this is the fundamental thing that all these big tech platforms violate, right? Like, you can’t even talk to, like, I had a YouTube channel got hacked and taken down, you can’t even talk to anyone about it. They don’t even care about you, unless you’ve got, like one hundred thousand subscribers. You’re, like, an irrelevance and I think with a lot of these systems we’re talking about you know, like UberEats. The description you just had, like, the big problem with UberEats, one of the many problem is like yeah, the drivers are designed to be anonymous, replaceable parts. So even if they want to, they can’t become, meet you and become part of your community and talk to people and get that feedback. But just by doing it ourselves and having our own people who go there every week, we’ve straight away got that reciprocity, where there’s a loop being made there and these systems are designed to remove it. So I thought just to wrap up, maybe we could talk about this a little bit if anyone’s got any thoughts? 00:47:51

RE: I have got a story. So, I think what I find with the big tech companies, they’re designed so no one takes responsibility and in community, one of the first things, one of the biggest issues, is you have to take responsibility. If you’re a community, you take responsibility, you look after people, regardless if it’s your fault or not. And we had a problem with UberEats drivers selling drugs outside my pub and I rung up UberEats, they wouldn’t deal with it, they said the drivers don’t work for them but you know, it’s my pub, it’s my license, if they’re seen doing that I get in trouble and it seemed to be no one’s fault and they only seemed to take it seriously when I threatened to go to the press with it. And I had another issue where a UberEats delivery driver peed in someone’s living room, peed in someone’s hallway and then threw the pizza around so, yeah, it’s about taking responsibility, I think and I think what I would like to see and what we’re trying to do with PlaceCal is, we’re kind of taking responsibility ourselves. We wanna map and find all these community groups and help them share their events and train them up and give them the skills that other people aren’t going to give them. So it’s taking responsibility. 00:48:48

DH: Yeah, I guess, that lack of reciprocity is also in how these platforms present themselves as tools for doing things but only for doing things in a very specific way, or for doing one specific thing that they’ve optimised to make them money. So you know of course, the platforms that aren’t open source but they’re not even editable in any kind of user friendly way or customisable. It’s just like, you can change your picture, or you can add events but you’re doing, you’re operating to their agenda. The biggest thing I found out through hack spaces, but also some of the festivals I’ve run, is you don’t need to train someone for eight weeks in a new tool for them to become competent with that tool necessarily. What they actually need is to just see it being used for ten minutes and have a quick go of it themselves. So like, I used to run hack space tours of a two thousand, at the time a two thousand square foot hack space. There were some people doing that who kinda needed a script. Like they saw it as this pitch they had to give to everyone who walked through the door. Whereas I would just take people for a walk around the hack space and be like, there’s the laser cutter, here’s all our woodworking tools and just look for like, what piqued their interest and then get them talking about their projects. Cause all people need is not some kind of info dump, they just need to see the potential, or register like, “Oh, there’s that tool I’ve wanted to have a go at” and again like, you only need to train them in it for ten minutes. Unless it’s something really safety critical, like a lathe or a laser cutter, which, you know, you can make some poison gas with. But beyond the safety it’s just a matter of letting people mess around with things. And like, Feral Vector is a festival I run, the venue is quite restricted, like, running any kind of classroom set up there takes out a huge amount of the venue for quite a lot of the day. That usually means we don’t get to have a production office or something and we actually found it way more productive to just ask people - “What can you teach someone in ten minutes, sat at a table?” and suddenly we had game developers learning to do lino printing, or all kinds of different stuff and it’s just having the facilities there for people to drop in and use, where they could engage with it for five minutes, or they could sit there for four hours chatting but either way, it’s that people find the level that suits them in terms of learning a tool or using a thing and that adaptability is a really productive thing to build into things. It is absent utterly from most tech. 00:51:25

KF: I think what you described to me too, and I guess what I was getting at here, is that you told me that you know, you have those experiences, you teach people how to learn a tool and then it changes how they think. 00:51:31

DH: Yeah, I mean once you are aware of how a particular tool works it becomes part of how you solve every problem from then on. At least potentially. The most extreme example I’ve seen is, a laser cutter is just dangerous enough that you need to have an induction to use it cause you know if you put the wrong material in there it will make chlorine gas or something but once you have that generally I saw that people who had learned to use it would come up with a laser-cut solution to every single problem they had about physical making for the next few months. Which is like this really interesting drive, because then they explore all of the affordances of a laser cutter and laser cut materials and they may do a load of quite shoddy experiments in that time but through an entirely self driven process they figure out exactly how that tool is useful to them and it becomes a part of how they think. 00:52:25

RE: That is a point though, the internet’s made everyone think that everything’s perfect straight away. You know, social media, like, you’re just perfect, everything’s perfect and actually loads of times you have to mess around and not make perfect things to get to there and so that illusion from the internet is on that too. 00:52:40

DH: It’s kind of a sore point I have in hack spaces with any kind of digital manufacturing tools, is like, people love laser cutters, 3D printers, CNC mills especially because they think the process is - you design a thing in a piece of software and then you feed it to the machine and then your finished object comes out. Perfect. Actually the nicer things people make with those are when they view them as part of a process. So sure, you laser cut some plywood components but you also sand and finish them. Or you combine them with some other process. That’s how you end up with a really lovely object but a lot of people do just want that experience of, like, push the button, get the thing. 00:53:23

KF: It’s funny that we’ve got the expression about, you know, when you’re holding a hammer up everything looks like a nail, but I think, I think you just, the one that’s come to mind for me is usually like, the satisfaction of having a staple gun, or a glue gun, like that’s the stuff. You know, you hold a staple gun, something’s getting stapled. You know. 00:53:37

RE: That’s kind of a good metaphor for PlaceCal. 00:53:39

KF: Is it?! 00:53:42

RE: Like the 3D printer and the sander, do you know what I mean?

KF: Cool, well, maybe we’ll leave it there. So thanks both for coming on that was an ace episode and yeah, we’ll see you all next time.

The Trans Dimension

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Trans Dimension is an online community hub which connects trans communities across the UK by collating news, events and services by and for trans people in one easy-to-reach place. It was funded by the Comic Relief Tech for Good “Build” fund, and builds on GFSC’s existing work on PlaceCal.

We created it with Gendered Intelligence, the UK’s largest trans-led national charity. As a studio led by trans and non-binary disabled people, this was a dream collaboration and hopefully the start for many more exciting projects. Our pilot focussed on London where Gendered Intelligence are active, and we are now planning a UK-wide rollout. Artwork is by the awesome Harry Woodgate and graphic design and logo by frequent collaborator Squid.

Tech wise, The Trans Dimension is a static site created in Elm Pages that feeds in event data from the PlaceCal GraphQL API. This gives Gendered Intelligence full control over the site. We can now use this formula to create other interest-based sites that are independent of PlaceCal’s codebase and branding.

Why is this so important?

People who are trans, non-binary or gender diverse experience:

Higher levels of social isolation, exclusion & loneliness
Higher levels of discrimination, shame, abuse & violence
Greater inequalities in health & wellbeing, especially mental health, and
Less opportunity in terms of education, training & employment

As a result,4 in 5 trans people experienced transphobic hate crime in 2020. Experiences like these can be a deterrent to finding crucial and life-saving support networks.

Right now, NHS waiting lists for trans healthcare are up to five years long, and there is more pressure than ever on mental health services. If we can support our users to build networks and reduce their social isolation, we hope we can build collective resilience and build a national network of trans-led and trans-friendly groups. Together, they can create safe spaces for trans people and battle the seemingly never-ending wave of transphobia sweeping the UK and the world.

What are the difficulties?

Whilst many organisations and trans community groups maintain their own social calendars, they’re not ‘owned’ by the wider community, nor are their listings as easily discoverable as they could be.

Right now, finding events means knowing where to look in the first place, and then going to each separate website to try to find something relevant to your interests. Facebook can be a good tool but fundamentally pits groups against each other for attention. It also increases the barriers to access if you’re not already well socially connected. There is also a high chance of being ‘outed’ by clicking Facebook links by accident which can be very off-putting for some.

Once you’ve found an event or group of interest, trans people need to carefully vet each event to determine whether it is safe. Even events listed as for the “LGBTQ+” community may not actually be trans-friendly.

If you’re trans and disabled, your work is even harder. Disabled people often have to email, call, or visit venues ahead of time due to a lack of public accessibility information.

These barriers prevent trans people from meeting each other and developing friendships, and in turn prevent us from building the strong, supportive trans communities we need.

How will we make a difference?

The Trans Dimension is a shared, community-owned system which many providers can contribute to—removing the need for cross-checking. It will help people find trans-friendly events and build a wider sense of community. The Trans Dimension will enable even the smallest community groups to have an equal online presence & advertise events alongside larger groups.

We’ve worked with both GI staff and Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People to create a care-based guide to inclusion and accessibility for trans and disabled people. We’re now looking at how best to put this advice into practice and create some cultural change around accessibility.

Listings are moderated centrally by a dedicated staff member at Gendered Intelligence, meaning listings will be relevant and up-to-date. Putting on events is hard and often thankless, and there’s very little support for you out there. We hope that we can use The Trans Dimension to support all these groups and create a network of people working together on trans liberation.

“I am delighted to see the advent of The Trans Dimension. It’s just what the trans community needs. As an organiser of a trans meetup group myself I couldn’t believe how many events were happening each week, most of which I’d never heard of before. This is a great resource and a super way to stay up to date. I can’t wait to see how this evolves in the future.”

Ray Lavery, London Transgender Meetup

We hope that The Trans Dimension will help create a world where trans people of every age and ability can safely access the potentially life saving support of community networks, and where all trans people feel welcome.

Announcing the Geeks for Social Change Podcast!

Thu, 11 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to all the lovely people who filled in our GFSC supporter survey, we learnt that podcasts are super popular with you all, with over 60% of you listening to them.

We’ve spent the last few months chatting to friends about what this could be about, and landed on a simple concept: a series of conversations with our extended networks about our day to day lives navigating technology, ethics and activism.

We’re delighted to present the first episode to you today. Mallory Moore (Trans Safety Network), Zara Manoehoetoe (youth worker and community organiser), and Dr Kim Foale (Geeks for Social Change) discuss technologies of state and empire that control our lives. With a special focus on UK trans legal status and lengthy prison sentences given to black teenagers for sending text messages in Manchester.

You can listen to it below, or on anchor.fm. We’ll be adding it to all the major podcast platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, Amazon etc) today.

Subscribe via RSS, Sticher, Spotify, Radio Public, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music or Spotify for Podcasters

“I see a lot of the criminal justice system as a technology for further aggravating class divides”

– Mallory Moore

“[The CPS] is saying what you hold in your phone, what data sits in your laptop, that is who you truly are as a person”

– Zara Manoe

“One day I’m going to have to pass the exam to prove I’m a gender disaster goblin, will that be an official form?”

– Kim Foale

If you liked it and want to support us, feel free to send us a tip – needless to say noone is paying us for these and there’s a lot of production costs involved in terms of equipment, transcription, production, etc. We also have Patreon and OpenCollective set up but are yet to get rolling on these – anyone wanna be our first backer? 🥰

Episode information

Glossary

CPS: (UK) Crown Prosecution Service
GMP: Greater Manchester Police
“Fedposting”: Publishing intent to commit a criminal act online

References

CeCe McDonald (cw: extreme violence against a trans woman)
Kill the Bill
Kids of Colour
The Real World of Technology - Ursula Franklin
Trans Safety Network

Credits

Music: Cooking, Sharing, Happy Seasons! by Megan Arnold
Transcription: Amy Ní Mhurchú
Thanks to Amy Ní Mhurchú and Gabrielle de la Puente for their invaluable support and feedback

Transcript

Kim: Hello. I’m Kim Foale and this is the first Geeks for Social Change podcast. I’m joined today by two amazing guests. We’ve got Zara Manoehoetoe from a range of groups of Manchester, probably point at one and she’s on it, and with Mallory Moore from Trans Safety Network, again among many other groups. I’ll let them introduce themselves in a second but I just wanted to say that the point of this podcast is to start getting some conversations we’ve been having privately about tech and activism and the intersections between the two down on paper. We tried doing this as kind of a zine and we’ve tried doing, writing it up and coming up with other formats but, like, I think, I’m sure they’ll both join me in realising a lot of the best conversations we have at the moment just seem to be in group chats or voice notes or emails or things which just - or discord conversations - and things which never sort of get written down anywhere. So we’re here to kind of explore this interplay and see if we can sort of, through these conversations, come to a better understanding about how these two things work together. [00:01:49]

Kim: So without further ado I will introduce Zara. So do you wanna tell me kind of what you’ve been working on, how you’re feeling this week, anything you’re excited or sad about? [00:01:59]

Zara: Um, so yes, hi, I’m Zara. I am involved in a lot of anti racism, abolitionist organising and have been for quite some time. I’m Manchester based, Manchester born and bred, Manchester and proud. Let’s just get that straight out there. But, yeah, no, been heavily involved in kind of the ‘Kill the Bill’ movement, the mobilisations with Black Lives Matter and now looking really into building foundations in the community to counteract the harm that we’re facing through the state. Whether that be through like cop watching but also raising awareness with children and young people around the harms that they’re faced with and their families and that kind of stuff. I’m feeling ok. I have had a whirlwind of a couple of weeks but yeah, I’m feeling ok. Happy to be here, in good company. [00:03:02]

Mallory: Hi, I’m Mallory Moore. I’m one of the founding members of Trans Safety Network and I have are, well, previous to that of various grassroot activism since my teens, I‘ve been doing various sorts of activism on and off. My big things right now are trans safety research and trying to make it so that harm to trans people actually matters because it’s something which keeps disappearing just because no one is particularly interested in it - which it’s a funny thing because everybody talks about it, but anyway, I won’t go too deep into that one. And in terms of how I’m feeling, I’m feeling pretty good though. There seems to be a bit of a swell of various sorts of grassroots - and it’s small, but people are starting to get a bit more creative, and it’s something that’s really inspiring me, away from the usual kind of institutional left. So that’s a big deal for me. [00:04:16]

Kim: I think that’s a really good segway to, kind of, what we want, d’you know, just this episode to this whole podcast to be about. Which is kind of, I think these two terms, kind of, activism and tech, are both, the more we’ve looked into them in kind of developing this idea just the sort of, the more vague and weird and undefined they are and how I think almost everyone who defines, who describes themselves as an activist, hates the term actually and ends up almost immediately kind of making a sort of like: “well an activist, but not that kind of activist” kind of gesture, right? And we all do it and we all talk about it. And I think there’s possibly, like, a feeling that there’s maybe some bad things about it that really don’t appeal to us. And I think the same with anarchists, like, a lot of these terms feel almost like cringe, y’know? Like who would say they’re an activist? Who would say they’re an anarchist? How cringe is that! And I think the same with tech. So a lot of the perception we have of tech is very, its kind of all good or all bad, you know. Its either the thing that’s gonna save us all or its all terrible and surveilling us, and so yeah, I think we’re gonna try and get into these a little bit. So I wondered, first, if either of you have got any thoughts on, kind of like, what we mean by an activist, if it’s something you identify with, if you hate it, cause I do, Is there anything else you’re using at the moment? [00:05:29]

Zara: I actually cringe when people are like: “and meet Zara…activist!” and I’m like, ok, but what does that mean to you? I think, I just think so many people are activists - and that’s cool like, people can do what they wanna do and if you’re doing good then that’s great but I also think that it’s a label that’s, y’know, has so many different definitions and is used in so many different ways and it’s also used as, like, a label to, like, exclude and invalidate your work and what you stand for as well. It’s like the term radical, like: “Zara, she’s radical” and it’s like ok next you’re going to call me an extremist. D’you know what I mean? And all those kind of things. But, yeah, I mean, I don’t usually talk about myself and my position but I would say like: “oh yeah, I’m involved in like a lot of grassroots community campaigns and I’m involved in a lot of organising activities” and that kind of stuff. But yeah, there are definitely people that would tell me, like: “you’re an activist”. [00:06:41]

Mallory: Yeah, I guess if I jump in here, on the trans front, there’s like currently this thing called the ‘TRA’ which is, like, ‘Trans Rights Activists’. It’s been chosen as a term because it sounds like ‘MRA’ or ‘Men’s Rights Activist’ and there’s this idea, like, these evil TRAs taking over the world, like, we’re secretly plotting in the shady corners of the world in our volcano layers. [00:07:06]

Kim: Good. [00:07:07]

Mallory: And taking over everything. And the truth is, I am. But actually it’s kind of disappointing sometimes cause you get, like, every single trans person’s a TRA if they speak publicly about anything. So I guess my relationship with the sort of activist stigma is kind of the reverse where I see quite reactionary trans people who aren’t necessarily doing anything for the community. I don’t want to name too many names because there’s too many of them and they’re, like y’know, basically celebrities, or z-list celebrities and y’know the moment they say anything about trans issues they’re a trans activist. Literally every trans person’s like, I’ve worked hard for my radical stripes and like, literally every trans person’s written off as a radical these days and I feel like, the room just isn’t there for me to like, be pushing a radical agenda. Which is really upsetting for me because I guess that’s something I’ve wanted to have and there’s just no space left cause it’s what we’re allowed to say and what sort of things we’re allowed to imagine have been cut back and back and back in the media so far at this point I’m not even on the edge anymore. [00:08:46]

Kim: Yeah, I think we, y’know, the other term that is thrown around alot is kind of abolitionism. In this case meaning sort of, like, getting rid of systems. Cause let’s face it, in the UK most of them are bad. If you point at anything, it probably needs abolishing, let’s face it. But I think, yeah it’s really interesting cause if you ask most people what their image of being an activist is it’s usually something along the lines of, kind of, going to a protest or being kind of obnoxious in some way, y’know. Like, it’s the people are terrified of, well maybe terrified is the wrong word but you look at groups like Insulate Britain and people just see them as someone who’s slowing them down getting to work, or whatever, right? Like, that’s like, the only concept people have got and yeah, like you say, it’s just bananas with trans activism where we’re sort of asking for things that five years ago were not controversial. But because that’s so distant from where the overton window is at the moment it seems radical, so yeah. I’m really interested for you to talk more, Zara, about what you were saying about this term activist being used as a way to kind of exclude people or set them apart. [00:09:53]

Zara: Well I think, see for me, the funny thing is, is that I never realised that the work that I was doing would be considered activism because it was just what I did based on the fact that I come from a community that is persecuted based off the fact that we’re working class, racialised, and so it was just, like, standing up for ourselves. It was what we were taught to do from young. And then as I got older I became involved in, you know, “organising”. But because of, like, working in and around Manchester, I study social policy, you know, sitting at tables with people who were in charge of institutions and in positions of power and authority and in positions that were able to kind of, frame strategies and frameworks that affected my communities. And I’m talking, for years this, like, because I’ve always been the gobby one in the room, in the workplace, like, I’ve never been able to keep my mouth shut. When I was an apprentice, they liked it but then once I was a paid employee it was like: “okay, slow down”. They would say things like: “Oh, this isn’t an activist space. We’re doing things differently here” and, you know, “You don’t have to shout about things. You don’t need to get so angry”. Well, actually, people are being tasered to death, or, you know, people are being harassed on the daily in the streets by the police, or, you know, we’ve got social services coming in removing children that don’t need removing, what needed happening was the parents needed support. I am angry. My anger is valid and when I’m nice and I’m calm and I’m like “okay” you aren’t listening to me. So I need to bring my assertive self into that space for you to take me seriously. And to say, you know, you have to work within the system. Well the system is causing me harm and I’m here sat at this table, conversing with you, telling you what you can do in your positions of power to make it better for us and then you’re saying: “Oh but we can’t do that because that’s too much change” or “That’s not how we do things” or “Things need to take time and we need to do some research into this”. We don’t need to do any research because our lived experience is sat in front of you. And that’s how they’d use it. They’d use the term “activism”, “activist”, to kind of say: “Oh”, you know, “calm down a bit. Not here, not round this table”. It invalidated it because it wasn’t, you know, what I was presenting was the lived experience of myself, community members, reflections, examples, real life examples, with badge numbers and recordings. But because that information wasn’t presented to them in a report, written by a doctor from a local university research center, it wasn’t valid for them. Which is really, really sad because those institutions make money off my lived experience and then present it to strategy leads and policy leads and make recommendations. All while anonymising us but taking credit for that work and thousands of pounds, even millions of pounds is thrown at that but the recommendations aren’t followed. And it’s just a cycle of experience, research, experience, research and nothing actually changes fundamentally for us in our lives. [00:13:33]

Mallory: Yeah, it’s that real relationship of inequality around who’s allowed to produce knowledge. That happens a lot. It happens for us a lot as well. [00:13:48]

Kim: Yeah, so I think, like, there’s a couple of themes that come up there for me. I think one of them is, like, which I wasn’t expecting when we started this. It almost feels like there’s an element of something akin to whistleblowing to a lot of the work we’re doing. Where it’s being the one to be willing to be the one to stick your head above and say actually, this isn’t good enough. And it’s interesting to pull it out but I feel like the other part we maybe have talked about less and I’d like to hear what both of you do as kind of, like, what are the activities that you do that, I don’t want to say ‘make you an activist’ because we’re trying to get away from that term, but, like, what are the activities you do that feel are the kind of most benefit to your immediate communities. So, like, to give examples, I think for me a lot of the time it’s kind of like working on some software stuff with Geeks for Social Change that we’ll talk about on future episodes, you know, like that, cause often the most useful thing I can do for other people is to just, like, help them out with some, like, basic tech support or do some stats or something. But I think on a more day to day level it feels more about being there to support my sort of friends and comrades and colleagues, like, emotionally and, like, making space to have these kind of conversations and to like invite people around for dinner and to, like, encourage people to talk about, like, the things that are bothering them and the kind of, like, you know, this dissonance between the experience of living in the country and, like, what you’re supposed to think it is, you know? I feel like there’s such a mish-mash there and especially post-COVID, when we’re supposed to be in this sort of, leveling up and everything’s better now and it’s gone back to normal and most of us are still processing what’s happened, you know. I can’t put my finger on it but it just feels, like, sometimes being what I think of as activism is just like, paying attention to this huge disconnect that feels everywhere right now. [00:15:34]

Mallory: So I guess there is that kind of care and I do that too with, kind of, with other activists who are like peers, other people doing community work and community, trying to have a relationship of care with other people who are doing that work in community. You know, telling people they’ve done good. Listening to them talking about stuff that’s stressing them out. Trying to provide experience where I’ve got it or direct people onto people who might be able to help them if I don’t have it. I think that’s, like, that’s a foundational thing, just making sure that it’s sustainable, like, I’ve got a peer organiser that I do a weekly debrief with privately and we just talk about shit that’s happened and just deal with it and try and work out, not even try and work out solutions to it but just, like, talk out shit that’s happened in the last week. Cause there’s always something. [00:16:30]

Zara: I would say that I do a range of things. So you might see me on a Saturday with a megaphone stood on St. Peter’s Square, shouting my mouth off. Leading chants, marching but then, you know, the back office organising that comes with that, organising a demo. But then, and that’s like, you’re typical, innit? But then I also do information sharing, raising awareness within the community, like the biggest thing that I think I do is listening and offering space, again, like, what you just talked about, because then I am able to take what I listen and what I hear and do something with that. In many ways it’s actually kind of a real driving force behind my work and I am able to identify needs within the community. So recently there’s been, like, a rollout of, like, know your rights training that’s been made available to children and young people, parents, allied professionals within the youth work sector. But also things like, being involved with intervention of stop and searches and what that looks like and supporting people to, you know, find the information that they need to be able to challenge and take on services and institutions that are causing them harm but then also mapping them with an organisation that can provide immediate safety or care or support, in that moment. So yeah, a range of things and I’m lucky actually to be surrounded by people like youse who, like, I like to think of myself as, like, a younger. I’m like thirty now but that I have like, all these people who are just around me who I’m able to be like: “Can I just talk this through for a minute?” and you know this is happening, I say all the time, like, I walk with confidence because I have so many people around me who offer this knowledge and information to me and, like, me and Kim have been known to be voice-noting ‘till 1 o’clock in the morning. But yeah, no, and I like to think that I bring that information and share it with others. [00:19:12]

Kim: It’s interesting cause when you talk about it this way, it’s almost like, you know, it almost feels like the work that goes on in the network level is like a big mycelial network and the protests are like the mushrooms that spring up, right? But it’s kind of, it’s kind of wild cause I guess maybe, because protest is seen as like, the entry point to activism, maybe we get to blame the SWP for this now I think about it! Another thing to put on their shit list. Like, it’s like, all this other stuff I feel is almost like, more important, is much more important on a day - to - day basis. I think protest is like, often a flash point and a way of letting off steam and it should be a way of like, experiencing joy and seeing your friends and hanging out. It’s just, I’m not sure how people can get involved in this if they don’t go via this protest route. Which then kind of, sets the scene for everything that comes after and you end up with just the angry ones, like us hanging around. I don’t know. I suppose everyone’s angry, I don’t know. [00:20:12]

Mallory: Yeah, I mean, there’s other ways people find into activism. Like, around community care activism there’s a lot of people who end up coming into contact with that through, and peer advocacy that happens, a lot of people come into contact with that through a crisis happens in their life and they need support of some kind and then they come out the other end and if they’re ok and they’ve got the resources they get trained up themselves. Like, there are other models for things and the benefit of that kind of model is that those people aren’t coming in because they were looking to be a ‘do-gooder’, they’re, kind of, coming in because they’ve got their own lived experiences of the situations and they’re becoming an activist as a result of sharing their, what helped them survive crises, in order to strengthen other people going through that again after them. [00:21:15]

Kim: I think that’s good. So maybe we should go on and talk about, like, technology a little bit. And I think I’ll frame this a bit cause I think the word technology, especially in the last ten years, has come to mean something very rarified that it hasn’t always. So the literal etymology of technology - I mean there’s a few sites that give you different ones - it’s from the Greek and it means: “systemic treatment of an art, craft or technique”. So really there’s two parts to this. There’s kind of like, the thing itself that’s being made and the process that it’s made through. So you know, at Geeks for Social Change we’ve started talking about tools and processes for community liberation and this is why, because we think it breaks it down a bit. It’s like a lot of the things we’re talking about here, you know, like protest, information sharing, community care, these are all processes. And in doing them we use tools and these things get various amounts of attention, you know. Just to give this a bit more flesh too, like, Ursula Franklin is an amazing Canadian physicist who wrote a really seminal work called ‘The Real World of Technology’ that we’d advise everyone to read but there’s a series of lectures too that we’ll, we’ll link under the podcast afterwards. But she splits technologies into two kinds, so basically this, she calls them holistic or prescriptive technologies and basically this is the difference between a work related tool and a control related tool. So a work related technology, such as a typewriter, are designed to make tasks easier. This has also been seen as, there’s things like making a pot, where, you know, usually when you have a pottery class everyone’s involved - a potter is involved in every stage from collecting the raw material to making the final thing. And while the pots might all look the same, they’re all slightly different and will have been adapted and gone through the same process and effectively the potter is in control of this work. Or if you’re using a single, non networked computer, the computer operator is in control of this work. And then, a prescriptive technology is more like a technology of the boss. So if we think about, say, making something like a steel beam, this is then like a universal unit that can then be sort of, picked up and reproduced. Or if we think about a computer that becomes networked, that’s then something that a boss can sort of, see how much is being produced. And so it, it turns it around and it means that it enables this control by people on the workers that are doing it. And I think that it’s interesting that these two, even though they might have the same tool, the process here is very different. So this is how we’ve been thinking about technology and I think we’ve not been, necessarily communicating it very well. But I just wanted to put this in to like, frame tech. I don’t know if that’s way too academic or like, what people think about that and how you think about, kind of, what technology is and how you use it in your day to day life. I don’t know who wants to go first. [00:24:07]

Zara: It’s all tech to me. It’s that thing that I’m not very good at and I don’t really get, in a nutshell. I have a phone, I have a laptop. Can just about use, like, Zoom and Word and that kind of stuff. But in terms of like, with the work, like, organising it’s only since meeting you, understanding that the two need marrying together and that that work is actually taking place. I just wasn’t aware of it because the work that I’ve always been involved in has been very, boots on the ground, face to face meetings, meeting with people in the community, it’s always been like, conversational and if we had brought, if there was any kind of techy bit to it, it was basically to like email someone and like emailing lists and you know, recording misconduct by the police on a phone for instance. But then, as the years have gone by, and the organising has gone kind of national its been like, ok, we need to really get more structure around what we’re doing but then also understanding how we can be infiltrated through tech, how we can be monitored through tech, how we’re so easy to track and trace and that the government and, you know, all of these statutory bodies and services have whole teams of, like, media and communication and all that kind of stuff that we’re having to deal with and it’s funny cause they do a lot of their work as well like through tech, like, consultations but we’re we’re not accessing any of that information because it is online and it is free surveys and all that kind of stuff. So, I’m still finding my footing but then I’m also understanding that I don’t need to understand everything, I just need to communicate with the people that do, so that then they can do their magic and we can work together. [00:26:26]

Mallory: Like, I think it’s interesting that the first thing you said was that tech is not something that you’re not very good at and I probably should have explained in my introduction, I’m a technologist for a living but like, yeah. I think this is actually a big feature of what’s happening with tech in terms of automation and computerisation of technology. Whereas, the examples Kim gives of tech being, like, you know, potter’s wheels and things like that. Which is not how a lot of people think of tech these days. For me tech is like, you know, includes human processes and you know, how we talk to each other. If we have a process for, like, vetting new members of an activist group to see if they’re safe or not, things like that are still technology to me. But, like, what’s going on in part is that, like, you say you’ve got these technologies of surveillance and control that are invading our lives through being useful, like, phones are useful. But they’re not transparent to you, they betray you to the police, they send your information to, like, advertisers, which is sold. You don’t have control over that very easily. Most people don’t have control over that. So yeah, like, I think this aspect of the lack of transparency in tech is such a huge problem in terms of how hard it is for people to have any control over their lives when all of that belongs to people with ownership over the tech. Ownership of the ways, ownership of the means. The tools and the processes all belong to someone else and they work for someone else, even if you’ve paid money for it, which is, like, that’s kind of the thing. [00:28:31]

Zara: It’s funny that you , like, when you say it, like, I think of tech as this big massive black hole. You know like the phone stuff and like yeah that’s happening up there somewhere and I don’t really get it and it’s, but I need my phone. [00:28:48]

Mallory: Yeah, cause that belongs to someone else. That’s kind of what I mean. That all of that process, like right from the, like, silicone chips in your phone and how those are organised, all the way up to the equipment in the satellite that’s like taking all of your phone calls to some other place, the whole thing belongs to someone else. And because they have control over it, you don’t get to see how that works, even if you were able to understand it, which is like, yeah. [00:29:15]

Zara: And I think that actually, like, to me, the unknown is quite scary. So instead of pursuing the scariness, I just kind of black it out. Like, even at uni I was the person who went and sat in the library, pulling the physical books off the bookshelves and reading them and writing notes by hand rather than accessing all these PDFs because once I’ve downloaded something, I can never then find it again and, you know, al these different things, and I think so and then, but what you said about, processes also being, like, human processes. Now those I can do. I’m very meticulous with ways of working and I like my lists and I like this and I like that. So thinking of it like that is, like, nice for me actually - to take out of this conversation. [00:30:04]

Kim: Yeah, like, something that really triggered a lot of this thought process for us too was just this statement people make when they say, like: “I’m not a tech person” or “I don’t really get computers” and I’m kind of challenged to find a single person, at least in the UK, who doesn’t spend a decent part of their everyday life, like, on their computer, or their phone, doing something. And it’s, like, it’s so embedded in everyday life and I don’t think it was always like this. I think, I can’t remember, you know, like, facebook, youtube, twitter, they’re all less than 15 years old, I’m pretty sure, I’d have to check the dates and it’s wild how fast this has kind of changed what organising looked like. So I think, you know, when I started out as a baby activist, what it meant to be an activist was to organise events and festivals and put stuff on that your friends could come to and make social places and set up squats and do fun stuff. And I feel like when I was doing tech stuff back then that was more like, helping people lay out, like, set up magazines in like Quark XPress or whatever, or it was setting up networks in community centres, or it was like, making old, piecing together thin client computers from bits out of a skip. And at some point in the last sort of ten years or so, that’s just not the case any more and increasingly, like, it’s gone from tech people being, like, individuals who would, like, you know, make a quick website for a community centre or put together a network and have a general range of skills, to being this sort of very rarified thing where, like, if you learned, if you go and learn about how to be a programmer nowadays you’ll learn a very specialist thing that just basically, you know, what massive companies want and you’ll sit on a team of two hundred and do some really specialised parts. You know, I’ve spoken to people who do this, like, they’ll program sort of, like, 3D CAD software in the cloud in javascript but like, they’ve never deployed a website, you know. And I can’t get my head around that and it feels like, I think exactly like you said Zara. It’s like a black hole. It’s like, it’s been designed to feel like you’re powerless. And I think weirdly what we’ve got here now, with this sort of, you know, with this facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google - F.A.A.N.G. as people call it - it’s kind of a real oppressor/oppressed situation and what always happens when you’ve got an oppressed group is that it just feels stupid and like it’s their fault, right? And actually, like, it’s the other way around, it’s been deliberately engineered to be like this, in this sort of, like, global, totalitarian, fascist worldview, I mean and is it fair to call the structure of facebook literally fascist, I think it is? And yet like, everyone feels like they’re suddenly each individually a personal failure for, like, not being able to fit in with it, right? [00:32:35]

Mallory: Like, if you think about a shovel, right? Let’s break down technology really, really simply. If you think about a shovel, that is a piece of technology that is designed for one person, with one pair of hands, ok. And it’s got, like, a thing at the end that you hold. It’s got a shaft that you hold as well. You dig things with it. It’s got a place where you can put your foot. That’s a one person thing and it’s designed with the intention - this isn’t something that we think about when we look at a shovel - but it’s designed with the intention that one person is going to be using that. Not two people, or, like, any other configuration. It’s not gonna be very useful for someone with, like, only one hand. Various other things are going to be problematic for it because it’s been designed with one purpose. And if you look at things like facebook or, like, the mobile phone network, that stuff’s opaque, not because it’s not visible to you as an end user, because the intention is that you’re an end user - shut up! Like, it’s not that the end users are stupid. And I’ve worked on telecoms equipment, they have lots of information, they have like, a standard telecoms hub taking like, fibre into, like, a fibre cabinet or something like that, you know it has a special access door for, for law enforcement that’s, like, standard built into all of them. So for some people it’s very very easy to access that kind of technology, for everyone else, it isn’t. And they’re designed that way, like, it’s not - people often feel stupid because, like, Kim said, people feel stupid because they’re disempowered because the technology is disempowering. Wasn’t designed with a handle for them to hold onto and I think that’s really, you know, the handles are all pointing towards the people who own the equipment or the people who have legal powers to seize control of the equipment. [00:34:42]

Zara: And it’s funny cause like, so I’m thirty, so I’ve watched things come in and it’s funny cause I say all the time, I’m so glad that I actually had a childhood - and I call it a childhood cause I used to go out and play kirby, and knock-a-door, run and d’you know what I mean? Whereas the young people that I work with, my nephews, my nieces, all them, they’ve just been on screens from day dot and but for them, this is their norm, so they’ve been born an end user with tech how it is now and don’t know any different. Although, like, some of them, young people that I work with, are into coding and are doing that in libraries now, from the get go, but like, what you’re talking about, this whole, like, infiltration mechanism that’s built into this tech that nobody’s aware of, I think, even when people are aware of it a lot of people are just like, just like when the state refuses to feed children and it’s: “oh that’s the way it is, there’s nothing you can do to change it”, whereas, like, especially now, for instance in Manchester, I have a real motivation to be educating children about how the data on their phone can be used against them. Like, media, and how, even just media that’s on your phone can be used against you and I think we have to be thinking that way now, don’t we? And it’s funny because that is a forked path that you’s will have had for years, I’m guessing, like, just, kind of being in that zone. Whereas I’m just still catching up because we, a lot of the work I’m involved in is still very much is still about putting chairs out in a community centre and putting them away and making brews and, you know, having physical space for conversation and a lot of our activism is face to face but what we’re now realising is the experience is also tied to the tech in your lives when you’re not in those spaces. [00:36:46]

Kim: This might be a good segway into talking about a huge case that just happened last week with a joint enterprise trial. It’s the 30th of May, I’m not sure when we’ll be broadcasting this but I wondered if either of you, do you feel able to an introduction to this case, Zara? Cause I think it’s maybe, a lot of this can sound really virtual but I think where we’re coming with this is like, this is very real and very literal and happening right now. [00:37:10]

Zara: Yeah, so, the case that’s happened, actually looks like a joint enterprise case but the doctrine of joint enterprise wasn’t used. So, joint enterprise is a doctrine that’s used to convict a group of people for the same offence based off the fact that there can be evidence that people have knowledge of this singular offence taking place. And we’ve seen it happen before in Manchester multiple times, use of joint enterprise where, a violent crime has been committed by one, two, three people and groups of up to twelve or fifteen people have been prosecuted, found guilty and sentenced for that, whether that be for murder or, you know, like, a serious harm. Because they have been found to be closely associated, or have knowledge of that harm taking place. So what’s happened in Manchester, just now, is that ten boys have tragically lost a friend in 2020 and were conversing in a group chat, following this, in moments of grief, to organise a memorial. Different things happened in aftermath, where harm took place in terms of, like, which involved a weapon and a car, which two or three of the boys, three of the boys were involved in and had knowledge of, at two different times but ten boys in this group chat were arrested by the police because of being part of this group chat and were charged with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to commit grevious bodily harm and all ten have been found guilty of that. And basically, the evidence that has been used in this trial to get that guilty verdict, as presented by the GMP to CPS, has been a telegram group chat in which, links the boys together and then following their arrest their telephones, their telephones, mobile phones, have been taken in and used as evidence with, like, tens of thousands of pieces of media downloaded and gone through by people who aren’t experts in understanding the media and data that was on the phone. These are all ten black boys, I should add at this, you know, should have said at the beginning. And the prosecution have managed to create a narrative around the boys of them being an organised, criminally active gang, based off the fact that they are into music, drill music specifically. All come from very, what would be considered disadvantaged postcodes, you know, they have black skin, they, one of them had a drugs offence. Which actually, was completely, because of a lack of safeguarding, safeguarding failure in his life. So yeah, basically this narrative has been created based off the media that was on their phone where people were posing in pictures and in videos because some of them were rappers and in music groups which then was able to bring forward this gang label because they wore the same colour, where actually some of the evidence they provided in the trial was absolutely misrepresented because it was footage from London and not even with the boys in there, in this group. So the jury, which, you know, we never get a jury of our peers, let’s be serious, found them guilty. Four of them have been found guilty with conspiracy to commit murder and six of them have been found guilty with conspiracy to commit GBH and the sentencing hearing is taking place on the 30th of June. They’re looking at some serious, serious sentencing. Double figure sentencing for a moments, moments of grief, with no [00:41:33]

Kim: In some cases, as few as three text messages, I believe, right? [00:41:36]

Zara: Yes! [00:41:36]

Kim: Yeah. [00:41:37]

[Pause] [00:41:39]

Kim: So I think, yeah, I’m intrigued to bring in Mallory’s thoughts here but I think, you know, one way of looking at this is kind of a massive systemic failure of a load of technological systems, right? So you’ve got policing, you’ve got the courts, you’ve got the individual functions within the ways that these work, you’ve got all this content, which is presumably being pulled from, you know, I presume the drill videos are kind of on YouTube, so it’s almost like none of these services give a fuck, right? They don’t care. It’s like an unreal, kind of, massive catastrophic failure of this whole system to represent these people. [00:42:19]

Mallory: Yeah, I mean in terms of the technological aspect of that, I don’t know where to start. I see a lot of the criminal justice system as a, as a technology for further aggravating class divides. So, yeah, I mean you can tell its, you can tell the criminal justice system is a technology for perpetuating class violence because it does that to ten boys and you know, politicians can do an unknown number of criminal things and get nothing but I’m trying to be a bit less glib but I don’t know what to say because it’s a genuinely shocking, the whole case is really shocking and I don’t know what else to say about it. [00:43:10]

Zara: The key thing for me, in this case, or not, one of the key things is that the media and data on the phone outweighed the actual humanity and their character and I’m not trying to say that people should be excellent and should be, you know, amazing but, these, some of these boys had university places, college places, were involved in football, you know, still lived at home with parents, were just friends off the same estate, off the same areas, you know, had good grades, were attending school, were doing all these things that, you know, we’re told that we have to do when we’re children to comply and, and become a success in life, none of that mattered because the tech told us who they really were, according to the CPS, and this was the argument. It was: their interest in music means that they advocate for violence, their skin colour means that they are part of a gang, you know, the fact that they lost a friend and they wanted to talk about this on this telegram group chat, specifically it being telegram, means that they had something to hide and there was an ulterior motive, when actually, [00:44:30]

Mallory: All sorts of people set up groups on telegram. [00:44:15]

Zara: Well, it’s, after the guilty verdict came back I tweeted: ‘I feel like running up, I’m very, I’ve got mixed feelings, I feel like running up in that courthouse and causing a ruckus’. Once I sent it, I realised, that message is probably very similar to what the boys had said and, you know, and I reply tweeted to it, like: ‘It’s this kind of message that would have me done for conspiracy to commit criminal damage’. [00:45:04]

Mallory: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of a meme in like, online geeky activist circles. Talking about ’fed posting’ and avoiding ‘fed posting’ cause if you fed post, you know, it could come back and bite you later. If they pick you up for one thing then, like, anything dumb you’ve said online becomes evidence. [00:45:27]

Kim: I was gonna say, like, from what you’re saying Zara, it’s weird, like, it’s almost like the, the reality that, it’s almost like who these boys presented themselves as online has been more real to the judge and the jury than who they actually are in real life, right? It’s like these few interactions with social media, like, the sum of them sounds like it’s been more under discussion than who they actually are. [00:45:51]

Zara: And some of this media hadn’t been shared. It was just on their phones. D’you know what I mean? And some of it, it wasn’t them, their interest in other people’s music, you know, made them an advocate for violence and, but yeah, it basically is saying, what you hold in your phone, what data sits in your laptop - that is who you truly are. And I suppose, you know, there’s arguments to be made that people would make, pro that, but when it comes to children who are navigating a very hostile environment who are grieving, and this is one of the things that I said on Saturday, they were grieving, not guilty. [00:46:38]

Mallory: It’s basically thought crime, isn’t it? Like, simply enough, like, people used, people use social media to get their thoughts out, even if it’s bollox and like frequently most of us just type bollox and like, this is essentially just thought crime, what’s going on. [00:47:00]

Zara: But who would have known, like, and this is the big thing for me, like, working with children and young people, because I don’t believe that children and young people should be policed around their expression of self. I really don’t. I think children should be free to explore themselves, to be free to experience what their interested in, to change in interest and, you know, all that kind of stuff but there’s something, there’s a piece of work there that I haven’t quite thought out, yet, but I am in the process of thinking through, around how we, because technically this would be considered political education, what I’m talking about right now, is we need to be letting young people know how this can happen to anybody. The ramifications of being a child, basically, like, and I don’t want to stop them from being a child but I want to prevent this from ever happening again. [00:48:00]

Kim: I guess we’ve talked a lot about tech as being something scary and that’s oppressing people and I think for the most part, it is, and I think this is what I see missing from most mainstream tech discourse. It’s just like, there’s always this, it’s sort of portrayed as this, kind of, value neutral thing where it’s, like: ‘we’ve made a cool new little widget, isn’t that nice?’ and then you look at the sort of sum total of it all and it’s, like, no, it’s definitely not nice. But I was gonna, kind of, move on a bit to just, I think there’s possibly a lot of parallels here to the work that I know you do with transphobia, Mallory, and just the similar patterns where you’ve kind of got the media and, you know, like, a bunch of really hostile twitter accounts and they really use these tools to, kind of portray trans people in a certain light and I, I don’t know really where I’m going with this question but I’m just kind of interested what you see as kind of, are there any ways of resisting this or is it just sort of, like, you know, fighting a losing battle, do you think? And in what ways would we resist this? [00:49:01]

Mallory: So like, on the trans questions, with respect to institutional transphobia and technology, like, the history of, the big one is, like, trans health care and the history of trans healthcare is one of trying to stop people being trans, fundamentally, like, transition related healthcare that we have now started off with them trying to stop people being trans and then realising that they couldn’t and then, like, helping people transition. Helping the few people who, like, got through that hazing process, to transition but, like, deciding that trying to prevent people transitioning was, like, a good idea. So, we’re in, like, this current, so there’s that angle on things of our whole healthcare system is trying to mitigate against our existence and then there’s all this other side of stuff which is like the processes in society in general, regulating gender, regulating legal gender and how spaces are, spaces and processes are gendering. So there’s this great book called captive genders and it includes stuff like the ways that, like, it’s got stuff by Cece McDonald who was a black trans woman who was incarcerated in America for killing a white supremacist who was trying to murder her. And she and other people talk about surveillance and gendering and all sorts of other ways that there’s this kind of, invalidation that happens through, you know, what’s your real, legal gender cause we all have, like, legal registered gender in most countries, in most parts of the world. Like, because it’s written down somewhere and because it’s attached to whether you have any rights or not, this institutional weight is added to it and it affects your human rights, it affects how you get treated if you go to prison, it affects how you get treated if you get discriminated against in law, it affects all sorts of rights elsewhere. And there’s this big conflict between, like, fairly white and liberal trans rights organisations who seemed to be mostly interested in, like, tampering around, like: ‘Let’s make these genders valid and legal’, versus a lot of other people who’ve never had proper documentation who will struggle with any system where you have to, like, turn up and provide evidence. Like, it works genuinely, quite a lot like the border system. You have to, like, have documented evidence that you’ve been, like, in this particular condition and that you’ve been validated by these people and you’ve been doing it for two years and you’ve proven you’re a good citizen cause you, like, signed up and you took your hormone pills and you were, like, you know, so you’ve got a right to change gender and then the government will change your gender for you and it’s just absolute, like, the, the entire thing seems to be designed around hampering trans people just getting on with their lives. All for the purpose of maintaining this binary separation between men and women in law. Like, you know, we have other social classes where we can protect against discrimination without having an actual legal status that makes you that thing. We protect against, like, we protect against homophobic discrimination, or against racist discrimination without you legally homosexual or legally black, like, we don’t have that but in terms of gender regulation we still very much have that, so that’s probably what I would say is probably the big, the big divide in trans activism is around wether we should, like, tamper with that system and make it better for some middle class documented trans people who have, like, two or three years worth of documentation and, like, signed letters from two different psychiatrists and can prove, like, they’ve been employed the entire time so they can get a letter from their employers to, like, show that they’ve been properly living as a woman or a man or, like, whatever. Versus people who can, like, recognise that that’s actually really bad as a system and we should probably just abolish it. So, yeah. [Laughs] [00:53:42]

Kim: Does this mean one day I’m going to have to pass the exam to show that I’m just some weird, like, gender disaster goblin? Is that going to be, like, on official government forms? [00:53:49]

Mallory: One of the most passable middle class trans women that I know, who has been, like, transitioned for several years, like, got every single surgery, got, like, bunch of other stuff, got rejected from her first application to change her gender, so it’s, like, maybe they don’t feel like it that day, right? Which again it’s a lot like the home office as far as I’m concerned, it’s a bit, like, I don’t know. Anyway, so. [00:54:22]

Kim: Something that’s really struck me here, is, like, I think we’ve talked a lot recently about, between the three of us, in all these voice messages, talking about, I think, just about the kind of intersectionality to a lot of these issues feels like it’s, kind of, gone down the river a bit because there’s just so many day - to - day fights on all of these issues that kind of take over, especially if you’re a bit terminally online, like, I think it’s fair to say all of us are. And it really just strikes me, like, you know, these are two vastly different use cases, you know, the case of these, kind of, ten black boys from Moss Side and the case of, kind of, like, you know, often, sort of, middle class trans women and, but there’s these, like, real connecting lines and it, and I think this tension between your representation in the technologies that exist to control our lives and how you actually are, as a human being, this seems to be a really big tension. And maybe, almost the cause of, to bring it back, right to the beginning, where a form of activism starts. So maybe what I’m getting is there’s a sense that kind of, like, if, you know, you’re representational fit within this, within this bigger system gets too disconnected from how you actually are, this is almost what forces you to become an activist cause you don’t really have any choice. It’s like the system has like, sort of, popped you off the side, you know, like you don’t fit anymore and then really the only option you have is to kind of, I guess, like, depending on your perspective, either fight to be reincluded in it, or fight to change the system because it sucks. You know, I’ve been talking recently about how it’s sort of like, you know, we get invited to these listening events and consultations which basically get ignored and it’s kind of like, they’re passing us felt tips and we’ve kind of got the fire lighters, we’re ready to like burn the thing down. And it’s just like we’re on two completely different wavelengths, you know. [00:56:02]

Zara: It’s funny though cause, like, when it comes back to that tools and processes thing and, like, the example that Mallory gives, it like, working like the home office, when they find something that works they’re gonna roll it out wide. [00:56:18]

Mallory: Yeah! Exactly, exactly. [00:56:20]

Zara: And it makes me think as well, like, because of all this data that they gather on trans people, what we’re going to end up with, is like, we have the gangs matrix, there’s going to be a trans matrix. [00:56:34]

Mallory: There’s a transexuals register.[00:56:37]

Zara: Ok.[00:56:38]

Mallory: [Laughs] I’m not on it because I refuse to sign, I refuse to get myself licensed as a transexual. Fuck it. [00:56:45]

Zara: And what Kim said about, you know, being forced into activism, like, I’m literally a human, I exist, respect my existence or expect resistance comes to mind, but also, like, working within systems of harm. So like, in my professional work environments I have struggled to work in certain settings because it means being complicit with the violence that funding means you have to commit and therefore have had to move away from those places of employment. Same with policy. Like, and that’s why, when I have conversations with people within the community and we’re talking about things and I’m, like, “Ah, so basically, you’re already part of the movement” and they’re like: “What?” and I’m like, well if you’ve stood up for this and you’ve said no to this and you don’t want that because you need this, you’re already with us. You just need to draw the lines and I like to think, I was having this conversation with you the other day Kim, like, I’m quite good at finding links and we have all these individual pieces of legislations and individual policies and strategies and it’s funny cause we’ve talked about this as well, about like greater Manchester strategy. There’s all these individual things but actually they all work quite well together but nobody’s connecting the dots until you’re that in it, that you can only see the dots. And it’s sad for me sometimes because sometimes I wish I couldn’t see the dots, so that I didn’t have to be angry all the time, so that I could just chill out and like, enjoy a night with my friends in town but then something happens and I’m like: “Oh see, look, there you come, policing us” and du-du-du, duh, duh and it’s, it is that intersectionality of oppression and we have to adopt that intersectionality within our organising. And I said it on Saturday, like, my child is your child, your child is my child, like, my fight is your fight, your fight is my fight and it’s only by sharing this information and knowledge that we work towards solutions. And not even changing the systems, just getting rid of them and creating the ones where we’re actually on equal footing from the beginning cause people talk about equality, diversity and inclusion. I’m over the equality part, give me some equity or move out of my way. So yeah, there’s my little rant. I didn’t think I was going to have a rant, I had a rant! [00:59:14]

Kim: Yeah, it’s good. Or I’m increasingly, just like, just pay for me to go on holiday.[00:59:18]

Zara: Give me some sunshine and rest.[00:59:21]

Kim: Beach. Yeah.[00:59:23]

Zara: Yeah, man. [00:59:24]

Kim: I think that’s a really beautiful point to leave it on, unless there’s any final thoughts from Mallory. [00:59:27]

Mallory: No, I’m good, like, yeah.[00:59:32]

Kim: Cool.[00:59:33]

Mallory: I think it’s about ownership. I think it’s about ownership of the process and like that whole Audrey Lorde thing of, like, ‘Master’s tools’. A lot of these systems aren’t working for us because we don’t own them. If we owned them they would work, they would be ours but they’re not. [01:00:01]

Kim: Yeah, processes as things you can own, that’s really good. Hey, maybe that’s the topic for the next one. [01:00:01]

[End] [01:00:04]

Why is it so hard to do nice things, that make a difference, with other people?

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This article is a bloggified version of the talk I gave at EMF 2022 aimed at a hacker/maker/creator community. It’s a bit rougher and more personal than our usual posts, so I hope you like it, and I would love to talk to you all about it over the following months.

Part 1: on the desire to do stuff

I started Geeks for Social Change in about 2016, first as a meetup group, then a reading group, then a research and design studio, and now a collective and studio combo (more on this soon). This came out of a desire to blend together activism, tech and research in groups I was in to make things better and create truly community-led tech. I’m basically a scrappy activist deeply embedded in feminist, trans, abolitionist, antiracist politics, who couldn’t see myself represented anywhere in tech, and the rising term ’tech for good’ hitting extremely wide of the mark for what community groups I worked with needed. I’m now just about ready to start getting all these feelings out my head and onto the page.

Like a lot of long term activists, I was also very burnt out from activism and wanted to do something joyful and fun, to be able to deliver projects with a very “fully automated luxury queer communism” vibe. To get away from the coalface a lot of activism can find itself stuck at, and make a place to actually start building the world we want to live in rather than just fighting the old one.

Making as a basis for joy

I like to think almost everyone has some form of making, coding, producing, sewing, sculpting, knitting, instrument playing, or other arts and crafts process, as a coping mechanism. An activity that’s just for you that brings you joy for its own sake.

Art of noises, a game I made in 2014 as a way of playing with concepts in my PhD as a standalone activity to bring me joy

It feels like we can’t change a lot in the world at the moment and things are pretty grim, but we can at least make some cool doodads. The process of making (or producing) can be therapeutic, keeps us mindful, lets us use our hands, work in non-hierarchical ways, and generally fuck around and find out with low stakes.

I think this is potentially a really really deep form of interacting with the world and at the core of what gives our life meaning. However, we are not really living in a society that allows this joy to be at the forefront of our lives, making it something we have to fit into the cracks.

“We live in a world which is generally disagreeable, where not only people but the established powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects, are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. The powers that be need to repress us no less than to make us anxious … to administer and organize our intimate little fears.”

(Deleuze, 1988)¹

Deleuze talks here about “the power to act” as the basis of our entire being. Whether we want the power to eat a burger, play with our phones, design a shader on stage, build something out of scaffolding, turn some mercury into gold, or whatever else people did at EMF Camp, we are fundamentally empowered or limited by our collective and personal power to act.

Doing stuff as an escape from the drudgery

I think the effort that is currently needed to begin and maintain these things that bring us joy is really something that needs attention. Especially given many people have jobs they hate and they do stuff in the evenings or weekend to feel valued. David Graeber for example points out that the more you get paid, the less likely your job is to improve society². Our ease of being able to do these things that bring us joy drastically affects both our perception of the world and feeling of control over it.

Making is for many our escape from oppressive power structures. Almost every talk in the EMF program is not someone’s day job, or if it is they’ve had to jump through burning hoops to make it their day job. This is what we do for fun. Isn’t it mad that these niche interests, the things that bring us joy, and that bring a field of people together, are pushed so far from the margins that we can’t even imaging this being the main thing we do? We have a potential wellspring of new ideas and the people who want to make a better world, and yet that space is pushed right to the margins.

EMF camp at night

The joy I’m talking about here isn’t the joy you get from going to a party or taking drugs, say. I’m talking about the satisfaction of setting your mind to a hard problem and fixing it. This is about the stuff that gives life meaning and makes you feel alive, gives you agency over months and years, not days and weeks. Doing good projects that matter and accomplishing things you thought previously impossible can be one of the most rewarding things there is. Anyone whose been part of putting on a big event or producing some collective artwork generally has a huge sense of pride about it. These are the things that form part if our identities, and change who we are, how we think, and what we think possible.

So in summary: doing and making stuff not just fun but possibly a basic form of interacting with the rest of the universe. Capitalism is bad, and gets in the way of this. If you think this sounds like communism or anarchism, yes you’re probably right.

Part 2: on the difficulties doing the stuff with other people

A completely reasonable desire given the joy of doing things is then to want to do things with other people. And this is where it gets messy, because people are messy and relationships are hard.

This might be setting up a hack space, forming a D&D group or knitting circle, going LARPing, making a Minecraft server, or just organising a weekly meetup at the pub. We could call this ‘apolitical’ organising (although obviously everything is political!).

It could also be trying to mobilise some friends to go to a protest, form a mutual aid group or trans clothes swap, put on a zine fair, or organise a vaguely political film festival or club night for a minoritised group. We could call this ‘political’ organising. As you can see there’s really no clear distinction between the two but let’s go with it for now.

While the core of the activities is very different, the actual activity becomes the same: building relationships and organising communities. Again, these relationships are usually the ones that give our lives meaning -— doing fun things things with like with people we love is the one of the best feelings on earth. In other words: the work becomes more about relationships and less about the original activity we started with.

We’re not really taught how to work cooperatively at any point in our educational or work systems. Despite the fact it’s more or less the default way of working between friends and hobby groups, we don’t really learn about different ways of doing consensus or consent, conflict resolution, restorative justice, or a bunch of other stuff that would really help. So it can be tricky because we’re just short of tools and experience and we’re short of other people to help fix things when stuff goes wrong. So just as it can be great organising things, it can also suck. A lot.

It is this relationship work that is the thing the rest of this piece will really focus on.

Communities of Place and Interest

We all exist within communities of place, and communities of interest. These both deserve a bit of attention and thought as to how they differ.

Communities of place are, basically, where we live. This is our immediate neighbourhood, the things we walk past every day. This used to be the main space for what we would consider “community life” but now to many can feel really alienating. I live in a very mixed inner city area (Hulme in Manchester) and see up close how age determines where and how far people will travel — the student population keeps itself to itself (not half because of the gigantic fences erected by the university) and socialises in the city centre while older people, especially minoritised ethnic groups, end up living near each other in ways that are invisible to outsiders.

This is self-selecting in itself — postcode at birth is still the single biggest predictor of your life chances and choices — but in the rarefied world we live in it feels like this can be the closest thing we have to meeting people outside our self-selecting hobby and identity groups.

Communities of Interest are what they sound like. The stuff I talked about in the first section of this paper. The rise of the internet has made these far far easier to do (and sort of shoved out the ones of place for those who are really online). The locus of attention is the interest or hobby itself, and creates its own habitus that transcends any one place.

The interplay between the two can be hard, and is why I think it feels so hard to do stuff right now. We are sort of in a new era where such a large proportion of the population is a bit too online, in ways that are entirely controlled by gigantic oppressive companies, who directly set what behaviours are possible and impossible. This has both increased alienation between the on and offliners, as communities of place all of a sudden seem really difficult to engage with. Safer to stay talking to my friends where its safe.

On some level we are all working in a crossover of the two. The size of the geography expands as the size of our interest gets more niche. So for example it doesn’t make any sense for me to think about trans organising in my ward, there’s just not enough people (ok, where I live specifically there might be but in general not). As a group that is 0.3-0.5% of the population we need to cast a net over wider areas. But if I’m thinking about protecting local parks or meeting neighbours for coffee I’m thinking you know, 200m from my house. And I’m also expecting people outside that radius to not really care where I go for coffee or to a park because they have their own. But these interest-based groups silo fast, and then get more and more niche, and eventually scene drama somehow becomes your life.

And then let’s just not leave it unsaid…

Doing stuff right now, under a Tory government

I hope it is not controversial to say: politics in the UK (and world) fucking sucks right now.

We live in extremely disempowering times. It feels like it’s hard to talk about possibility and change right now as we spend so long struggling to exist: the intersecting cost of living crisis, ongoing pandemic, corrupt and fascist government, social isolation and loneliness crisis, upswing in structural racism and hate crime, and highly coordinated and well funded attacks on trans people are creating an incredibly intolerant environment. Covid has torn apart a lot of the normal functionings of how people go and find communities of place and hyperfocussed the ones of interest.

I think a lot of us, especially those who are perhaps two or more of trans, disabled, of colour, neurodivergent, working class, queer, carers, and other marginalised groups have never been further from representation at the ballot box. This is the rant part of the talk before I get talking about more constructive things. The Labour Party in waiting looks like Tory-lite, and on some issues is more right wing than the Tory party. The minority parties never look like serious contenders on any issues and don’t seem to have any real teeth outside of just “not that guy”, and the mainstream alternatives to that suck too. Join that up with the billionaire press in this country, and yeah. Not good. A lot of us simply not only see no representation of ourselves at all, we have almost daily attacks on our rights to exist everywhere we look.

To be clear I really respect people trying to make change in any of these big institutions. I’m just increasingly finding that this whole sorry mess is not something I care about any more, and most of the community organisers I work with locally feel the same. I think it’s time for us to go back to basics and figure out what community means again, as this is very often taken for granted.

Injecting big-P politics into our work unfolds in confusing and complex ways. Theres something inherently cringe feeling about doing any politics. I feel like everyone I talk to who does organising feels this in their soul. We do everything we can to avoid terms like ‘activist’ and spend an awful lot of time annoyed at other people. This talk made me cringe to write. But hey: I am cringe, but I am free.

People think of activism as protests or being obnoxious on Twitter, and for many that’s the front door, but we simply need to find better and more ways of being able to resist this sorry state of affairs that are inherently joyful, sustainable, inclusive, and can actually pay people a wage to do. Ways that centre the needs of structurally marginalised groups and take us back to what really matters about all this: enabling collective joy.

On the classed and gendered nature of free time

I was invited to talk at EMF under the ‘EDI’ (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) banner, because some on the festival team realised it has a problem and wanted to make the festival better represent the UK’s wider population. There are a lot of structural reasons why this is the case – the idea of it being someone’s ‘fault’ is unhelpful here – but it’s important to be explicit about why this kind of initiative is important and what we hope to gain from investing in it.

An ONS study³ showed that men have five hours more leisure time a week than women every week. That’s a whole hobby. So there’s a side of this “free” labour that is radically classed and gendered, and tied to disposable income and caring responsibilities. Leisure time is therefore something people have highly varying quantities of and is drastically classed, gendered and probably racialised, before we even decide what to do with it.

I think this dynamic by itself results in so much of what we see unfold in terms of hobby group makeup. And a lot of this is because of larger issues to do with the unequal distribution of care labour, unequal pay, etc. But it also ties into a disability activism narrative where if activities are uncritically based around the idea of the normal, normative, able bodied person, who Grayson Perry coined “Default Man”, we are just always going to be reproducing the harmful construct we’re placed within.

Jos Boys talks about this basic tension in a disability studies context:

Why does the idea of disability being creative and avant-garde seem so absurd? Is it because of the taken-for-granted assumptions about disabled people that they are in need of the help of others, are passive consumers of services, constitute a minority of individuals in society who (unfortunately) must bear the brunt of their own medical problems? […] What if, instead, we see that rethinking disability enables us to explore critically and creatively assumptions about […] disability and ability, which, in turn, can offer better ways of understanding the […] implications of both bodily diversity and everyday social-spatial practice? (Boys, 2014)⁴

Why is this so hard!!!???!!!!!

Anyone whose tried to organise anything can attest to how utterly thankless it is most of the time. I think especially for the political spaces, a bunch of the following are common experiences I’ve heard over and over that I paraphrase here:

“I tried to help out with some activist stuff, but everyone was just too busy yelling at each other and I didn’t feel I could contribute”
“People on the left are complete dicks and I got in shit for some stuff I don’t really understand and no-one bothered to explain to me”
“I tried to help out at a community centre but they were just really disorganised and never get back to me”

From the other side, for groups needing help this can be just as frustrating:

“People keep coming to us with what they want to do and not asking what we need. The real issues here are complex and layered and don’t have simple fixes or someone would have done them.”
“We had a volunteer make a website but they didn’t really listen to us and no-one knows how to operate it. We’ve now got to make a new one without upsetting anyone.”
“Volunteers keep coming and promising us the world and then vanishing. It makes it really hard to plan things and means we have to assume the worst a lot.”

There’s no easy fixes to any of this stuff. Because of the vast underfunding of this sector by the Tories, groups can have an awareness they’re putting people off but don’t feel they can make the time to find out why.

A lot of this though is simply because when you step outside normative contexts where people are in hierarchies and have similar social capital, you start dealing with actual breakdowns in society and that can be really jarring. Structural discrimination is very ugly, operates on multiple scales, and the dynamics have existed long before you were born and will continue long after. Putting your toe into it can feel like getting it bitten off. It takes a lot of hard work to do the work of decolonising yourself, unlearning racism, transphobia, classism, etc. In many ways it’s a life’s work. Especially for white middle class people like me, meeting people where they are that they have the power can feel initially incredibly disconcerting.

It is this we try and tackle head on in our work.

Part 3: on Community Technology Partnerships

In the last section I’m gonna talk about GFSC’s approach to navigating all this stuff, and how we sort of want to take apart how people think about tech and put it back together again in a way that overcomes these ideas from the ground up. Despite working on this idea since 2017 we’re still working through this and are very much at the start of our journey so please come talk to us about it. You can join our discord server if you like, or send us a tweet or email!

To recap…

On the surface of it it seems simple: tech and maker types have skills they enjoy using, and community groups have unmet needs that could be helped by these skills. Why then does it feel so incredibly hard to make these collaborations happen in reality?

What we increasingly found developing GFSC was that the methodologies we have to do good work are just not fit for purpose. Design Thinking and Human Centered Design are two such approaches that proclaim to be liberatory but actually just end up revolving around the idea that what we need is expert white middle class able bodied people on high salaries to come and helicopter in and fix things and then leave. This is the kind of “uber, but for…” model. Uber, but for poverty. Yeah, no.

The Capability Approach

My earlier journal paper with Prof Stefan White built heavily on one key existential question:

“What are the people of the group … actually able to do and be?

(Nussbaum, 1999)⁵

The Capability Approach is a human development methodology used by the UN and WHO for their sustainable development goals developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. This simple question asks what people are able to be and do, and asks how we can remove blockers to these concrete actions and states.

This seems like a simple question but is both a concrete ethical test that respects people’s fundamental existence, rather than having choices ‘made for them’ on the basis of external characterisation or assumptions of their abilities, feelings or opinions. By basing our work on this human development approach, rather than something from within product design or the tech industry, we think we’ve found a way to reconfigure this fundamental relationship in a wider (i.e. non technical and pre-existing) moral framework.

Community Technology Partnerships

In other words, people are the best judges of their own personal circumstances and neighbourhood. They therefore are the best placed to fix it. Our approach to codifying this has three stages:

direct engagement with and involvement of,

multiple stakeholders in a place-based creative partnership,

actively enabling realisation of self-defined opportunities for individuals and groups.

(White & Foale, 2020⁵)

Essentially this means:

Talking directly with and engaging a range of people,
Getting them around a table⁶ in your neighbourhood in a way that allows decisions to be made collaboratively,
And in doing so enable everyone to achieve new things that they want both individually and as a group

The explicit goal of this approach is therefore to increase collective power to act, to increase the things we can do or be. Have you ever felt like it’s not possible to get stuff done? And then moved to another city or a maker camp like this, or fell in with the right group of people, and suddenly you feel like you can do any number of things? This is what we’re getting at. How do we make places feel full of potential, creativity and joy? Beginning with inclusion and collaboration as a central principle creates the conditions for this.

This is enough for one blog but a few examples from our work we will go into another article:

With imok, we worked with No Borders Manchester to make a tool that replicated their existing process,
Taphouse TV Dinners was a collaboration between multiple groups working in Hulme and Greenheys to provide free food for vulnerable residents,
PlaceCal is our flagship tool that has set up a new nonprofit partnership of local community groups who want to work together to publish information about events and services

None of these interventions really resemble an ‘app’, or what people think of when they talk about tech. They’re all complex mixes of community development work, some software either old or new, and a commitment to training and education. This work is really hard to talk about at the moment in much more detail than that because we’re trying to create a basis for emergent systems, not deterministic ones, and we are barely off the starting blocks working on it.

I’ll end on a quote:

“the space beyond fixed and established orders, structures, and morals is not one of disorder: it is the space of emergent orders, values, and forms of life”

(bergman & Montgomery, 2017)⁷

How can we disrupt the monopolisation of the internet by the big five tech companies and create our own structures based on mutual support, joy, inclusion and accessibility, that allow us to centre our basic desire as humans to create things?

I have no idea but ask us in a year.

Talk to us!!

Let us know if you want to get involved in this kind of work. We’re just starting some big exciting projects and would love to have you with us.

You can chat to us on the GFSC discord
Follow us @gfscstudio on Twitter and Instagram
Email me: kim@gfsc.studio

Thanks to Dr Colleen Morgan for her utterly invaluable input into this piece.

Deleuze, Gilles (1988). Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. City Lights Books, San Francisco. Download ↩︎
Graeber, David (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster. ↩︎
Office for National Statistics (2018). Men enjoy five hours more leisure time per week than women: Men in the UK enjoy nearly five more hours of leisure time per week than women, ONS analysis reveals. Retrieved online. ↩︎
Boys, Jos (2014). Doing Disability Differently: An Alternative Handbook on Architecture, Dis/ability and Designing for Everyday Life. Routledge, Oxon. ↩︎
Cited in: White & Foale (2020). Making a place for technology in communities: PlaceCal and the capabilities approach. Information, Communication & Society. ↩︎ ↩︎
Or virtual equivalent, but the point is it’s people you live close enough to to physically visit and create relationships with that are not solely around shared interests. ↩︎
bergman & Montgomery (2017). Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. AK Press (link). ↩︎

The Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events

Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As part of our work with Gendered Intelligence on The Trans Dimension events listing site, we learned that there were a lot of event organisers wrestling with how to improve access to their spaces. This particularly arose with trans event organisers, who recognise that many in this community have additional access needs, and it is important that we make our events and gathering spaces as inclusive and welcoming as possible.

We worked with GI and the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People to put together a zine covering these areas, and in doing so, learned a lot about the breadth of what ‘access’ can mean.

The zine includes anecdotes of experiences that a number of people in the trans community have faced when attempting to attend events or spaces. GMCDP were also able to offer invaluable insight about what accessibility means, and how far it extends beyond just ramp access and disabled toilets.

Above all, the zine takes a non-carceral approach to accessibility, aiming to give organisers the tools and understanding to recognise that while completely universal accessibility is often impossible, a high standard of accessibility may well be more within their means than they had imagined. It ends with some questions organisers might want to ask themselves, to help consider how accessible their events are, from a range of perspectives. The goal of the zine is to help organisers think more deeply about accessibility, and offer them some starting tools for putting together a comprehensive access statement of their own.

We unveiled the zine at the launch night of the Trans Dimension website, and our designer also created some extremely cute pin badges to accompany the zine and website!

The Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events

Thu, 12 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve previously blogged and tweeted about The Trans Dimension, a new space for trans community enabled by technology and collaboration that we’re working on in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence. We will have some news on this soon and are hoping to launch this at the start of July.

In the meantime, we thought we’d share with you some work we’ve done to help trans groups work together to make events more accessible for everyone. We conducted workshops with Gendered Intelligence staff and young people, as well as Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People to produce a zine called The Trans Dimension Guide to Inclusive Events.

This zine is an act of care. It is the result of deliberate and enduring collaboration rooted in the idea that there is no single answer to the question ‘how can we improve access to our spaces?

When we asked our collaborators for affirming or positive experiences they’ve had at events we heard “The best I’ve had is mediocre.” We want to believe that this is not because of a lack of understanding and responsibility, but for a lack of guidance and resources. Hopefully this zine will help.

We provide this as a free download but if you are able to support us financially, our suggested donation for the e-zine is £3. It is still in draft form but we wanted to share it as soon as possible to give people a chance to give us feedback.

We welcome thoughts and comments on this guide and are planning to release at least one additional version before launch. You can email kim@gfsc.studio to direct feedback to GFSC, or info@transdimension.uk to direct it to GI.

Trans Safety Network Website and Rebrand

Sun, 01 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Trans Safety Network are old friends of Geeks For Social Change, and we’ve always been passionate supporters of the tireless, often painful work their team do to unpick both mainstream media and far right lies about the trans community. They approached us for a rebrand, and to redesign their website to make it more authoritative and robust.

We worked with them to understand their key audiences and build a new brand which focused on elevating their site’s clarity and trustworthiness. Trans Safety Network is a leading source for reputable, high quality research on hatred against trans people in the UK, and their site needed to reflect that position.

Something really vital to this project was a sense of demystifying. We wanted to make sure that anyone who approached the site would be able to understand it, and that nothing relied too heavily on assumed prior knowledge. This informed the web design process and made sure that access to information was prioritised throughout. We worked with frequent collaborator, Squid, on the branding and visual identity of this project.

The redesigned website can now instil a sense of trust in first-time visitors. By ensuring that all content is presented in a consistent, professional, and clear manner, TSN are better equipped to claim their position as a trusted source for counter-narratives against the increasingly hostile world of anti-trans organised harm.

If you’re able, you can support Trans Safety Network on Ko-Fi, or by sharing their articles as a means of countering anti-trans narratives. Visit the Trans Safety Network’s website.

We’re hiring a community development officer!

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We are looking for a part-time community development worker to help establish Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs) in the North of England.

CTPs are our approach to developing technology led by communities based on the “capability approach” developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amrtya Sen (also known as “asset based community development” or “strengths approach”). You will work with a team on rolling out this initiative to the UK alongside Geeks for Social Change, C2 Connecting Communities, University of Exeter, Manchester School of Architecture, and the Wellcome Centre of Culture and Environments of Health.

The role includes finding then talking to community groups across the North to find out who they are, what challenges they’re facing, and how those problems might be solved (or not!) using technology.

The initial focus of your work will be PlaceCal, an award-winning community calendar platform, initially developed for older people living in Manchester. By using a mutual aid and capability approach to technology, we developed a complete package that tackles the causes of social isolation at the root, combining community development work, software, and a strategy that works with existing community groups and public sector teams.

You will help onboard groups and set up local PlaceCal instances, initially over Greater Manchester, and then expanding to the North of England. We are currently rolling out PlaceCal to Greater Manchester with the support of Lankelly Chase’s Greater Manchester Systems Changers initiative.

Geeks for Social Change are a trans, disabled and neurodivergent-led tech studio in Manchester, UK. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things.

Our commercial work (’the studio’) currently comprises a small team of about 4 full-time-equivalent (FTE) staff, working a 4 day week. We are also an activist collective (’the collective’) with an active Discord server that meets monthly to discuss liberatory approaches to technology. We ran an Ethics and Technology Reading Group in pre-Covid times.

In order to roll out PlaceCal and the CTP approach and enable it to be truly co-owned by its users, we set up a new community interest company called Place Health Technology CIC to own the project and its outputs. You will be working for this new social enterprise, which will be working closely with GFSC and the other project partners over the next two years.

Our ideal candidate

We are looking for a community development officer who has:

Experience with grassroots local mutual aid groups, local political organising, or running your own events. Basically, we need people who get our politics and preferably have experience assisting with community work. This could be: queer or anti-racist organising; community and mutual aid groups; DIY arts music; writing and artists groups; culture collectives and festivals; or any other experience you think fits this description.
A high degree of comfort working with complex and beta-quality software. If you’re comfortable setting up complex CRM systems, configuring things in AirTable, or have ever done any hands on software development, you are probably more than qualified.
Lots of patience. Getting new partnerships off the ground is slow, careful work. Training people up in new IT systems is also slow, careful work. This role will require you to do both. We’re ideally looking for a candidate with experience creating things from the ground up and who knows what it takes to get things going.
Desirable: experience working with a software team to deliver a SaaS project. This includes writing bug tickets, understanding general Agile project flow, communicating when things go wrong, etc.
Desirable: existing strong connections to activist organising in Greater Manchester. We would love to have someone already known to our initial cohorts who can hit the ground running.

Experience matters less to us than cultural fit, motivation and passion. We are looking to form long term relationships with committed people. You will be working with two other people on this project: a project manager, and the same role as this for the South of England. A lot of your day-to-day work will be done solo but there are opportunities for collaboration, idea sharing, working out problems together.

Given the nature of the work we especially welcome applications from trans and non binary people, people of colour, disabled people, and other marginalised groups. We are based in Manchester and our initial focus is Greater Manchester, but we would welcome applications from people who are part of activist partnerships in other cities.

Salary and conditions

This is a 1 year 11 month fixed term position, with the intent to secure funding to extend this to a permanent post. This role is 2 days per week, equalling 12 hours total. Renumeration for this role is £13,333pa with 14 days holiday and an equipment allowance (this is a full time equivalent of £41,672pa if you’re basing it on a 37.5 hour work week, but we work a 4 day, 24 hour “full time” week at GFSC so the maths is a bit confusing).

All staff work from home and choose the hours that suit them (within reason!). For this role you will occasionally need to travel to meet project participants. We have a travel budget to cover these expenses.

We are flexible on specifics of employment and welcome applications from people who struggle to fit into other roles due to protected characteristics.

Our ambition is to turn Place Health Technology into cooperative structure during this two year period.

Interested?

Think this sounds for you, or want a no commitment chat about it?

Email jobs@gfsc.studio with:

A short statement about your experience in community groups / activism, including any Greater Manchester connections you might have
A short description of your experience working with complex database software and with developers on software projects
A recent CV (please don’t worry about customising this for us we just want an idea of who you are!)
A link to any projects you’ve been part of you think we might want to have a look at

Deadline: ~May 16th~ extended to 10am on May 23rd. Then we will take it from there!

We expect applications to be around 500 words and definitely no more than 1,000 words. We welcome brevity. Don’t worry about making it perfect, we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person.

If you have accessibility needs please let us know in the initial email and we will do our best to accommodate.

We are looking for a start date of 1st June. If there are no suitable applicants by May 16th, we will keep this job ad open until we find the right person and update this page when the role is filled.

This job is funded by the National Lottery Community Fund.

RAFTT design diary #1

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Local history is an area GFSC have done a lot of work in. Every neighbourhood on Earth has a plethora of stories that are completely unknown outside it. At GFSC we want to find ways of telling and sharing these stories which are compelling, well presented, accessible, easy to use, and crucially are designed and owned directly by the communities they’re made with.

Some of this work predates GFSC as a studio collective and infuses our DNA. This includes The Cassowary Project which explored Sylvia and Kim’s experiences doing local history in Hulme; Hulme History, a collaboration with urbanism co-op Urbed where we digitized their archive, made a website for it, and helped get it into the local archive; Dear Friend, a project encouraging people to write to inspiring women in history that they had a personal connection to; and most recently a community history day working with our friends The Old Abbey Taphouse.

From doing this work we know first hand how much the community history of structurally disadvantaged areas can often be overlooked and lost, which often prevents people from being able to make sense of where they are and the impact of the state on their own community. By sharing memories of place and experience, a greater sense of solidarity, connection, and community can be fostered amongst residents — past, present and future. There is also much to be learnt from histories, and by thinking and talking about what has happened in the past, we can reflect and learn, understand forces that often are outside our control, and help focus efforts for community-led social change.

What are we trying to build

As anyone who has tried to do it can attest, genuine co-production is really hard, especially when youre making something totally new. It can represent a kind of Western movie standoff where two gunmen, pistols drawn, take it in turns to say “what can you offer”… “well what can you do?”, forever. If you put something too specific in front of people, like a hammer, all of a sudden all problems look like nails. But if you don’t have anything to show, there is no potential to get a shared understanding of the problem and people don’t really know why you’re there. We therefore need to design something specific enough to get people excited, but vague and flexible enough not to put the cart before the horse. A lot easier said than done!

Ultimately, we want to create public history archives that allow the communities concerned to easily and accessibly explore and understand their own history. We want them to be able to enjoy photographs, maps, newspaper articles, letters, and all kinds of other physical artefacts, without degrading the original artefacts (as physical handling of them would do — one advantage digital archives have, as a companion to physical ones). We also want them to hear the stories of their neighbours (past and present) in their own words. This usually wouldn’t be possible without a concerted effort to collect and curate these stories in collaboration with their tellers, so this is what we aim to do.

These projects need to be free to host and maintain (so that they don’t become defunct as soon as whatever grant or donation got them up and running is exhausted), and they should also use free and open source tech, which will enable new volunteers to pick them up and run with them, and make sure that they’re easy to update for as long as people want to.

We also want to make sure that these projects aren’t just disordered dumping rounds for collections of artefacts and stories — for local history to be compelling and inviting, it needs to tell true stories in ways which are coherent and meaningful. Call that a ‘beginning, middle and end’, call that a ‘narrative flow’, but whatever it is, it ensures that the experience is more akin to reading a good book than it is shuffling through a drawer in someones desk filled to the brim with loose papers and photos.

One of our upcoming projects

The first of several local history projects we have coming up is a collaboration with First Choice Homes Oldham (FCHO). We are working with them on a new digital community history project focussed on one small area of Oldham — the project is titled ‘The Rise and Fall of Two Towers’, in commemoration of the two iconic, soon-to-be-demolished tower blocks which stood at the heart of area concerned. FCHO told us there was very little outwardly discoverable community activity, resulting in community engagement for them being a real struggle.

So, on the brink of the demolition proceedings, FCHO saw an opportunity to do some real outreach and get closer relationships with their customers. We worked with them to apply for funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund that would expand that work into a hyperlocal digital history project.

FCHO bought together key local stakeholders from Oldham Archives, the Colosseum Theatre, and OL1 Oldham community group. Through the magic of the GFSC collective, Colleen Morgan (part of the Anarchist Archaeologist Black Trowel Collective) recruited MA student Sam Benbow to help us navigate this tricky project as part of her dissertation research.

Gathering data

Step one of any history project is to think about who the key people and events are, see what information is already out there in terms of maps and statistics, and what pre-existing themes might be explored. This phase can be very challenging where no work like this has been done before, and this area was no different.

One of the earliest findings made by FCHO was that there was very little by way of oral, photographic, or indeed any other kind of history of the area. This history currently only lives in the minds and cupboards/drawers/photo albums of those who have called the area home, and it is our job to find ways of getting this history out in a way that can be shared and enjoyed by the whole community.

The council do have some materials (like maps, newspaper articles, and limited photography) in their archives, so these materials could act as valuable prompts in helping members of the community step up and share their reminiscings.

At present, FCHO are attempting to find and contact current and former residents of the area, to see if they would be willing to tell their stories to us. They have done this through events (an afternoon event at a local community centre, and a stall at the local market), and through leveraging their individual contacts to follow up with people directly. They are also advertising on local notice boards and on social media.

Sam is conducting in depth interviews with participants who are willing, offering them a series of questions and prompts to try and get out as many stories and anecdotes about the area as possible. Alongside the council’s archival materials, we are also asking participants whether they have any materials of their own to share, like photographs or other artefacts that relate to the towers or the area immediately surrounding them.

Of course at this stage, we don’t really know what the overall history data set will look like. Will we unearth a huge treasure trove of photographs from the past in someone’s cupboard? Will we find an interviewee who offers loads of incredible recorded oral testimonies that they’re happy to share? Will the social media campaign really take off, and we end up with loads of tiny text-based snippets of anecdotes?

Whatever form our data set takes, it’s still important for us to start considering how we might build the eventual online digital history project with it, which will take the form of a user-friendly (back and and front end!) website.

Last week we had a great opening discussion about the kinds of questions we need to ask to build this sort of site, and how we might answer them. The illustrations in this piece are the sketches we created on the fly as we talked.

We started off by asking what the narrative order of the site might be. How do users explore the content? What is the ‘town square’ of the site — the space it is centred around, the key navigation which users will base their explorations around?

Kim has written in the past about why ‘pincushion maps’ are a bad idea, and indeed we are keen to avoid this approach here. Our previous local history site Hulme History (http://hulmehistory.info/) was centred around a map, but also around a chronology, and aimed to show how the map had changed and developed over time.

For this project though, a map doesn’t necessarily feel like the correct narrative device to base it around. While it may offer some interesting context on some of the materials, the geographic area being covered here is small, and centred around two tall towers, which means a lot of the data gathered may end up lumped together on those two specific points. (However the project does also cover the wider area, so we couldn’t make, for example, side-view graphics of just the towers showing where individual events happened from that view).

Another reason why centering the map isn’t a great idea here (or indeed, in many local history projects) is that some ‘items’ (events, movements, or people) simply cannot be pinpointed to one individual location.

So with mapping/geographic data ruled out, what other facets of this data set might we consider the “primary axis” to base the structure and narrative of the site around? We initially talked a lot about whether a ‘timeline’ would be a good concept here. Sometimes this works wonderfully as a narrative device, but with larger or more fragmented data sets (of which this could yet prove to be either), it can feel either overwhelming, gappy, or simply irrelevant to the larger narratives at play.

Themes

We started talking more about the notion of ‘themes’. This is a less quantitive way of defining data, which in many senses makes it more personal. It is of course important to ask who defines what themes are centred… Do stories end up being silenced if they don’t fall within particular theme categories? These are concerns we need to be mindful of, as we explore our growing data set and figure out what themes are emerging as more and more people contribute to it.

But regardless of these considerations, it feels to us like an exciting and engaging way of organising and exploring the stories of an area, and offers perhaps more of a ‘way in’ than some of the more quantitive, factual breakdowns we could otherwise have used.

Some emerging themes so far include:

The towers as a navigational device
Parties and celebrations
Community centre/s
Key local personalities
Deprivation and challenges

And more still growing and forming.

It will be down to us to consider how many and what themes to centre the website around in the final design.

Thinking about design

We started to loosely consider the structure of a site like this, starting off by reflecting on the successes and failures of Hulme History.

If there no longer needs to be a map at the centre of the site, what is the core navigation? How can we make this site exciting and easy to use both for someone who just wants to dip in and out of the stories, and also for someone who wants to read the entire archive from cover to cover?

We also want to come up with a system that will work whether we end up with a small number of high quality/in-depth contributors, or a large number of small scale contributors. So rather than thinking of an hour long interview conducted on zoom as one piece of content (which more than likely, no one would ever listen to in full), we can think of it as a number of smaller pieces. We can transcribe some sections of it into text, we can export out some sections as short audio recordings, and maybe we can even source imagery to accompany some of the anecdotes we are told.

With this in mind, we are thinking of our content as easy to consume, bitesize ‘snippet’ anecdotes, which will hopefully span a variety of media.

We returned again to thinking about narrative — the story the site tells at any individual moment, no matter where an individual is in their exploration of it.

All stories start from a beginning — an anchoring point to get you into it, even if the project is, as discussed, not in chronological order. We will need to figure out how this overall introduction and starting point manifests itself.

The middle of the story (the largest, and most complex section), is the exploration of our many ‘snippets’ — as mentioned, the ‘way in’ to these snippets will be by theme, but of course each item will have other data associated with it (’metadata’ if you will) — things like who gave it to us, geographic location (in some cases), when it happened, whether there were any groups associated with it, and so on. Some snippets may also overlap across themes, so might appear in multiple places. (Though does this make it harder for those who want to read the site ‘cover-to-cover’ in a more linear way? Does this matter?)

As for the ‘end’ of the story… Well, is there an end? We discussed whether the site will draw any conclusions, or perhaps the ‘end’ will be an invitation to ongoing contributions, as we do want the site to grow and be added to over time, rather than being a site which begins and ends with our initial build. (The site will be built as a static site, and training will be offered to members of the community and the team at FCHO so that it can be maintained and added to in the long term).

Structure

We looked at our old Hulme History site (http://hulmehistory.info/), and decided to use that as a jumping off point in considering panel based navigation styles. The design/layout sketched here is arbitrary, these ponderings were more to think about navigation and site structure.

Shown here, to the left, is a ‘themes’ panel, which would be constantly visible, or at least accessible. To the top right is an expansion of one of the themes, showing all the individual snippets which are contained within that theme. Any one of these snippets can be clicked on and expanded into the panel below (bottom right).

We did discuss whether maybe three levels of navigation was simply too many, so created an alternative where the themes panel also contains a short ‘contents’ for each theme (partial or full?) and on click a user can explore all the contents of that theme in the panel to the right.

One idea is that we want appropriate contextual information to appear whatever snippet a user is looking at. Is it super relevant where this was on the map? Then we show it. Is it important that someone knows immediately what happened before and after this? Then maybe it does appear on a mini timeline. Was this photo supplied by a particular local group or body? Let’s name them and allow the user to easily access their story.

This was as far as we got in our first discussion — and of course this still feels very rough and open ended, and we need to figure out how a lot of things work.

My (Emma) background is in graphic design for print, so I have a tendency to need to imagine how any given content will fit into a space. I am enjoying learning to think about things in a different way, centering the community and their stories, and researching how best to give these stories back to them in a way which is accessible and has the longevity it deserves.

More soon, I hope!

GFSC 2021 Roundup

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

For now though, here’s some of our 2021 highlights!

We kicked off the year number crunching the dishonest and worrying stats from GMP about Taser use on Manchester residents as part of Resistance Lab Manchester. We caught them in a lie and these stats have now been removed from GMPs website without apology or acknowledgement.

Taser usage by Greater Manchester Police has risen to its highest ever level

In further work with Resistance Lab, we produced and ran an online panel about the threat of Tasers to residents of Greater Manchester. This was based on our research work and report from 2020, and featured an amazing panel of speakers who have been working on this issue for years. The event is still on YouTube if you want to watch it!

No more Tasers: Live panel event

This work was part of the inspiration behind our first studio ‘long read’ for some time. Modern tech is seen in many circles as something good or neutral that creates jobs and opportunities. However, we think the sector and the culture behind it can often be exploitative and harmful, in ways that will never be acknowledged by those at the heart of it. You can read our thoughts in full here:

Everything is connected, but should it be?

Off the back of our ongoing research and writing around tech, in February we were invited to deliver a provocation at the wonderful Hattusia’s community meetup, where we made some lovely new friends! We talked about how the tools you use influence the things you can make, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

The revolution will not be hosted on Amazon Web Services - a provocation by Dr Kim Foale

The GFSC Collective is a group of activists, technologists and creatives who have been meeting every couple of weeks since October 2019. We discuss all kinds of topics which are of interest to us, and collaboratively work out how we can build the technology that mutual aid, antiracist and anti-transphobic groups need.

There will be more on the collective when we do a bit of a website refresh in the coming months. But in the meantime, we finally launched a Discord due to public demand! Come and say hi if you like, and get involved in the discussions!

discord.gfsc.studio

One thing the Collective have been researching is the extent of the arms industry’s involvement in Manchester. We are asking how a city that calls itself “Nuclear Free” can put nuclear weapons manufacturers like BAE and Northrop Grumann in its regional marketing materials.

What happened to Nuclear Free Manchester?

Our first actual tech/software release as a collective was imok, a simple bot to support people undertaking risky activities. This was a collaboration with No Borders Manchester. You can read about it and find links to the source code here:

imok is released!

We were hoping to run a pilot last year before a full software launch but due to Covid-19, the signing centres have been mostly shut. (The bot was originally designed with asylum seekers who are forced to ‘sign on’ in mind, as they are sometimes unexpectedly detained and even deported at these sign-ons, with no way of informing family or friends). This temporary closure and suspension of the signing on system is obviously great for the people usually forced to use it, but has meant we’ve not been able to get any user testing done. Plans are in the works, as the process of signing on is unlikely to go away, and once it returns, we hope to be able to hit the ground running with imok.

One of the big highlights of our year in the GFSC studio has been starting to work with total dreamboats The White Pube!! We don’t have a lot to show publicly yet, but we are currently helping them move their site away from an outdated, fiddly and unpleasant to use old platform, and move all their content over onto Hugo. An announcement will be coming about this very soon!

2021 was also the year we started working with other total dreamboats Gendered Intelligence!! We’re helping them design a new intranet system (which we’ll be able to share more about soon), and we also helped them transform their website — from a broken system that was giving them usability nightmares, to a simple Jekyll site that anyone at the organisation can work with.

On top of this, we got funding from MIND to help Gendered Intelligence provide Covid helpline support for trans people. We reviewed a few options and were initially going to make them a chatbot to help free up staff time for the more complex stuff.

In true GFSC fashion though, we found that basically everything on the market was far too complex and expensive for their needs. So we created EnquiryWitch: a “no chatbot chatbot” based on Twine.

We’re still working on a full release for this but you can check it out on GI’s contact page. The goal was to make sure messages from people outside the organisation got to the right email inbox the first time, rather than needing an extended back-and-forth correspondence. It also tells people when GI can’t help, and redirects them to other services. GI have told us this has drastically reduced their admin overheads and given them loads more time to work with individuals.

http://genderedintelligence.co.uk/contact/contact.html

The source code is here, although we still need to give it a bit of TLC, and release the Netlify hooks that allow it to send emails.

https://github.com/geeksforsocialchange/enquirywitch

Fianlly, in further collaboration with GI, the big reveal from just before Christmas was our first announcement and preview of The Trans Dimension, a trans listings site for London funded by Comic Relief. We’ve gone on about this loads so won’t go over it again here, but you can check this post out for the full details of the project.

Enter… The Trans Dimension!

The Trans Dimension is a key step to getting our award-winning PlaceCal technology back on the road with an extremely generous donation from Lankelly Chase. We just did our first “proper” release thanks to loads of work from our lovely new developer Alexandria and we will have more to share on this soon.

Release v0.1.0 · geeksforsocialchange/PlaceCal

A big hurdle we’re having to overcome in our work on Placecal is how to programatically export Facebook events. Facebook is in full antitrust mode and doesn’t offer any simple export options. We’ve developed Faceloader, a tool which scrapes Facebook event listings locally, and syncs them with an iCal file.

https://github.com/geeksforsocialchange/faceloader

You can read more about Faceloader here:

https://twitter.com/gfscstudio/status/1467828195626205184

Finally, another long read that aims to sum up GFSC’s approach to technology. In short — much tech is sold as some kind of magic way to fix problems in and of itself. Instead of this, we should think of technology as providing tools we can utilise to achieve our goals using a wide range of different approaches that extend beyond ‘tech’ as the start and end point. You can read this piece here:

Technology isn’t a magic wand, it’s a treasure map.

In 2022 we have SO MUCH MORE TO SHARE! Including:

A long-overdue website update explaining where we’re at as a studio and collective, and sharing much more detail about our work
The launch of the Trans Dimension at a very cool London location
An update on our local history work with residents in Oldham
A full plan for a UK-wide PlaceCal rollout including a vision for activist and mutual aid groups up and down the country
Some very exciting projects created with and for the trans community that we can’t go into any more detail about yet
Activist education data science courses
A podcast??????
… basically watch this space, 2022 will be our year.

To stay up to date, sign up to our newsletter here

If you’d like to donate to support our work as a collective, you can do so here (There will be other donation options coming this year too!)

Enter... The Trans Dimension!

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Geeks for Social Change are thrilled to to announce The Trans Dimension, an online community hub which will connect trans communities across the UK by collating news, events and services by and for trans people in one easy-to-reach place.

We’re developing it in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence, a trans-led national charity improving the lives of trans and non-binary people. Geeks for Social Change is a studio led by trans and disabled people, so this is a real dream collaboration and hopefully the first of many announcements we’re going to be making over the coming months.

It’s been funded by the Comic Relief Tech for Good “Build” fund, and builds on GFSC’s existing work on the PlaceCal initiative. Our pilot will focus on London, after which we will plan a UK-wide launch.

This graphic is a first look of the coming website, featuring illustration by the wonderful Harry Woodgate and logo from frequent GFSC collaborator Squid.

Why is this so important?

People who are trans, non-binary or gender diverse experience:

Higher levels of social isolation, exclusion & loneliness
Higher levels of discrimination, shame, abuse & violence
Greater inequalities in health & wellbeing, especially mental health, and
Less opportunity in terms of education, training & employment

As a result, 4 in 5 trans people experienced transphobic hate crime in 2020¹. Experiences like these can be a deterrent to finding crucial and life-saving support networks.

What are the difficulties?

If you’re trans and disabled, your work is even harder. Disabled people often have to email, call, or visit venues ahead of time due to a lack of public accessibility information.

These barriers prevent trans people from meeting each other and developing friendships, and in turn prevent us from building the strong, supportive trans communities we need.

How will we make a difference?

The Trans Dimension will be a shared, community-owned system which many providers can contribute to—removing the need for cross-checking. It will help people find trans-friendly events and build a wider sense of community. The Trans Dimension will enable even the smallest community groups to have an equal online presence & advertise events alongside larger groups.

We’ve worked with both GI staff and Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People to create a care-based guide to inclusion and accessibility for trans and disabled people and we’ll be sharing the results in the coming months.

Listings will be moderated centrally by a dedicated staff member at Gendered Intelligence, meaning listings will be relevant and up-to-date. Putting on events is hard and often thankless, and there’s very little support for you out there. We hope that we can use The Trans Dimension to support all these groups and create a network of people working together on trans liberation.

To get notified when we launch, you can sign up for GFSC’s newsletter below, for just Trans Dimension updates on our hastily constructed holding page, or follow GFSC or Gendered Intelligence on social media!

Hubbard, L (2021). The Hate Crime Report 2021: Supporting LGBT+ Victims of Hate Crime, London: Galop. ↩︎

Technology isn't a magic wand, it's a treasure map.

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I used to love the Innovations catalogue dropping through the door with the weekend paper. For an entertainment-starved tween, it was a mix of ludicrosity and earnestness that made for ideal Sunday browsing.

This was a simpler time for home technology, a time before the realisation of Bill Gates’ “a computer on every desk and in every home”. Family PCs were big clunky things that lived in the “computer room”, a room certain family members would loudly make a point of avoiding.

Computers were stand alone curiosities, a device to play Solitaire on or type up notes, something more akin to a woodworking workshop in the basement than to the hyperconnected always-on communication platform-from-hell it’s become today.

If permitted to take up space in a more general-purpose living room, they would hulk alienly from the shadows of a “computer desk”, a blinking monolith from the future.

Evidence of this is largely not online but I was able to pick up a paperback of some of the best bits.¹

Innovations gave a spotlight to niche ‘inventions’ that aimed to solve mundane problems with over-the-top gadgetry. Palm pilots and calculator watches and clock radio toilet roll holders. (Everything had a clock radio.)

These things were often laughable, and I think that was the point. They were just fun sounding things, things you don’t know how you’d lived without until now, things that didn’t actually solve any real problems anyone had.

It fitted in that gap between “I need that!” and “But do I really?”, the gap that is probably responsible for killing off the catalogue in the pre-online era, with its built-in cooling-off period during the time it took to mail in a form or call a phone operator.

But a lot of inventions of this era were seemingly designed to fit in this Innovations sized-hole. The promise that all of society’s smallest problems could be improved by upscaling your toaster was an intoxicating one.

Some items listed barely pass as innovations. Scare Cat (left) and Giant Hands (right).¹

Move on a bit, to the present day, and Amazon is the world’s Innovations catalogue.

Many of the sales models used by startup tech businesses are based on this direct mail marketing approach. This includes Russell Brunson’s hugely influential “Dotcom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online”, a book partially responsible for almost every irritating online sales trick you see today, and others like it such as Eric Ries’ “The Lean Startup”.

These approaches, combined, outline a methodology for making products in a distinctly Innovations-y way: Find a tiny thing that people might want. Build a product that promises to fill the gap. And price it so that it seems impossible to refuse.

Do people actually need it? Or does it accelerate our planet further towards destruction while doing nothing to fix any real problems? Who fucking cares. It’s innovation, so therefore morally neutral, or even by default good. Everyone loves innovation! Who doesn’t love innovation? Don’t you know what innovation has done for you, personally? Look at what we can do!

This idea is been so persistent that it’s the only real concept most people have of what technology is. It’s a thing, a device, a service, an app. Something that sort of fixes a problem you have. At least in part, at least sometimes. It’s a piece of glittering promise shorn from its creator, a discrete offering that doesn’t visibly need a human interaction or connection. Or maybe just a piece to a bureaucratic puzzle that manages your life admin.

Due to the massive amounts of money and hubris that reside in the tech sector, we now seem to believe that the same methodology used to sell pens that write upside down with a built-in dictaphone can somehow be adapted to fixing homelessness, or poverty or something.

Securi-Gnome: "He can be pegged down into the earth"¹

Sorry, but I’m here to tell you this isn’t a thing.

Fixing difficult social problems, or any problems other than the utterly trivial, is (as the saying goes) a journey not a destination. Hard problems are fixed with hard work, or they wouldn’t be hard. And yet there is no shortage of snake oil salesmen telling you the opposite, that somehow you can undo decades of racism, transphobia, poverty, or whatever other issue with a nice app or a bit of data or a subscription to our service.

People expect tech to be a magic wand: wave it and fix a problem. But for any serious problem, this doesn’t work. In the same way owning a set of spanners doesn’t automatically make you a car mechanic, much less able to run a garage. And yet, policymakers seem to think all they have to do is buy spanners (with dictaphones and clock radios built in of course) and somehow the cars will get fixed by magic.

The worst part is that this is now the world those of us engaged in on-the-ground communities and mutual aid groups have to deal with. We’re seeing a wave of people come in who just want to fix things with Design Thinking or Human Centred Design, and their new set of Internet of Things-enabled spanners.

People who inevitably lose interest when they realise they can’t just design these things away, and that communities don’t actually have any loose bolts we can’t tighten ourselves, we just don’t have the time or resources to tighten them. Or worse, they hit on a way to extract money from these communities, and become very successful from it.

On the community level, we are always dealing with gnarly problems — problems that are eminently fixable by a great team and with a good plan. Devices are secondary.

Imagine you’re planning an archeological excavation. Nicer gadgets are helpful, sure, but you’d also need a team who knows how to use them.

Archaeology changes slowly over time as new technology facilitates advances in the field. But the core work of excavating a dig site doesn’t. That is the technology.

With all the lasers and 3D printers in the world, you still need a team of people with trowels and brushes who know what they’re doing. And you always will.

Jazz spent four days procrastinating on the editorial for this article but somehow made this in ten minutes.²

Acknowledgements

Words by Dr Kim Foale. Literary spice and Nicolas Cage content by Jazz Chatfield. Illustration by Emma Charleston.

Nick Biggs, Innovations Catalogue, 2004 ISBN-13 978-0747573463. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Obviously, this isn’t a real listing, but it fooled Kim until the third read-through. From National Treasure (2004). ↩︎

EnquiryWitch

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The UKs largest trans charity Gendered Intelligence approached us because they were struggling to manage the quantity and variety of emails they were receiving. Emails often went to the wrong inbox or multiple inboxes with incomplete information, and were frequently enquiries GI couldn’t help with. This labour was taking up hours and hours each day across the organisation and sucking up staff and volunteer time needed for other tasks. We worked with them to explore the problem holistically, looking at a range of potential bespoke and off-the-shelf solutions.

The original instinct was to go for some kind of “chatbot” solution, but being GFSC we first wanted to properly test what the capabilities of this solution was, and if there was something better we could make that solved the problem at a more root level.

Through lots of discussion and research we set the goal of making sure that enquiries end up in the right inbox first time with all the correct information, and that members of the public were informed before emailing which enquiries couldn’t be dealt with. People contact GI about a wide range of issues, and different teams at the organisation deal with different areas. Emails were getting bounced around internally, leading to delayed responses and additional workload for those tasked with directing them to the right places.

We looked at a few chatbot solutions but found them all very overcomplicated, requiring lots of configuration and training, as well as ongoing maintenance of a server to host it on. Most of all though, these solutions didn’t actually solve the underlying issue that figuring out who should have what email and what information it needs to have in is a human problem that a computer can’t fix for you!

We did desk research of about 400 emails along with interviewing key staff to understand what kinds of enquiries they got, and where they should go to. Using this analysis we were able to get a big picture of the organisation and create a mapping between internal institutional logic and the chaos of general human enquiries.

After investigating a few options we eventually settled on adapting Twine, software usually used for interactive fiction. This software allows creation of simple “choose your own adventure” stories which then compile down to simple HTML and Javascript, so there’s no chatbot server to run and everything can be edited using the existing, very well developed editor. We added functionality to let it send emails using Netlify serverless functions. And voila – a “pseudo chatbot” that boils down to a single page of HTML that can be embedded in any website. You can see it on GI’s contact page

The final product may not look look like much but this complete review and consolidation of incoming emails has completely transformed Gendered Intelligence’s incoming communications, they estimate saving a 3 days a month of staff time across the organisation.

We now want to release this properly to make it easier for others to use – get in touch if you think this is something your organisation could benefit from.

What happened to Nuclear Free Manchester?

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Now not only do we have several companies here who manufacture or assist in the production of nuclear missiles and submarines, we put ’em in the regional marketing brochure.

It’s the last day of Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI), one of the world’s largest arms fairs hosted in London every two years. From Stop The Arms Fair’s website:

In 2019, DSEI brought together 36,000+ arms buyers and dealers from 114 countries to network and make deals. In 2021, governments and military delegations will be browsing the wares of 1,600+ arms companies selling everything from guns and bombs to fighter jets and warships, with live action demos promised to take place in the Royal Victoria Dock.

[…]

DSEI is an important event for the UK state, which heavily subsidises and promotes the arms industry, and helps organise the arms fair. In 2019, the UK invited delegations to DSEI from 67 countries, including countries involved in military conflicts and at war, and on its own list of human rights abusers.

If you want to know where the really really bad people in the world get their guns and ammo, it’s here. If you’re a repressive government such as Saudia Arabia, UAE or USA looking to buy anything from torture equipment to chemical weapons to helicopters, DSEI has you covered. In fact, the UK government will pay for your delegation to come over, give you a stall to sit on all week while people come and pitch you weapons, and lay on millions of pounds of policing to protect you while you’re here. You can even speculate on how many bullets are in a jar and win a prize!

Guess the number of bullets and win a prize! Image via @darren_cullen on Twitter

Sounds bad, so what’s this got to do with Manchester?

The companies paying exhibitor’s fees at DSEI all have to operate somewhere. And a decent number exist in Manchester. Companies with HQs in GM exhibiting at DSEI are selling a range of products from the mundane to the world ending, such as: signage (3M), mechanical simulators (Pennant International Limited); ammunition (Edgar Brothers, Arralis); aircraft and aircraft materials (Thales, Safran); telephony solutions (Vodafone, VITEC); cyber security and intelligence (Geollect); combat drones (Elbit); and literal nuclear missiles (Northrop Grumann)¹.

GfSC’s rough review of the DSEI exhibitor list shows about 60 companies who are based here, are part of a parent company that’s based here, or who are pretty vague about their address but all signs points to Manchester.

But isn’t Manchester meant to be the city of peace?

Quite. In 1980, Manchester declared itself a Nuclear Free City.

On November 5, 1980 Manchester became the world’s nuclear free city - placing itself at the forefront of the campaign to ban atomic weapons.

The city council called upon the government to ‘refrain from the manufacture or position of any nuclear weapons of any kind within the boundaries of our city’ - and called for local authorities throughout Great Britain to do the same.

In 2005, one of the architects of this declaration Cllr Bill Risby stated:

Establishing the council’s nuclear free policy was one of the proudest moments of my life. At the time no one could have foreseen how the movement would grow.

in the 1980s-90s the slogan “Manchester: a Nuclear Free City” was widely used on signs. You can still see them around town today. This Manchester Evening News longread talks about the history of where it came from.

Left: a poster saying ‘Manchester: Working for a Nuclear Free City’. The text is gold and there is a white sillouhette of a dove on a blue background. Right: a booklet published by Manchester City Council entitled ‘Emergency Planning and Nuclear War in Greater Manchester’

So what went wrong?

Who knows. The Andy Burham administration now seems to be welcoming in these companies with open arms (sorry).

Let’s take BAE Systems. According to Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT)

BAE’s Typhoon and Tornado aircraft have been central to Saudi Arabia’s devastating attacks on Yemen – attacks that have killed thousands and created a humanitarian disaster. Further Typhoon aircraft have been delivered to Saudi Arabia during the bombing and BAE and the UK government are pushing hard for a new contract.

BAE has 6,300 staff in Saudi Arabia to support the operational capabilities of the Saudi armed forces. In 2016, during the attacks on Yemen, the company stated that “the Group’s extensive in-Kingdom training and support activities are at a high tempo. The Royal Saudi Air Force has achieved high utilisation and aircraft availability across its Typhoon and Tornado fleets, operating under demanding conditions.”

BAE also own the company that created the Trident nuclear submarine fleet.

Sounds bad right? Well, not according to GMCA who literally put them in the brochure for the Greater Manchester Strategic Framework, alongside a quote from someone with a truly Bond-villan-esque name and job title.

A page from GMCA’s ‘Doing Digital Differently’ brochure highlighting BAE Systems.

Other companies who presented at DSEI 2021 actively welcomed by various parts of GMCA include:

Northrop Grumann, who as cannot be stressed enough, make nuclear missiles, and sponsor research articles with names like “The Downsides of Downsizing: Why the United States Needs Four Hundred ICBMs”. GMCA see their operations in Greater Manchester as a “Cyber Ecosystem Milestone” on their website.
CACI, a huge conglomerate implicated in war crimes including torture outsourced to them by the CIA at Abu Ghraib prison. Transport for Greater Manchester (TFGM) saw fit to commission them to do research on bike hire schemes.
Elbit Systems (previously Elbit Ferranti), Israel’s largest privately-owned arms company which mainly ships unmanned drones to Israel that are used to bomb Palestinians. You can read more about Elbit on Palestine Action’s website. And by the way, Manchester University has been more than happy to help with the research to make them even better.
The effect of this concentration of arms and cybersecurity companies is so powerful companies like UK Fast are pivoting to defence, proudly stating on their website they provide hosting for MBDA systems who provide missiles to the Saudia Air Force to bomb Yemen.
Co-op Digital worked with Thales, who provide equipment to the UK army to stop migrants crossing the channel among other things, to teach children to code (presumably ‘how to stop children just like you reaching our shores!’)².
All the big companies seem to be at it on the education from too. Raytheon cyber academy is also part of the “Cyber Ecosystem Milestones”, and Raytheon are involved in sponsoring training for women to “get into code”. BAE Systems have opened an academy to train people how to build nuclear submarines in Barrow, Cumbria. And through GMCA’s Cyber Advisory Group these companies form a panel with all the local universities and authorities.

So what now?

Manchester is no longer a nuclear free city. Not only do we have several companies here who manufacture or assist in the production of nuclear missiles and submarines, these companies are put front and centre in the brochure GMCA uses to advertise the region to investors.

GM’s speciality seems to be pushing programming and cybersecurity. It’s very unclear what these jobs are and in fact it’s hard even to find an office address for BAE systems in the area. We imagine “cybersecurity” is a catchall for a wide range of software used in warfare, such as operating systems for missiles and planes, VoIP interception algorithms, software to spy on both domestic and foreign citizens and governments, facial regonition AI, etc.

Frankly we think these companies shouldn’t exist at all in their current form. And we certainly think working for them shouldn’t be seen as a reputable career, but a dirty part of the British Empire’s colonial legacy. There is simply no justification for the manufacture and distribution of these weapons which are used to murder civilians, destabilise countries, repress populations, destroy the environment, and facilitate vast networks of international corruption.

And please, stop taking money from arms companies to teach children you absolute ghouls.

For the avoidance of doubt not all these things are manufactured here but their offices, sales structure, admin etc are. ↩︎
This is extra weird when you consider the banking division of the co-op has an ethical policy prohbiting this. ↩︎

We're hiring!

Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Update 11/10/21: this role is now filled!

Geeks for Social Change are looking for a backend or full stack Ruby on Rails developer to work 24 hours a week.

The initial focus of your work will be PlaceCal. PlaceCal is an award-winning community calendar platform, initially developed for older people living in Manchester. By using a mutual aid and capability approach to technology, we developed a complete package that tackles the causes of social isolation at the root, combining community development work, software, and a strategy that works with existing community groups and public sector teams.

We are currently adapting PlaceCal for a project focused on supporting the trans community called The Trans Dimension, in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence. We will be building the new community information site as a static site pulling from the PlaceCal APIs (aka Jamstack). There’s a few other projects in the pipeline too.

To make this happen we need to add features to our backend and admin interface, including: interest-based filters that can be managed and owned by named groups, refactor and improve the admin interface, improve permissions and admin roles, add additional calendar importers, add various video stream features, and creating an email notification system. You can see the code on GitHub.

You will be helping develop a cutting edge technical and social intervention that targets the most socially isolated and digitally excluded people in the country. We truly believe that our ‘bottom up’ approach which builds on existing international development best practice and has been pubilished in a peer reviewed journal article is the future for truly inclusive tech practice. You would be a part of this exciting innovative process bringing social and technical spheres back into alignment.

Geeks for Social Change are a trans, disabled and neurodivergent led tech studio in Manchester, UK. We are an atypical tech studio. Our work is based on anarcho-feminist principles, aims to be antifascist and antiracist, decolonise the tech sector, fight state violence, and work towards liberation of trans and disabled people among other things. To this end we co-founded the Resistance Lab collective.

Our commercial work (’the studio’) currently comprises a small team of about 3 FTE staff. We are also an activist collective (’the collective’) with an active Discord server that meets biweekly to discuss liberatory approaches to technology. We ran an Ethics and Technology Reading Group in pre-Covid times.

Our ideal candidate

We are looking for a Ruby on Rails developer with:

At least some experience in or knowledge of grassroots local mutual aid groups, local political organising, or running your own events. Basically, we need people who get our politics and preferably have experience assisting with community work. This could be: queer or anti-racist organising; community and mutual aid groups; DIY arts music; writing and artists groups; culture collectives and festivals; or any other experience you think fits this description.
At least two years’ coding experience and one year’s experience developing Ruby on Rails, with some backend experience. This can be on professional or personal projects, but preferably we will be able to see your code. You will be doing some reasonably complicated database stuff from the get-go so it’s important you’re comfortable with this kind of work.
Desirable: experience in a range of different programming languages or other frameworks: maybe Django, JavaScript, React, Go, Python, R, etc. Our collective projects use a wide range of programming languages so we’re very keen on people who have dabbled.
Desirable: experience using scrum, agile, XP, or whatever you want to call it. We would really benefit from some expertise in these areas.

That being said, experience matters less to us than cultural fit, motivation and passion. We are looking to form long term relationships with committed people. You would be working with two other developers on this project. A lot of the work will be done solo but there are opportunities for collaboration, idea sharing, working out problems together.

Given the nature of the work we especially welcome applications from trans and non binary developers, people of colour, disabled people, and other marginalised groups. We are based in Manchester, the project is aimed at a London audience (for now) and we planning on recruiting a candidate from anywhere in the UK but are open to international offers if you could be a perfect fit.

Salary and conditions

We are offering a 6 month temporary contract at this time but we are currently securing funding to make this permanent position which we hope to have confirmed by the time of interview. We are a 4-day-week employer, working 4 days a week for 6 hours (24 hours per week) because we think the 40 hour work week sucks and this is a more reasonable work/life balance. All staff work from home and choose the hours that suit them (within reason!).

We are flexible on specifics of employment and welcome applications from people who struggle to fit into other roles due to protected characteristics.

Renumeration for this role is £28,000pa with 7 weeks (28 days) holiday and an equipment allowance. We are currently a limited company but are looking to convert to a cooperative over the coming year or two.

To save you doing the maths, this is equivalent to £43,750 pro rata based on a 37.5 hour week or £46,000 based on a 40 hour week, but as we’ve defined ‘full time’ as 24 hours the term ‘pro rata’ doesn’t make a load of sense to us!

Interested?

Think this sounds for you, or want a no commitment chat about it?

Email jobs@gfsc.studio with:

A short statement about your experience in community groups / activism
A short description of your Rails experience especially on more technical backend projects
A short description of your non-Rails experience
A recent CV (please don’t worry about customising this for us we just want an idea of who you are!)
A link to a portfolio if you have one, or just a few links to sites you’ve worked on, a project on GitHub, etc.

Then we will take it from there!

We expect applications to be around 500 words and definately no more than 1,000 words. We welcome brevity. Don’t worry about making it perfect, we’re more interested in getting a flavour of you as a person.

If you have accessibility needs please let us know in the initial email and we will do our best to accommodate.

We will review the first wave of applications on Monday 4th October, and keep this job ad open until we find the right person: we will update this page when the role is filled.

The White Pube Website Overhaul

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The White Pube is the collective identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, under which they are best known for their writing about the art world, video games, food and more. Their six year old site built on Wix was becoming unwieldy and challenging to manage, and with widespread calls to boycott Wix by BDS, they felt it was well past time to move on to a new system.

We kept the frontend exactly the same as it’s perfect and a key part of their identity. Using various web scraping tools and lots of find and replace, we copied all 400+ pages off their current site and remade them using simple web standards - markdown, html and images. For this we used the Hugo static site generator for it’s speed and ability to resize images all using a single binary executable.

We then taught them both how to edit this content using hugo, markdown and git, with some basic command line support. Through this education they’re now finding it takes 5 minutes rather than 45 to publish an article, and are actually enjoying the process of publishing! As a result of this the site now has several new sections as it’s easy for them to add, and Gabrielle has created her own site from scratch using the tools we gave them. It’s also free to host so is saving them a little bit every month over Wix.

For us this really encapsulated our approach to tech education – with a bit of teaching, a bit of specialist code and some good overall strategy, we’ve given Gabrielle and Zarina life long skills and direct access to their published output at the code level.

Faceloader

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Through our work on the PlaceCal initiative, we found lots of groups were using Facebook Events as their primary source of event data. However, since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and with Facebook’s increasing abuse of their monopoly position, Facebook has all but made it impossible for community groups to sync their data outside the platform.

Where there was once multiple “Facebook to Google Calendar” extensions and an open and easy-to-use API, now there’s a big business only service that was closed during Covid and only really aimed at the Ticketmasters of the world. Site crawling is actively discouraged through blocking requests from data centres and silently hiding future events for accounts that are not logged in. While there is a “download my data” option for personal pages, this is completely unsuitable for simple data sync of public data.

This is a pain in the butt for event promoters and community group organisers. Anyone who wants to both use Facebook to engage with an audience, and have this information to be available in other formats, currently only has the option of doing this manually with cut and paste. Facebook as an events platform has many desirable features such as easily allowing multiple event hosts, having events visible on more than one Page, and generally the social features that are really helpful for running an event.

Our (attempted) solution

While Facebook constantly shift the goalposts to stop easy interoperability, there is one thing they haven’t yet blocked: using the accessible version of their website to view your own events.

FaceLoader is a desktop app that takes the name of one or more Facebook pages and then pretends to be you by visiting each event link and downloading the data to your local computer. This creates local files on your computer you can upload into other event platforms, as well as importing the files into your Google or Outlook Calendar.

FaceLoader was designed primarily to be used with the PlaceCal event aggregation platform, which requires a public iCal feed or API to operate.

On hiatus

However, we’ve found there’s way more barriers than we thought to make this work. It seems like datacentre IPs are block-banned from accessing Facebook without a login. If we do require a login, then it’s setting up a very brittle network of people who are using their personal access information to sync production data. Other tools to scrape Instagram have reached the same fate.

We’ve also found on the ground that groups are increasingly abandoning Facebook Events as the platform insists on a pivot to video, which is utterly unsuitable for most groups. We’ve finding more and more groups run out of Instagram or private WhatsApp groups – which works a lot better for the groups but is making inter-group networking near impossible.

We eventually dropped support for this but leave it here as an example of the difficulties in taking on big tech. We would welcome anyone who wants to try and take over the project!

imok: a simple bot to support people undertaking risky activities

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

No Borders Manchester approached GFSC to create a tool to support their Signing Support Network. As part of the Tory government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, people seeking asylum in the UK must regularly ‘sign in’ at one of 14 ‘signing centres’ around the UK. In Manchester, this is Dallas Court Reporting Centre.

This has repeatedly been described by people seeking asylum as the most dehumanising aspect of the whole asylum process. The #AbolishReporting hashtag is widely used on this issue by a variety of groups including Right to Remain and Migrants Organise. Reporting centres tend to be in the middle of nowhere with no seating or shelter for waiting family members or friends provided. On attending, an immigration official asks a range of inane questions that seem designed to waste everyone’s time, but can theoretically impact your case for asylum. How often you have to check-in depends on how big a risk the government thinks you are, from every day to every quarter.

If the government does decide to deport you, then you can be immediately detained from the centre and taken to the airport for extradition often with no recourse to a phonecall or way of notifying next of kin. This makes the entire process extremely stressful as it can happen at any time with no prior warning. Currently, No Borders Manchester and other groups manually support individuals going in and out of Dallas Court. This is obviously enormously labour intensive and requires a constant on-the-ground presence by volunteers.

Our solution

imok is a simple bot designed to support people undertaking potentially risky activities. It’s primarily aimed at community groups working together to support these people.

The bot lets users ‘check in’ to the service with a messaging app or SMS message. If users don’t ‘check out’ after 30 minutes (for example), it raises an alarm in a Telegram groupchat that project admins can join.

Other example use cases for it are:

Supporting protestors at risk of arrest or kidnapping
Supporting women and LGBTQ+ people walking home at night, or going on dates
Supporting journalists or medical staff in warzones

We released it under an open source (MIT) license. If you’d like to dive in and have a look then go check it out on GitHub, which contains full instructions for setting up your own instance and a list of recommended security precautions.

We’ve still sadly not got to pilot this due to rapidly changing conditions around reporting during Covid. If you think this would be a useful tool for your group please get in touch.

imok is released!

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

imok is a simple bot designed to support people undertaking potentially risky activities. It’s primarily aimed at community groups working together to support these people.

Examples use cases are:

Supporting protestors at risk of arrest or kidnapping
Supporting women and LGBTQ+ people walking home at night, or going on dates
Supporting journalists or medical staff in warzones
Supporting people seeking asylum through ‘signing in’ processes

We released it today under an open source (MIT) license. If you’d like to dive in and have a look then go check it out on GitHub, which contains full instructions for setting up your own instance and a list of recommended security precautions.

How did this come about?

Last year GFSC were approached by No Borders Manchester to create a tool for their Signing Support Network. As part of the Tory government’s ‘hostile environment’ policy, people seeking asylum in the UK must regularly ‘sign in’ at one of 14 ‘signing centres’ around the UK. In Manchester, this is Dallas Court Reporting Centre.

Illustration of Dallas Court by Michael Collins (CC-BY-NC, Right to Remain)

If the government does decide to deport you, then you can be immediately detained from the centre and taken to the airport for extradition often with no recourse to a phonecall or way of notifying next of kin¹. This makes the entire process extremely stressful as it can happen at any time with no prior warning. Currently, No Borders Manchester and other groups manually support individuals going in and out of Dallas Court. This is obviously enormously labour intensive and requires a constant on-the-ground presence by volunteers.

We’ve worked over the intervening months to create imok and are now really happy to release it. We hope that it can take some of the pain out of the process for both Signing Support Network volunteers and people seeking asylum.

GFSC will be working with No Borders Manchester over the coming months to pilot it at Dallas Court. We will release a full report on the pilot after it is concluded.

This sounds great, can I help?

Yes you can.

First of all, donations would be greatly appreciated. Imok has been developed entirely by volunteers in the GFSC collective. We’ve never attempted direct fundraising before at GFSC, and if this becomes a sustainable income source we will be able to greatly increase our capacity to release not just imok but a range of activist support software. You can set up a one-off or regular donation on Ko-Fi.

If you are able to translate from English to any other language, we welcome translations. You can do this through POEditor. It’s currently a very short translation project at around 30 sentences.

If you are a Python/Django developer, we also welcome code contributors. We will be working on moving our development to GitHub issues in the coming weeks: feel free to give us an email at kim@gfsc.studio, a DM on Twitter @gfscstudio, or join the GFSC Discord server if you want to help out.

What’s next for the project?

After completing the Dallas Court trial, we will be adapting the tool to support the growing wave of protests in the UK such as #KillTheBill. These protests are already resulting in harassment and assaults by the police, with a common tactic being to snatch protestors off the streets, put them in a cell at a police station in the sticks, and later releasing them far away from home in the middle of the night. We hope that imok can somewhat mitigate this through improved tracking of individuals attending protests. If you are in a group for whom this would be a useful tool, please feel free to get in touch.

The government’s rules say you are allowed a call, but in practice this is very hit or miss (Taylor & Humphrey, 2021; Taylor, 2020). Most commonly, people who are detained will have their phones or SIM card taken away. The offer of a phonecall often comes too late or never at all. ↩︎

Everything is connected, but should it be?

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Content note: This article contains discussions of classism, police brutality, incarceration, sexism & misogyny, forced deportation and racism, with brief mentions of rape, violence, blood & needles, death and genocide.¹

“Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence” - Article 8, European Convention on Human Rights (1998)

I have worked as a software developer for twenty years. In my lifetime I have seen the internet go from a utopian dream of connected knowledge to a dystopian surveillance network overseen by global superpowers.

When I started my career, computers were primarily seen as standalone entities: robot butlers (fig. 1) for the technologically privileged (as opposed to the robot symbiotes, or parasites, that we now keep in our homes and our pockets). The robot could only see what it was presented by its human owner. It could not yet read our thoughts or desires, eavesdrop on what we said to our friends and lovers in secret. And if it could, well, it was only a subtle interference. Polite.

Fig 1. The branding of Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) in the early days of the internet exemplified this view of computers as personal assistants.

Circles of tech counterculture foresaw the issue that privacy would become. But for most people, including the burgeoning industry growing in California, it made sense to dismiss any such concerns as low priority, something to be fixed ‘down the line’.

But in the space of just fifteen years, routine mining of data from individuals has become a major cog of the global economy and national security apparatus. Hyper-networked robots not only know far more about our lives than we have offered consensually, but they also have gigabytes of data on us that we don’t even know about ourselves. They feed data to and ingest data from other machines, services, and agencies frequently and minutely: high frequency trading for personal information. This gathering and sowing is second nature to them. This data is then correlated and synthesised by silent overseers with a vested interest in the mass gathering of personal information to be sold to the highest bidder. This system, as it is, has played a dominant role in international geopolitics and will continue to have catastrophic consequences.

Current privacy discussions tend to focus on what are, in my view, trivia of this current state of affairs. Decisions about privacy mainly happen only within the ‘chrome tower²’ of technology production. If they are considered at all, issues of privacy are designed solely around how they affect the presumed core demographic for the technology – i.e. WEIRD (Western, Educated, from Industrial, Rich and Democratic countries), white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied men.

It’s easy to find examples for this type of thinking even on the most surface of levels: smartphones becoming too large to be comfortably held by any but the largest of hands; automatic hand dryers whose sensors fail to register darker skin; and Apple releasing a health app claiming to cater for ‘your whole health picture’ but neglecting to include the simplest of provisions for half the world’s population, a period tracker.

What the people behind these innovations do not care about are the radical differences in how privacy affects people differently based on their social capital. This means that even people with ‘good intentions’ end up designing socially damaging software because they wilfully neglect to think about implications that don’t affect them personally. These are people who are never (or rarely) affected by the negative consequences of privacy fuckups. The worst case scenario for this demographic is having to change their password every now and then, or being the victim of easily rectified credit card fraud.

For the citizens of Myanmar, the military’s abuse of privacy, enabled by Facebook, was used to incite genocide. Needless to say, Facebook’s Head of Security at the time still has his job.

Between these extremes, and especially on a more local level, the impact of vampiric (predatory, extractive) privacy policy can be harder to see. I’ve become personally entangled with it in a few different ways, initially by the very fact of being an activist who also happens to be queer, trans and disabled in addition to being a software developer and researcher.

Most recently, the work of Resistance Lab, an anti-racist collective who aim to find new ways to resist state violence, in Manchester has cemented something for me: that the dream of utopian connectivity we were promised could not be further from our current reality.

Living in the Manchester surveillance state, case studies

In Manchester, where I live, Black people are eight times more likely to be ‘stop and search’-ed by the police, according to official stats³, which we suspect is an underrepresentation of the true figure. In practise this happens when ‘stop and search’ efforts are focused on ‘problem areas’ (read: Black areas) such as Moss Side, where, for example, one person was searched 16 times. The results of these efforts produce an ongoing supply of minor offences that are then used to justify further over policing of these areas – a self-fulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, ‘white collar’ crime in nearby financial districts such as Spinningfields is completely ignored and therefore has no evidence base.

Under ‘joint enterprise’ legislation designed to make, say, the getaway driver of a bank robbery equally liable for crimes taking place during the robbery, 11 young people from Moss Side were sent to jail for one murder. The evidence for their connection? Smartphone footage of ‘gang signs’ being made, taken at a youth work session in a building that contains the local library. The gang sign? An extended middle finger. This is not an isolated case. The ethnicity and social class of those convicted will surprise no one.

The Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham now plans to put police officers in schools⁴, despite large coordinated public efforts and independent research by campaigners. So when he also says he wants to start tracking people’s fingerprints and veins in order to use the tram, it’s hard to imagine that this data won’t be used in the most totalitarian ways.

Fig 2. In Gattaca (1997), finger prick blood tests are used to discriminate against those with ‘inferior’ non-genetically enhanced DNA.

How do technologies like ‘VeinID’, which is essentially straight out of 1997 sci-fi film Gattaca (starring Ethan Hawke, Jude Law and Uma Thurman), end up not being dismissed as dystopian movie plots, but given regional working groups and financial incentives to operate? The simple answer: because the people in the chrome tower – developers, funders, politicians, tech evangelists and financiers – are usually in the tiny minority laid out in the introduction. To them, this is a simple financial convenience that means you don’t need to take your phone or card out your pocket to pay.

Fig 3. Instructional image from the website of FinGo, the company who plan to roll out VeinID in the UK.

For others in Manchester this couldn’t be further from their reality. Is it too hard to imagine that the next ‘joint enterprise’ arrests could be based on data of multiple people who happened to board the same bus? Does it seem unlikely that Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE) teams would match fingerprints taken at Dallas Court Immigration Centre (where asylum seekers and refugees must regularly report) to those taken by city homeless services, and used as grounds for deportation?

What we are learning is that one person’s convenience can easily result in another person’s imprisonment, deportation, or death.

If this all sounds too dystopian for you, the NHS have already shared supposedly anonymous ‘track and trace’ data with the police in a massive breach of patient confidentiality. Right now, the Undercover Policing Enquiry is investigating decades of abuse by officers against innocent members of the public, including multiple women deceived into long term sexual relationships with police officers – they consider this rape (I do too). Their reporting went as far as to keep records of the profits made from bake sales by women’s groups; at a social centre cafe I used to help run in Leeds, what we assumed to be a series of money handling errors was almost certainly deliberate sabotage by an undercover police officer. We must stop seeing these events not in isolation, but as part of a consciously constructed element of the global military-industrial complex.

A practical example: the different types of user account

So far I’ve been talking ‘big picture’ about the national and international implications of neoliberal approaches to privacy. To better illustrate how these large and connected systems affect the most vulnerable in even the most innocuous ways, I’ll analyse one of the most commonplace acts we do online today: creating an account. This is a step that happens almost imperceptibly in our online lives nowadays⁵, especially through ‘login with Google or Facebook’ functionality.

Broadly speaking, four kinds of accounts come to mind:

“Consensual”⁶ accounts, where we optionally sign up to a service we want to access, usually clicking some ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’ box that we never actually read (at least without dedicating 76 days a year to it).
“Semi-consensual” accounts, where creating an account is mandatory for say, a job or residency status, but we would really rather not have one⁷.
Non-consensual accounts, where data is stored on us by the police or security services against our will.
Non-consensual “anonymous” accounts, where we are tracked by a variety of device identifiers that means ads can uniquely track us through a range of means.

Privacy discussions almost always centre the first type. We consent to signing up to a desirable app or website. We type in our email address. We conduct interactions within the app; as a casual user there are no third party ways you can access Facebook except for through the application itself, for example. By design, we are made to think of these as ‘vertically integrated’ closed gardens, a set of separate ‘data buckets’ that don’t cross over.

The infamous Cambridge Analytica leaks showed that even in this first and most preferable case instance, it is not possible to know what we are consenting to: namely, the wholesale connection and farming of all data we have ever published online, in all four categories, using both legal and non-legal methods. I suspect nobody who had their data extracted from Facebook, and then linked with hundreds of other sources to create materials for the use of ‘dark arts’ political consultants, would have consented to this if given the option. And yet despite the scale and severity of the crimes, no one has gone to prison for this scandal. Only a few small financial penalties were handed out. Doubtless there already exist legions of Cambridge Analytica clones we have yet to hear of, and every nation’s spy agency has some version of the same information.

That is the most well-known example of what I’m talking about. But every week there seems to be another huge leak from another big website or third party processing service. These range from the Ashley Madison leak of people seeking extra-marital affairs, to banking information on over a billion individuals, to the DNA data of individuals collected by companies who sell genealogy kits. This datavis has a partial list.

Each of these leaks is bad enough as it is. With a simple search key (e.g. email address), they can all be interlinked, giving anyone with the money to access it the ability to surveil individuals to an order of magnitude never before possible in human history. This data can then be stored in perpetuity. While GDPR has provided at least some theoretical restriction, it’s impossible to imagine that these companies will do anything differently, especially given the fines levied for data breaches will almost never outweigh the financial benefits gained.

In this context, privacy is incredibly relative. Much as the average British person apparently breaks the law an average of 32 times a year and never gets arrested, most of us are constantly having our privacy violated and will see few direct consequences. However, both the direct consequences to those that the state or private sector sees as a threat, and the indirect consequences for civil society as a whole, cannot be underestimated.

What if logins and user accounts themselves are the problem?

In my opinion one of the only remaining websites in daily use that lives up to that earlier utopian vision for the web I mentioned at the start is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not only free, but it doesn’t need a login, and only tracks your IP in order to ban ‘trolls’. Of course, you can login to Wikipedia if you want credit for your edits or to join the wider Wikipedia community – the vast majority of users do not.

This is, of course, anathema to the current way apps are developed. It’s hard to remember the last significant project that operated under a similar guise.

‘Uber, but for X’ has become the most typical flavour of pitch, to the extent it has become the easiest joke to make in tech circles. It’s worth noting that Uber is one of the most toxic companies on Earth, whose stated plan to be profitable requires all of the world’s transport to be replaced by Uber, and all the drivers replaced by AIs. Uber simply wouldn’t exist without extreme surveillance of not just drivers and customers, but also ‘problematic’ lawmakers and city officials to help avoid being caught breaking the law. Nevertheless, the model is frequently held up as some kind of ‘gold standard’ of app quality.

‘Sign up’ and ‘maybe later’, like two options that a pushy guy at a nightclub trying to get you to go home with him might present to you, are now the default dark pattern for many websites. Many of us will have had “you didn’t complete your order” adverts that seem to inexplicably follow us from site to site – proof to even the casual user that the websites they visit are not self-contained units.

Fig 4. Various ‘nudge’ messages that don’t allow you to say no: Amtrak asking ‘send me offers’ or ‘maybe later’; SEMrush asking ‘okay’ or ‘ask me later’, and an email asking us to ‘finish your purchase’.

Why do they push this? Because getting people to create a user account has inherent value. This is the inevitable consequence of a common marketing methodology called the ‘AAARRR Funnel’ (or ‘Pirate Funnel’). This acronym stands for ‘Awareness, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue’, each letter referring to a stage of the process of making a purchase or registering for a service. To implement this methodology, you first need the ability to track each aspect of this - from that first browser cookie, to account creation, to a login, to a re-login, to inviting your friends to join, to making a purchase, a repeat purchase, and so on. I have no doubt this works - as with most marketing tricks, this is the methodology half the web is based on, and why examples like the ones below are becoming more frequent every day.

I cannot begin to describe the rabid fervour that everyone from business executives to so-called ‘data evangelists’ to public sector managers have nowadays for gathering as much data as they possibly can – petabytes of it to be stored in a data lake, data warehouse, or other such metaphoric term. Often this literally happens in the same breath as discussions of privacy, data ethics, open source, or other in-vogue tech concept. Suggestions I’ve made to have even basic citizen oversight of data collection of Greater Manchester-wide data gathering initiatives have fallen on deaf ears. Somehow it has been widely accepted that the more data you have the better, as if data is a countable resource like money, and that if you just have a lot of it, good things are bound to happen, and that whatever risk this creates is worth it despite the fact we can’t articulate the benefits just yet.

In the desire to see data as the new oil, these people have either forgotten or simply don’t care that, much like oil, data generation is an extractive process designed to make a profit (or a comparative cost saving) for the owner of the data, and it is, much like with oil, apparently worth trampling over basic human rights, national sovereignty, and the environment to get. Despite the (ironic?) complete lack of evidence for it, we are told this will have health and wellbeing implications too. Maybe there is, but never is this done as a cost/benefit analysis – at least, I have never seen the risks seriously evaluated on any project.

Most software is information software

Interaction designer Brett Victor (2006) defines three kinds of software: information software, manipulation software, and communication software. Information software is where you want to find something out (Wikipedia). Manipulation software is where you want to make something (Word, Photoshop). Communications software is where you want to communicate with someone else (Email, WhatsApp).

Fig 5. Diagrams of the three kinds of software (Victor, 2006).

Most software is information software. Most of the time, we want to just find something out or browse. And yet, interactivity is all too often pathologically shoehorned in. All of the major platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram – continue to make their apps more complicated, merging so many features into one package until these platforms become more and more indistinguishable from each other. This is because backers correlate increased interactions with increased profit as per the Pirate Funnel.

The software industry is obsessed with it. Keep in mind that this software industry is the same one giving us Facebooks and Ubers, software the majority of us now use begrudgingly or with vague resentment. Maybe… we shouldn’t listen to them?

I maintain the simple position that apps should not even have a login unless there is an incredibly compelling reason. It just so happens that not only does it make things easier to use for 98% of users, but also that the sites end up working better for everyone as a result.

Even software that is explicitly designed to help vulnerable people often falls into the same traps laid and monetised by the chrome tower. Without being too specific, I’ve seen too many cases of concepts such as ‘Amazon, but for foodbanks’ getting financial backing from tech business accelerator schemes, where investors can see there is potential money to be made from desperate volunteers looking for resources and help in coordinating services. In these cases, the invasiveness of their techniques and disregard for the sanctity of privacy is only drawn into even more sharper focus by their explicit aim to safeguard and protect.

Street Support, a directory of homeless services that I worked on, does not require a login for the majority of users. There is endless pressure placed on all homeless services to track and monitor homeless people using their services. We put our foot down and said no. The people this directory was for tend to have intermittent internet access, usually in libraries and homeless centres, which meant that requiring a login could have actively harmed people in two ways: by making it more difficult for them to find information on crucial life-saving services, and by opening up their data to be captured by the government, therefore putting them at danger of deportation and more. Instead, two data points – what area you want to find out about and what kind of service you are looking for – were more than enough for our users to find relevant information. This had the knock-on effect of making the service widely useful for a large range of stakeholders and to have the results rank highly in internet searches.

While I was writing this piece, I got an Instagram ad which perfectly captures the more orthodox position of modern startup design (see below). This app actively encourages people to go around taking photographs of homeless people and uploading them to their server, where we can see their name and balance. Before even getting into the root causes of homelessness and what is actually needed in the sector (hint: houses), homelessness, as I have already mentioned, is now grounds for deportation. It only takes a second to realise the harm that could be caused by this initiative. While seemingly extreme, this is not unlike dozens of other ideas I’ve heard in ‘tech for good’ circles.

Fig 6. Instagram advert I received for Face Donate (left) and a screenshot from their website (right).

But what about when we do need a wider range of people to upload information?

I don’t claim to have the solutions to all of the problems I’ve touched on so far, and I certainly don’t have the social capital or the ‘capital’ capital to enact any of them globally, but I do at least try to put my money where my mouth is (so to speak) and think very carefully about design around privacy in projects.

My current flagship project, PlaceCal, is a website for neighbourhoods based around a shared community calendar and underpinned by the coordination of mutual aid in neighbourhoods⁸. I designed the software to build on top of the software people were already using: Google Calendar, Facebook, Outlook. All of the data we collate is public data about services pulled in (by the PlaceCal software) from public share links of existing services. That information, though public, is still only collated with the consent of the owner. The initiative as a whole was co-produced with Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods (MAFN), a resident-led multi-stakeholder partnership of people working to make the city better for the over 50s.

Then, how do we decide who can add information? PlaceCal’s methodology is to work with a trusted community organization in each area who then onboards other community organisations – in other words, everyone publishing data is explicitly whitelisted via existing real life trust networks. In this instance, those links were established in the MAFN partnership. We wanted people to go to events in real life, so we didn’t include anything like a comment system (with its associated moderation headache). Instead we used our resources to focus on ‘big picture’ digital inclusion issues.

By design, the ‘end users’ of both PlaceCal and Street Support are anonymous. Nothing is gathered about our users. We simply do not store data on them. To ensure we are meeting the needs of our target audience we simply ask them.

Instead of asking people to register an account, enter their details and select areas of interest, we get all the context we need from the website focus itself (homelessless, age friendly activities) and the ward they want to see results for (most people want to go somewhere familiar and local). These two datapoints were more than enough to give useful and relevant results. The focus of our efforts therefore became making sure that the service listings were complete through community engagement, rather than obsessing over the details of user profiles and logins and creating ‘achievements’ and push notifications in the app.

In PlaceCal’s case, people can find (and do find, when we aren’t in a pandemic) a weekly event near their home that they previously didn’t know existed, go to the event, establish a real-world connection, and maybe never check the site again. In some cases it was their GP who referred them, so they didn’t even touch the site directly. (It’s hard to overstate how much public health practitioners simply do not have easily searchable simple text databases of local health services available to them). Similarly, in Street Support’s case, we have absolutely no data on how it helps homeless people (or not).

So how are we to know it works if we don’t siphon off every drop of data we could possibly gather into a private data lake for analysis by a third party? Because we trust the people we talk to about it to tell us it works, through ongoing engagement with our project partners. We get constant feedback from community development workers that their work would be impossible without it – and in fact,_ is _impossible in areas without these interventions.

So why aren’t more sites like this? The simple answer is that this logic goes down like a lead balloon with funders, for whom their only model is a case-by-case basis, who want a graph or preferably a pretty infographic showing a line of ‘goodness’ going up. Big institutions are currently investing serious sums in community engagement and investment funds, writing about communities in their marketing materials, and promising ‘people first’ or ‘citizen led’ approaches.

But when push comes to shove (which it always does), interventions which create cold hard receipts of every small interaction win out every time over those that do sensitive work creating long term change. At the coalface, well regarded potentially life saving peer-led local services are canned every week. Commissioners and funders want you to make people a cup of tea, but only if you get their postcode and take a picture of them for evidence, or how else would you know that your hot drink fund is reaching those who need it most?

A refusal to take part in this process for the dignity of your service users is a Sisyphean task. I have spoken to dozens of practitioners who have experienced this and privately share this view but are unable to talk about it publically for fear of being financially cast adrift, and dozens of funders who want to “yes, but” me into a corner until I give up. It sucks.

Fig 7. Meme uploaded ‘unironically’ to r/neoliberal

I think this, very simply, stems from the unconsciously adopted view both within and without the chrome tower that the Pirate Funnel is basically a good thing and is the only ‘true’ way to monitor a service and demonstrate ‘impact’. Decades of indoctrination by billion dollar corporations has seemingly convinced middle managers with Fitbits and Alexa-controlled lightbulbs everywhere that they must be on to something, and somehow a methodology designed to sell Nespresso subscriptions or Call of Duty loot crates must also be applicable to public services.

Silicon Valley firms spend a whole lot of money promoting that some of the most immoral people in the world today are maverick t-shirt-wearing inventors worthy of idolisation, and not frenzied capitalists funded by billions of high risk investment capital overseeing the most efficient transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in history. We even create superheroes based on their archetype. Is it any wonder that people believe they must be doing something right?

Fig 8. Arms trader Tony Stark from the Marvel franchise Iron Man, role model for aspiring Elon Musks everywhere.

Conclusion (of doom?)

Does your new app truly need users to create an account, or can you just give the information away for free? Do you really need to ask the ethnicity of your event participants, or can you just look around the room and see you have inclusion work to do without demanding the people affected the most by this provide receipts? If you gather information on the gender status of employees, how are you going to guarantee this doesn’t fall into the hands of the Daily Mail?

Maybe you truly do need those things. Or maybe the parasitic desire for more data at any cost should be called out for what it is, a fascistic tendency with dire consequences. If we continue churning out softwares and technologies without fundamentally changing how we treat privacy and how we regard users, we will simply be building the final floors of a structure not unlike The Tower, a tarot card from the Major Arcana, which depicts a gigantic high rise built on shaky foundations. Like The Tower, which signifies chaos but also revelation, maybe the crumbling of the tech industry (and those who fund it) from the ground up will be a necessary, and welcome, revelation that will herald a new age. But should we always need prophecies of such apocalyptic scale to come to fruition before we can incite change?

Fig 9. ‘The Tower’ tarot card.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to co-author Jazz Chatfield for his significant contributions to this piece, Beck Michalak for the venus fly trap illustration, and Natalie Ashton for inviting me to write this for the Norms for the New Public Sphere project.

This list does not include warnings for the content of linked news articles, so please view at your discretion. I have tried to make this list as exhaustive as possible, so please let me know if there are any I have missed. ↩︎
Academia is often referred to as the ‘ivory tower’ due to its lack of accountability and disconnection from the rest of public life. I’m coining this term to refer to the same phenomenon in the tech industry, as discussions increasingly only centre the voices of developers, ‘tech evangelists’ and financiers, and not wider society. ↩︎
It’s worth pointing out that GMP have been placed in ‘special measures’ and the Chief Constable has resigned over their data gathering and publishing practice, so all their statistics are currently under suspicion. ↩︎
Currently on hold due to Covid-19. ↩︎
For older and disabled people this can of course be an insurmountable barrier and one of the biggest barriers to digital inclusion, but this will have to be a discussion for another time. ↩︎
Placed in “scarequotes” because often creating an account is a mandatory step that is hidden at the outset. ↩︎
Protip: if you need a temporary email address to activate an account you can use browser-based tool Tempail. ↩︎
For more on this, check our journal article about the application of the capability approach to IT production in an inner-city neighbourhood in Manchester. ↩︎

Taphouse TV Dinners

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

At the very beginning of the COVID-19 crisis we were approached by frequent collaborators The Old Abbey Taphouse to help them design a service to feed our local community during what we could see was going to be one of the most challenging times in recent memory.

Taphouse TV Dinners was the result of this work. Over a few weeks we recruited renter’s union ACORN to do volunteer delivery, and the Gaskell Garden project gathered free unpicked fruit and veg resulting from the lack of agricultural labour stemming from Brexit.

Our contribution was to create a service design and data management system to run the project, bearing in mind we were working with ever changing volunteers, we didn’t know what food we would get week to week, and we had little idea at the outset who had what cooking equipment in their house.

We created a service design for the project showing how each request for food would work end to end, how we would match food requests to delivery people on bike or car, how the meals would be packaged up in the kitchen and clearly labelled for delivery, and how we would handle allergies and the like. We then made an AirTable database to provide all the wiring and simple one page static site to get information out about the service, and Jazz drew a cute logo. So basically we successfully recreated Deliveroo, but for free, using out the box software and with a team of volunteers!

This project really encapsulates the benefits of hyperlocal local community tech production – in the end our contribution was probably a couple of weeks work total, because we were in the right place at the right time with such a great range of community partners we knew already. This allowed us to work quickly and decisively. To date this has served over 7,000 meals, for free, directly to people’s doors – and all without any financial support at all from the local council or institutions.

“I struggle to cook meals because of my health conditions. During lockdown I felt isolated and having a meal cooked for me made me feel included and part of the community. This service also helped me stay connected with others in the community, I was able to cope with loneliness because of it as the young people who delivered the meals would stay awhile and chat with me while observing the social distancing rules. I felt safe knowing that I can turn to them if there was a problem.” – TV Dinners Customer

We’d love to find funding to create a service pattern and some more robust software for this. We’ve learned loads in the 2 years since it started and our AirTable solution is looking long in the tooth. Let us know if you’d like to help us get funding to reproduce this huge success in other areas.

A Growing Threat to Life: Taser Usage by Greater Manchester Police

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Resistance Lab was a Manchester-based multi-disciplinary team of activists, campaigners and researchers who are aiming to dismantle the causes of state violence. GFSC were a founding member of Resistance Lab in 2019.

Following multiple conversations, workshops, data analysis and collective meetings, we finally decided on a crucial first topic: the alarming rise in the rate of Taser use by UK police, and the general transition to an armed force in general.

As a collective we worked with families affected by Taser violence, dug deep into public data on the topic, and produced a wide range of qualitative and quantitative outputs from interviews and desk research to interactive graphs and data repositories.

In August 2020, Resistance Lab published A Growing Threat to Life: Taser Usage by Greater Manchester Police (GMP), a report documenting the intrinsic and potentially lethal threat posed by Taser in the hands of police in England and Wales. We wrote the report in response to the stories of the many victims of police Taser usage here in Greater Manchester and around the country. Since their introduction in 2003, 18 people have died following Taser usage by police and many more have sustained serious injury and trauma. In many cases, these individuals and their families have fought protracted battles through complaints processes, independent investigations and the courts.

Despite multiple assurances to the contrary, Greater Manchester Police’s Taser use, like much of the country, is now the highest on record, with last year’s statistics showing an even more highly disproportionate impact on Black people and other vulnerable populations. Despite statements in support of Black Lives Matter from GMP, the institution of a new Race Equality panel, the imposition of ‘special measures’ on GMP, the resignation of the GMP’s their most senior officer over data mishandling, and Michael Gilchrist and his family finally getting justice after many years of dismissal from Manchester authorities, Greater Manchester Police have now announced they want to double the number of Tasers on the street.

Data collection and aggregation pipelines were published on a separate data portal, and all the graphs source was published on Observable notebooks to allow others to verify and reuse our work. We published hard copies of the report to distribute to community groups around Manchester, and held a YouTube stream discussing our work with leading thinkers working against police violence. We also did a short follow-on piece showing a huge discrepancy between official stats and what they were telling community groups in Manchester.

This report was a major news story, covered by Channel 4 and ITV Grenada, Vice, The Voice, Manchester Evening News, and The Meteor, among other sources.

Making a place for technology in communities: PlaceCal and the capabilities approach

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The paper also explores the initial implementation and early success and potential of our PlaceCal platform, with insight into its potential future, and challenges it may face.

Manchester Community Histories in the Shadow of Urban Regeneration

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On a chilly Saturday morning last November I joined other local residents, activists and researchers to participate in the first Hulme & Greenheys Community History Day in Manchester. The event was held in the historic Old Abbey Taphouse, one of the few nineteenth-century institutions to have survived the multiple waves of state-led ‘urban regeneration’ that have irrevocably transformed the area over the past sixty years. Organised by the pub’s co-director Rachele Evaroa in partnership with Kim Foale, founder of local tech enterprise Geeks for Social Change, the day’s activities were designed to bring people together to share firsthand accounts of life in the old neighbourhood as well as foster dialogue about the impact of city planning and urban regeneration initiatives on local communities – then and now.

Upon entering the pub, I was greeted by the sight of former residents grouped around tables, sipping cups of tea and sharing stories. Others were huddled around a long table covered with historical maps, each taking the opportunity to point out cherished sites long since destroyed and built over.

Event participants gather around historical maps of the Greenheys area. Photo credit: Jenna Bowyer.

As a researcher at the University of Manchester, I was fascinated to trace the contours of the bustling multi-ethnic working-class communities that had once occupied the streets immediately behind the South Campus in what is now known as Manchester Science Park. My own research over the past year has focused on the historic battles waged by residents of that neighborhood as well as nearby Moss Side to stop the bulldozers from moving in during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Historical map of Moss Side East Ward. Photo credit: Kerry Pimblott.

After WWII, more than half of the city’s housing stock was deemed ‘unfit for human habitation’ and in dire need of redevelopment. The Victorian terraces of Moss Side, Hulme, and Greenheys emerged as a key focal point with city authorities announcing plans for large-scale ‘slum clearance’ in 1967.¹ It is important to recognise that these neighbourhoods had served as an important ‘gateway’ for migrant workers beginning with the Irish during the late nineteenth century and followed by early African seamen as well as subsequent postwar ‘New Commonwealth’ migrants from the Caribbean and Indian subcontinent.² By the mid 1960s, 60% of all Caribbean migrants to Manchester lived in Moss Side – a spatial configuration reinforced by extended kinship networks and unchecked discrimination in the housing and banking sectors.

This ‘color bar’ also extended into many public accommodations including the Old Abbey Taphouse, the publican of which famously refused to serve local boxer and activist Len Johnson, spurring a series of ‘drink-ins’ in 1953. Despite these barriers, many residents managed to purchase homes and started their own businesses including the many clubs, restaurants, and grocery stores that dotted Denmark Road.

Event participant reading from an exhibit created by Dr Shirin Hirsch and Geoff Brown related to Len Johnson’s historic protest at the Old Abbey Taphouse. Photo credit: Jenna Bowyer.

Against this backdrop it is unsurprising that residents organized to resist top-down urban regeneration schemes and forced relocation. To learn more about these campaigns I visited the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre, which preserves rich archives related to Manchester’s multiethnic communities. Among them are the papers of Guyana-born activist Elouise Edwards whose home was located in the heart of the demolition zone at 78 Platt Street. Residents, including Edwards and her partner Beresford Edwards, came together to form the Moss Side People’s Association and it’s subsidiary Housing Action Group, which held regular meetings, staged demonstrations, and published an independent zine called Moss Side News. The group aimed to inject residents into the planning process and ensure that they had a voice in the future development of these communities.

As our contemporary urban landscape makes clear, local activists were not successful in halting demolition. Between 1970 and 1974, the bulldozers moved in and gradually forced residents and most business owners out. Elouise and Beresford Edwards were among the final holdouts; their house was the last one left on the block when they departed in 1974. At the Community History Day we got to hear the personal stories of several former residents and – with the support of archaeological technician John Piprani and his team – used Digimap and GPS technology to identify the exact locations of the homes in which they grew up. John Piprani has written a blog on this process which has more photos and thoughts from the day.

Former residents stand on the exact spot of their old homes in Greenheys.

After lunch, we returned for a series of workshops organized by residents, cultural practitioners, and community historians all engaged in vital heritage-making practices related to the area. Through family memoirs and photobooks, theatrical performances, and oral accounts we are all constructing histories capable of outlasting the bulldozers and, hopefully, shaping future discussions about the impact of urban regeneration in our communities.

Dr Kerry Pimblott is a Lecturer in International History at Manchester University. You can follow her on Twitter @DrPimblott and read more about her project Race, Roots & Resistance.

To learn more about Manchester’s urban regeneration projects of the 1960s and 1970s, see, Peter Shapely, The Politics of Housing: Power, Consumers and Urban Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). ↩︎
Laurence Brown and Niall Cunningham, ‘The Inner Geographies of a Migrant Gateway: Mapping the Built Environment and the Dynamics of Caribbean Mobility in Manchester, 1951-2011’, Social Science History 40:1 (Spring 2016): 93-120. ↩︎

Graphic designer for anti state violence project wanted!

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Resistance Lab is a network of activists, grassroots community groups and university staff and students who work to confront state violence, with a focus on racism. We were initially formed by members of anti-racist groups and activists coming together to ask if it was possible to use technology to fight state oppression.

Through several workshops and meetings, we have been working together to analyse and understand stop and search data in our local communities, work with local archives to uncover alternative narratives of people who have died following police contact, and help families affected with the emotional and legal support necessary to investigate and challenge decisions.

Following a successful grant application to Nesta Democracy Pioneers program, we are delighted to be able to recruit a graphic designer on a freelance basis to create:

A logo and branding guidelines
Social media assets
A simple website layout (max 5 different page layouts)
A simple flyer layout
A cover jacket for a forthcoming zine (front and back pages and inner cover)

For this work the total budget is £1,250 (calculated as 5 days at £250). You will be managed by Kim Foale (Geeks for Social Change) for this work, who will be creating the website itself.

To apply, please email a portfolio link with examples of your work in these areas (instagram account, website URL, PDF, etc), and a few sentences on why you’d be interested in the work to kim@gfsc.studio before 10am on Mon 4th May 2020.

If there are multiple suitable applicants, we will conduct interviews by video call the following week. We would like all work to be completed within four weeks. Given the racially disproportionate nature of state violence, we would especially welcome applications from members of the BAME community.

Please note you must be able to invoice for this work as a freelancer, we cannot pay you through PAYE.

Edited 17th April 2020: the closing date for applications is Monday 4th May not June, apologies for our mix-up!

Action Together CRM Consultation

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Action Together support community groups in Oldham, Rochdale and Tameside, helping them grow, develop and become self-sustaining.

They approached us with a request for a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management system). However, after an initial meeting to discuss their requirements, we realised that they were facing more complex issues than simply an outdated and non-user-friendly CRM.

We helped create conceptual clarity of each tool in use, what was needed, and what new tools needed to be created. This enabled them to decide if they would use readily available existing and off-the-shelf tools, improve their existing system, or create a bespoke system. We then suggested ways that they can use these tools to help create collaborations with partners and communities of action. This strategy helped to link their overall goals and funding KPIs as an organisation with the specific IT implementation they had chosen.

One key finding was that everyone was maintaining their own private spreadsheet as the provided tool often didn’t do what they needed, then manually transferring the data over to the main system when requested. This results in multiple sources of truth and data formats. We have since found this to be universal across the chronically underfunded public and third sectors.

Our holistic approach enabled them to use their existing provision to much greater effect, using tools they were paying for but had not yet used, (such as Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint) to allow the sharing of previously siloed information, and allow ongoing support and advice within teams. We helped them to identify the points in their organisation that were causing the tensions they had experienced, such as informal single points for organisational technical support, a small handful of database experts who had become the de facto database maintainers, and only limited time available from their tech supplier.

Identifying these pressure points saved them countless hours and technical fees creating and configuring new systems, which it turned out they didn’t actually need! We gave them the tools to improve their own systems without any additional external help. This is a perfect example of where sometimes it’s not a new tool that’s needed but rather a deep dive into how the tool is being used.

Join us for Hulme & Greenheys Community History Day!

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Join us in a day of celebration of Hulme & Greenheys’ diverse history. We are a group of grassroots historians, residents and academics who have come together to explore the history of our area. We’ve organised this day to help us understand how the four waves of rapid redevelopment over the last 100 years have affected us all, for better and worse.

There will be lots of hands-on activities, an archeological surveying walk, talks on a wide variety of local history topics, and a free lunch open to all. We want everyone to share their stories, learn how research their histories, and have plenty of time for discussion and sharing. Please bring along anything relating to the history of the area you think deserves a wider audience such as photos, artifacts, memories, or the address you used to live.

We will also be recording oral histories throughout the day and invite anyone who wishes to to tell their story to have it documented by a trained historian. Our goal is to collectively submit a funding bid in 2020 to both continue to develop the connections made through this event, and create a community-led archive of all the history projects in our neighbourhood.

You can RSVP on Eventbrite and Attend on Facebook.

Itinerary

All events at Old Abbey Taphouse, Guildhall Close, Manchester Science Park, Manchester, M15 6SY

11am - 11:15am. Coffee, tea, and croissants.

11:15am - 1:00pm. John Piprani & Irene Garcia Rovira will lead an archeological survey of the Greenheys estate with commentary from local history experts. Bring along any photos or maps of where you used to live and we will see if we can find where they would be now using GPS. We’re hoping to use this information to make a 3D map of the Greenheys estate. John is an archeologist who organises community workshops making stone age tools. Irene works for Archeology England, who are based right next door in the science park.

1:00pm - 1:45pm. Complimentary lunch. We will cater for vegan, vegetarian and gluten free diets, please get in touch if you have any other requirements.

1:45pm - 2pm. Introduction to the day from organisers Kim Foale and Rachele Evaroa.

2pm - 6pm. Talks.

2:00pm. Elizabeth Faye and Kay Welsh are cousins and both Manchester girls, who come from a long line of strong, inspirational Northern women. “Square Roots” is their first joint fictional novel, set in the Greenheys area of Manchester, where they grew up and is inspired by true events of love, loss and intrigue that occurred within their family amidst the backdrop of two World Wars. Hear how their attempt at a first novel, all began by a mis-sent text and the many interesting coincidences that have occurred along the way.
2:45pm. Sylvia Kӧlling. Understanding modern Manchester through baths and wash-houses in the 19th century, with a special focus on Leaf St Baths in Hulme. Sylvia is an independent researcher who will discuss her investigation into Manchester and Salford Baths and Laundries Company.
3:30pm. David Rudlin. The end of an era, Hulme 30 years ago… a turbulent period of crusties and squatters, creativity and squalor, tenants and students, occupations and cooperatives, punx picnics, flying PIGs and Dogs in Heaven. David is Principal and a director of URBED (Urbanism Environment and Design), Chair of the Academy of Urbanism and an Honorary Professor at Manchester University.
4:15pm. SuAndi OBE. Revealing the concealed by celebrating the unseen and questioning accepted histories, in particular the lives, experiences and contribution of our local Black Community since 1925. SuAndi is a historian, poet, writer and playwright, coordinator of National Black Arts Alliance, and previous organizer of Black History Month GM.
5:00pm. Kerry Pimblott. Want to learn more about how to do community-based history of urban renewal in Hulme and Greenheys? Kerry Pimblott will talk about her work using the collections at the AIU Race Relations Centre which offer a window into the community’s history, culture, and resistance. Kerry is a radical educator and scholar based at the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on African diaspora history and movements for racial change during the long twentieth century. She will be presenting this with Ruth Tait from the AIU Race Relations Centre.

6pm - onwards. Lots of chats and discussions about what we learned!

Organised by Geeks for Social Change & The Old Abbey Taphouse.

Generously sponsored by SALC @ Manchester University.

Why tech co-production practice is barely scratching the surface

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot of discussion about co-production, co-design and other impressive-sounding terms starting with ‘co-’ at the moment in tech¹ circles. These terms long predate tech and generally have their roots in urban planning and civic policy. Despite all the hip methodologies such as ‘service mapping’ and ‘human centred design’, many in tech seem to miss the original point of these methodologies: to give complete power to the community that work is being done ‘on behalf’ of. In other words, there’s nothing special about any design methodology. Change happens when the balance of power is shifted, otherwise it’s just potentially well done and engaged market research.

I realise a lot of this knowledge hasn’t made it into mainstream tech discourse yet, so I gave an overview of Sherry Arnstein’s classic 1969² piece “A Ladder of Citizen Participation” at a Tech for Good Live event last week. I think that tech has a lot to learn from other areas of civic coproduction, especially as it’s now more than 50 years old! Some of the language now seems outdated, and there have been countless riffs on it (19018 refs on Google Scholar at the time of writing), but the core concepts remain the same. Here’s the ladder, redrawn a little by me. This article will relate the ladder to some practices I see in community engagement and tech practice today.

‘Ladder of Citizen Participation’ (Arnstein, 1969)

Nonparticipation

The bottom two rungs of this are categorised as ’nonparticipation’. ‘Manipulation’ is a very common first step when organisations want to be seen to involve communities, in which “people are placed on rubberstamp advisory committees or advisory boards for the express purpose of ’educating’ them or engineering their support”. ‘Therapy’ is a little harder to describe, and I’m not sure translates as well to today:

“In some respects group therapy, masked as citizen participation, should be on the lowest rung of the ladder because it is both dishonest and arrogant […] people are brought together to help them ‘adjust their values and attitudes to those of the larger society’”, diverting them from the real issues …

I think therapy refers to where the focus is shifted off the actual focus. For example, is a lack of signups really a UX problem that needs a series of design workshops, or is it that your service sucks and no-one wants to use it? Would Facebook really need to run this ad campaign³ if they actually did care about data misuse?

A Facebook bus stop ad

Despite how obvious these methods can seem, somehow the internal logic of large bureaucratic organisations manages to perpetually convince themselves that this works, that the product is fine and it is it the user that is at fault. Overall, in every community I’ve worked in this has led to ‘consultation fatigue’. Community memory is much, much longer than any funded project, webapp, or commission. People will and do notice if your engagement process, however well designed, has no actual potential to change whatever it is you’re developing.

Every big tech company

Tokenism

Most initiatives I see branded as ‘co-production’ fall under what Arnstein describes as ’tokenism’. As a perpetual cynic, I generally categorise tokenist initiatives as ‘market research plus’. In this model, while there might be a thorough consultation process, there would never be any way for people to say “actually we’d rather you let us manage this instead”.

“Informing” is the first rung on this part of the ladder.

“Informing citizens of their rights, responsibilities, and options can be the most important first step toward legitimate citizen participation. However, too frequently the emphasis is placed on a one-way flow of information - from officials to citizens”.

A big problem with this one-way flow is that rarely do people ‘upstream’ bother to find out if people can actually access and understand the information given, whilst internally celebrating a perceived openness and transparency. I think the worst offenders for this are initiatives that usually go under the banner ‘big data’, ‘open data’, ‘citizen science’, and so on. These projects frequently seem to have the unspoken belief that if information is published in an ‘open’⁴ enough format and represented in a nice enough infographic, somehow things will change by themselves, and that if people can’t understand this stuff that’s their problem. Needless to say, I disagree. Knowledge is not neutral, and if it needs to have an impact then this cannot be done without directly working with the people it’s being created on behalf of.

‘Consultation’ is the next rung. ‘Consultation’ is a word thrown around a lot as a sort of fix-all panacea when there’s an obvious community tension.

“Inviting citizens’ opinions, like informing them, can be a legitimate step toward their full participation. But if consulting them is not combined with other modes of participation, this rung of the ladder is still a sham since it offers no assurance that citizen concerns and ideas will be taken into account.”

This is an improvement on ‘informing’ in many ways. Getting a group of people in a room to have a chat about something in many ways is the only way things can start to change. It is just that though in most cases: a start. The risk is that it can simply be a box-ticking exercise for the consulter, and a tragic waste of time for the consultee. This is the main category of ‘oh crap we messed up’ consultations. Usually large organisations such as property developers or city councils realise that toes have been stepped on, sometimes due to direct action by the residents affected. They then invest in consultations on their terms, with no built-in assurances of what will be done when the consultation is complete. This is an enormous cause of consultation fatigue, especially when it comes shortly after one of the non-particpation methods mentioned above, and even more so when paired with a PR campaign that attempts to convince everyone how good it is that they’re doing a consultation (see: therapy).

The final rung in this category – ‘placation’ – is the natural extension of this, in which “a few hand-picked ‘worthy’ poor [are placed] on boards of Community Action Agencies or on public bodies like the board of education, police commission, or housing authorities”. Again, this is a great start to genuine community co-production. But again, as the effort involved in making co-production happen increases, so does the potential for bigger perceived wastes of time and rifts. In the most extreme examples, dedicated community activists will get invited to join these boards, spend years feeling like they’re banging their head against the wall, and leave with renewed division and animosity, often on ambiguous and hurtful terms. In other words: don’t put people on your board unless you’re really willing to treat them as you would anyone else ‘within’ the existing organisation.

I think the better tech initiatives fall into this category: well meaning, but fundamentally restricted by the kinds of change that the host organisation is willing to make. As mentioned in the introduction you can do all the engagement and research you like, but if that isn’t paired with a change in the way decisions and funding is allocated then it’s usually just well disguised market research with little potential for transformative social change.

Citizen participation

At the top of the ladder is what I believe to be the only way to achieve genuine progressive social change, direct citizen participation with the groups and people you are seeking to help. The three forms of this: ‘partnership’, ‘delegated power’ and ‘citizen control’ to me mostly refer to exactly how far power is delegated: from control over the budgets and project outlines of a few dedicated programs, to total power over entire commissions. Briefly:

Partnership: “Power is … redistributed through negotiation between citizens and powerholders. They agree to share planning and decision-making responsibilities through such structures as joint policy boards, planning committees and mechanisms for resolving impasses.”
Delegated power: “Negotiations between citizens and public officials result in citizens achieving dominant decision-making authority over a particular plan or program … Citizens hold the significant cards to assure accountability of the program to them. Powerholders need to start the bargaining process rather than respond to pressure from the other end.”
Citizen control: “A degree of power (or control) which guarantees that participants can govern a program or an institution, [and] be in full charge of policy and managerial aspects … A neighbourhood corporation with no intermediaries between it and the source of funds is the model most frequently advocated.”

By way of example, PlaceCal came out of a ‘citizen control’ project managed by GFSC’s Prof Stefan White called Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods (MAFN). This project gained funding to spend over four years on making four areas of Manchester more age friendly⁵. The approach, on paper, was simple: hire the minimum staff needed to develop a partnership, manage the project and produce an evaluation over the four years, and then allocate all the rest to the partnerships (44% or £324,000) to decide what they wanted to spend it on.

This decision ended up framing the entire project. Residents and community groups were trained in participatory budgeting, meeting facilitation and legal structures, asset based community development theory, and involved at every stage in production of research findings. The project conducted over 6,000 conversations with groups and working with residents consolidated them into several Age Friendly Action Plans. One of the major findings from this process was the perception by residents that there’s ’nothing to do in my area’, which led directly to PlaceCal, itself a co-produced and community-led project that’s currently working towards full community ownership.

MAFN itself was based on the C2 Connecting Communities programme, which began in the Beacon Partnership in Cornwall. As a response to coping with an impossibly demanding caseload, neighbourhood health workers introduced a community-led intervention that reversed the decline of a heavily stigmatised estate of 6,000 people. The Beacon project became a national flagship for resident-led community renewal and health improvement. From being a ‘police no-go area’ in 1996 with 50% of children on child protection register, after the first year overall crime down 50%, unemployment down 71%, educational attainment up 100% and child protection down 42%. C2 provide a solid methodology for exploring this kind of intervention on their website.

Working in this way therefore benefits not just individual projects but creates a social and political context for radical new projects that could not be conducted otherwise. Each project builds on the previous one, working with existing efforts, rather than that sinking feeling starting a new group, event or project from scratch, again.

Conclusion

Aiming for full citizen participation is very hard work and will become the whole project and not an add-on to do further down the road. A genuinely co-produced project will fundamentally change the nature of the work conducted, changing the emphasis from a focus on developing solutions, whether technological or otherwise, to one on creating a creative partnership around a shared purpose. Key to this is engaging directly in the actual barriers faced by residents on a day-to-day basis. When working in this way, technology will no longer be centre stage in the project, instead becoming one of many tools that can be used to help people work together.

Of course, this approach isn’t always relevant. If your primary purpose is commercial, or your objectives don’t involve citizen participation, then another approach is needed. However if, like us, you are attempting to create interventions on behalf of the most isolated and vulnerable in society, we think there is no other way of getting things done.

Got any comments or suggestions? Let us know on Twitter @gfscstudio.

‘Tech’ has many meanings, I use it here to refer to ‘high tech’ businesses and social enterprises that focus on creating apps and websites, and the culture that these organisations create. I will write more on this in future and would welcome helpful disambiguations! ↩︎
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of planners, 35(4), 216-224. ↩︎
Image from Justin Li on Twitter ↩︎
The ‘open’ in this context usually referring to publicly published open source, with other forms of ‘openness’ implied as an ‘obvious’ follow-on. ↩︎
Hulme and Moss Side (one area), Moston, Burnage, and Miles Platting. ↩︎

Why an email list is the most important tool for community groups

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When starting a new community group or campaign of any type, one of the first things to get right is group communication. Despite dozens of tech tools claiming to help streamline this process, in my experience, nothing beats an email list. Why?

Quite simply it’s because email is the single largest common denominator that is inclusive of the widest range of people. While not everyone has an email account (especially older people), it is a prerequisite for newer, fancier tools like Slack, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams or Loomio. These more complex tools work great when everyone is at the same workplace, or at a high level of tech competency, but work far less well for ad-hoc community groups. Email doesn’t require installing anything new, or remembering to check other apps, and is widely understood and used by everyone with a basic competency in IT. As a result, it is the least likely tool to create an ‘information rift’ in your group between those who just use email, and those who have the apps.

The ‘default’ method most groups use is mass email ’to’ or ‘cc’ lines (or worse, bcc). In fact, one symptom of a group organisation system not everyone is using is that these emails persist despite having a ‘proper’ system. Email is simple, quick, easy to understand, far more intuitive than knowing what thread in what app to check, and has a vast range of clients on every platform imaginable. As a result, a sensible group admin should harness this existing competency and familiarity and work with it.

The main problem with the ‘mass cc’ method is that there is never a clear contact list for the group, meaning new people miss messages due to people replying to old group messages. I’m sure we’ve all been in the frustrating position of trying to leave or join one of these mass threads, or seeing people repeatedly miss new members out. People should be actively consenting to joining lists, and instantly able to leave, for both our personal mental health and GDPR reasons.

A secondary problem is that this mess creates a lack of transparency. I’m a firm believer that groups are as good as their record keeping and minutes¹. There’s no greater waste of a community group’s time and energy than going over the same discussions every meeting. An email list acts as a de facto archive, allowing both new and existing members to refer back to previous discussions.

There’s a bunch of other benefits of course: email digest options; ease of searching for messages as they are from a consistent sender; and ability to prefix emails with a list name so people can see why they’ve got them, for example. But these all pale into comparison with this main two problems.

At the start of a new group when you have a handful of members and you meet regularly, these are less of an issue, and it can seem like an unnecessary time sink to properly discuss group communication. I’ve found through being involved in dozens of groups though that not having these discussions from day one can be utterly toxic further down the line, preventing groups from being open, transparent, and well organised. In fact, having this discussion at the outset can be one of the best things you can do to figure out what kind of group you are and how you want to communicate.

Are there some downsides to this method? Of course. The rest of this article discusses some tips for mitigating these.

Setting up stress-free email

The main resistance to suggesting an email list apart from the initial effort cost is that most people find the volume of emails they get to be way too high. I’ve never quite understood this given the ‘mass cc’ default approach mentioned above. My best guess is either that people feel implementing an email list will somehow increase the amount of emails they receive, or a general resistance to any tech infrastructure. Older people I’ve worked with especially find their inbox to be almost unusable due to the amount of spam they receive. I think this is why sometimes the Slacks of the world seem like a good option: a clean slate. Give it a few months though and even with the best will, it’ll just be another pile of notifications to ignore.

The problem needs fixing at the root. Email organisation is pretty simple and a few steps can drastically reduce your cognitive load and make checking email feel like less of a chore. Here’s what I do:

Turn off all notifications for email everywhere. Really. Countless studies have shown that real time notifications are a ’toxic source of stress’ ². While youre at it, try turning it off for social media for a few days. I think the sense of calm is immediately palpable. On Android you can swipe directly on push notifications to see settings to silence them.
Unsubscribe religiously from email lists or mailouts you don’t want to be on, by scrolling to the bottom and clicking ‘unsubscribe’. If it doesn’t have one, use your provider’s ‘mark as spam’ option if it has one. It takes a little while to make a dent, but eventually this makes a huge difference to unwanted incoming mail.
Filter anything you don’t want to pay active attention to into folders. This can sound a little intimidating but it’s very simple when you get into the swing of it. This includes things like event invites, marketing emails you do want but don’t want to read instantly, and yes, email lists. Gmail has very powerful filters for doing this. For example if you click the checkbox by an email and go to ‘filter messages like these’ in the ‘…’ dropdown, you can add ‘from:yourgroupname@googlegroups.com’, ‘skip inbox’ and ‘apply label’ to set up a custom label. It’s really that easy! you can then check once a week or whenever you have the headspace rather than getting every message.

In addition, I really reccomend using a basic ‘getting things done’ methodology³. A lot of people I know have thousands of unread messages. This can be a source of stress in itself. I think there’s little need for this with some planning and rigorous decision making. What I do is just be very strict about dealing with incoming mail.

Mine looks like this:

Do I need to reply to this? If I don’t, then mark as read or delete it and forget about it.
Is it something I can reply to in less than two minutes? If yes, then just reply now, don’t wait around (key to this is not checking email unless you’re willing to write a 2 minute reply).
Is it something I need to reply to later? If yes, then I star it in Gmail and come back later (or the equivalent in your client).
Is it something that will take a longer response? If yes, then I mark as read and put an entry in my diary for when I’ll deal with it, or add it to a todo list of emails to send.

It might sound a lot, but if you follow these steps your inbox volume will pretty quickly come down, as well as your perception of how much (or little) work you’re actually getting done.

Tips on group emails

With these steps taken, group emails will seem a lot less intimidating. They do raise their own challenges though. You don’t want to put off anyone from emailing if they have something to say (especially quieter members), but you also don’t want them to devolve into instant-message style chat.

Here’s some tips:

Personally I think it’s best if each email covers exactly one topic that is stated in the ‘subject’ line. For example: minutes from a meeting, an article to read, arranging the next meeting, or a specific piece of research. I understand that this results in a higher number of emails but it makes it easier to decide which ones you don’t want to read at all. Having 50+ emails with the same title means that it’s very hard to tell apart what’s being discussed.
Does the reply you’re sending need to go to the whole list or a smaller group? Have a think before replying just who is in the ’to’ and ‘cc’ line. If you are the list admin, consider making the default response to go to the author of the email, not the list.
Is it a document for discussion, such as an agenda or minutes? If so put it in a Google Doc or the like and share the link with the group. People can then put comments directly into the document rather than discussing via email.
Still getting too much? Most email list software supports ‘digest’ mode that will email every message once a day. Alternatively you can turn off receiving emails entirely and just read all the emails a web forum if your email list provider supports it.

Email lists are by far the best method of communication for small groups, but require a little work on behalf of group members to be most effective. We spend an enormous about of time and energy sending emails nowadays. Taking a few minutes (or even an hour) to sort out your inbox will pay huge returns in workload and stress. Let us know if you have any other tips over on Twitter!

The only reason historians and archivists know that some groups have existed at all is because they published minutes. ↩︎
Psychologists warn constant email notifications are ’toxic source of stress’, Daily Telegraph, 2016 ↩︎
A popular time management methodology, a Google or Youtube search has loads of takes on it such as this one ↩︎

Making a place for technology in communities

Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a draft of a journal paper by Prof. Stefan White and I on our application of the capability approach to community technology in Hulme and Moss Side. We’re hoping it will be published next year, in the mean time please let us know if you have any thoughts on the draft! If you prefer, you can download it in pdf form.

Abstract

We discuss how a capability approach to information technology in neighbourhoods with low social capital can create embedded and sustainable Community Technology Partnerships (CTPs) that connect residents and institutions together, reducing barriers to social participation and collaborative action.

Current research indicates older people in deprived neighbourhoods have chronic problems with the effective sharing of community information, a key factor in the “digital divide” ¹. Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods (MAFN) conducted 4,000 interviews in four ‘age-friendly’ resident-led neighbourhood partnerships in Manchester. This fieldwork demonstrated that the inability to create and share information within and across residents, communities and service providers is a key contributor to social isolation and barrier to local collaboration.

MAFN developed a CTP to correlate perceptions that it was difficult to find out what was going on in the neighbourhood, with an exhaustive audit of actual activity. The result was collective surprise at finding out about dozens of events in each area that were previously either poorly communicated or which were not normally published at all, relying entirely on word of mouth.

The CTP was developed using a capability model ² to discover and overcome both the social and technical barriers preventing the hosts of neighbourhood activities collaboratively and sustainably self-publishing their event information. This resulted in the production of PlaceCal, an holistic social and technical toolkit that ensures groups and individuals have the technology, skills, infrastructure and support to publish information, creating a distributed network of community information.

Niehaves & Plattfaut, 2014 ↩︎
Kleine, 2013 ↩︎

A brief introduction to PlaceCal

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PlaceCal is a package of calendar software, education and community development. It makes it easier for residents to publish events, find information about their area, and see how to get involved in local groups. This helps people become active in their community by connecting them to events that are happening nearby. The result of this is a more connected neighbourhood that works better for everyone.

It works by getting community groups to publish their calendars online using software they already have, and then linking them all up together to produce one really good central events and services listing.

This is really important as it’s currently very difficult for people to find out about the small local, neighbourhood-level events that can be hard to discover: the coffee mornings, sewing groups, computer classes and gardening groups that might be just around the corner but can only be discovered by word of mouth. This especially affects older people, who are much more likely to be socially isolated and digitally excluded.

A screenshot of PlaceCal at the time of publication

By helping everyone in a neighbourhood find out what’s happening, PlaceCal enables service providers, community groups and residents to work together enabling people to live more physically and socially active lives.

This has wide benefits for everyone living and working in a community. For residents, a more connected neighbourhood reduces the risks of social isolation and loneliness. For community groups, it drastically reduces the barriers and effort in getting their information disseminated to a large range of audiences. Having a single point of contact makes it really easy for health service providers and city councils to engage with local groups and roll out “social prescribing” schemes, without having to engage in costly “asset mapping” processes.

This article explores our first two years of developing PlaceCal, examining how we framed the problem and developed a solution that we think solves the issue of community information in low social capital areas once and for all. PlaceCal came directly out of a co-research project based around a resident-led partnership of older people (Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods) in Hulme and Moss Side in Manchester, UK.

This article was written for a publication based the workshop “Challenges of a Digital City for Disadvantaged Neighbourhoods¹” that we attended in October 2018 in Berlin. You can find out more about this workshop on the hosts’ websites: vhw & Stadtkümmerei. Thanks to the hosts for a wonderful time and the inspiration to write this!

What’s the problem?

It’s really hard to get good community information

Manchester is the 5th most deprived local authority in England out of 326². Working with a group considered “hard to reach” with technology (older people) in an area with a strained public sector and scarce resources fundamentally changed the nature of how we approached technological co-production.

Many neighbourhoods used to have a range of local publishing like newspapers, what’s on guides, and classified ad magazines. The competition provided by privatised sites like Facebook and Twitter seem to have absorbed some of these functions, resulting in less information in the public domain. Overall it’s now much harder to maintain what these “old” media represented: hyperlocal forms of information brokerage and trust.

In the absence of a more functional community media, finding out everything that’s happening in a given neighbourhood looks something like this.

Some of the flyers and posters we collected for events in our area

It’s disconnected, ad-hoc, and reliant on each individual organisation to create, publish and distribute their own material. This is enormously cost inefficient across the sector. It’s no surprise that less than 50% of voluntary, community and social enterprise³ (let alone unincorporated community groups) have a website at all, let alone an up-to-date one, given the cost and skills required to reach relatively few people compared to traditional media.

It’s even worse for people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods

This is especially extreme for socially isolated people. Generally, tech products are aimed directly at people with high social capital, exacerbating the gap between “tech haves” and “have nots”. Despite the last decade or so seeing a rise in “human centered design”, “user experience” and the like, this situation seems to be actively getting worse, with the designers of tools looking less and less like the people who use their tools every day.

We’ve discovered this first-hand working on Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods. We found lots of residents don’t have an email address, find most of the web far too complicated, can’t remember any passwords, think website font sizes and contrasts are too low, and most of all can’t really find a reason to be online outside of video calling their family. Crucially, these are also the people who run support people for their peers. This means that it’s not just hard for people to find community information; often that information simply doesn’t exist online as the people publishing it have the same difficulties with technology as those they’re helping.

This creates a Catch-22 where there is no point in many older people being online as there’s no information on there for them, so tools are not being developed by older people to suit their own needs. As long as tech products and practice are designed for people with high social and economic capital, this has no signs of changing.

This has big knock-on effects for health, wellbeing and loneliness.

The effects of this are enormous. Social isolation and loneliness are among the biggest killers in the UK today. A long term longitudinal health study found that being socially isolated is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as impactful as not taking regular exercise⁴.

The UK government and health sector is pushing for doctors and community workers to “socially prescribe”, or direct people to local groups that would be good for their wellbeing⁵. Currently however, this is not possible due to this lack of joined up community information. It is almost impossible for each GP to collate their own list based on the flyers and emails they get every day (like in our photo above), meaning it’s almost impossible to give useful information to patients in an average 7 minute GP appointment. This means that people are not getting redirected to the nearby services that need and welcome these kinds of connections, and making it harder for people to take control of their own health.

How it works

We designed PlaceCal as a new way of helping people understand what’s happening in their community. We realised we couldn’t just make an asset map, a directory, or a piece of software — it would require a fundamentally different way of thinking about community information, skills and training that brings everyone together to solve these issues.

What happens now

Every community group we spoke to had a diary somewhere, whether it was on paper, on someone’s calendar, or even in someone’s head.

These calendars work great for the day-to-day running of each group. However: they’re not linked up, it’s hard or impossible to find out about them without a personal connection to the group, and it’s not always clear who to talk to to get them updated.

Small groups don’t really have the money to publish at all outside the odd flyer here and there. The few who did manage to publish on or offline found it took an enormous amount of time, money and resources, and it was practically impossible to work with others to make the job easier. Websites were seen as a “nice to have”, but ultimately a huge amount of effort for a very small increase in visibility.

Big institutions tend to invest in their own community events and projects listings. These are generally linked directly to the organisation: so big health and housing providers will keep their own events listings, for example. While these platforms are often open to submissions from community groups, this takes a lot of time and work, and groups are often faced with having to add events to Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite, their own websites, flyers etc before even thinking about other local sources.

Our approach

We reframed the problem by examining this system as a whole: there are lots of small organisations with disconnected calendars, and large ones making their own copies.

We realised that if we could get all the small calendars online and to adhere to a common data standard, that they could all be combined into larger ones by a computer with some clever coding.

This means that everyone would be responsible for publishing their own information. The central system would just aggregate and process this new network of calendar data, acting as more like “community plumbing” than an endpoint.

How does this work in practice?

We find a key organisation in each area to work with

PlaceCal works by finding a local group to work with: be that a resident-led partnership, local housing provider, or something else.

We start with the organisations and groups already engaged in their neighbourhood. This group becomes the area commissioner, and selects a number of people already engaged in neighbourhood development (we called them “secretaries”) to manage the rollout across the region.

We work with each individual group to get them to publish a calendar feed

These secretaries then go to have a chat with each group. Every online calendar, such as Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook and custom CMSs has (or should have!) a way to publish an “ical” or “ics” feed, or an “API”. This concept is something quite basic to anyone involved in the technology sector, but completely alien to all the community groups we spoke to.

Rather than asking people to contribute to yet another system, we simply find out which of these calendars they are already using (or train them up to use one), and help them enter their event information in a way already embedded in their organisation. This means that no extra IT is needed, and often people are paying for this software already.

For example, if a group is using Outlook internally for their email, that means they have access to Outlook Calendar too. We can help them make a shared calendar of public events that can be managed with other people in the organisation. By using these existing tools that people are already familiar with, it makes people far more likely that this information will stay up to date, and not be “just another” thing to remember.

Illustrative diagram of how PlaceCal imports feeds

Giving organisations the skills to manage their own information has hugely increased the accuracy and completeness of their information. One organization we worked with published twice as many events when given this skill as their representative was able to tell us face-to-face.

Our most ambitious project yet was for Hulme’s 2018 Winter Festival, where we co-produced and delivered 10,000 A2 maps of the area with everyone’s venues and events on! This meant that every organization drastically increased their reach, and were supported by the neighbourhood team to be part of a the community network.

The map of Hulme and Moss Side we made for Winter 2018’s mailout

What are the benefits?

The overall benefits of PlaceCal are wide-ranging. We’ve developed our platform around core “roles”, based on the “capability approach” used by large NGOs such as the United Nations. These roles - Citizen, Organisation Manager, Organisation Admin, Secretary, Commissioner, Social Prescriber and Developer - are the basis for our research and evaluation process and cover all the roles people play in the publication of community information. We’re currently working on a journal paper that will explain these in full.

Here’s a look at some of the benefits for these groups.

Citizens get a really great source of hyperlocal information

For residents, there was a short and simple benefit:

People are saying they’re bored and there’s nothing to do - with this much on that’s mad isn’t it!

– Catherine, participant at a supported IT session for older people

A community group in Moss Side library using PlaceCal to find out what’s on

Small community groups can get their stuff online really easily

Small groups with little or no support can now get their events published online in a high quality format really easily. If this is in a community venue that’s already on PlaceCal, they won’t have to do anything at all to get listed as the venue’s events will automatically get listed.

Organisations get a trusted way to get their organisation’s data online

For people who manage buildings or large groups, getting their information online is also complicated and hard to know what to do. By helping them upload their events using internal tools, we make the crucial job of diary publishing as easy as possible and make a clear definition of success. In some cases this simply means we can read the feed that is already there, like one group who already had a calendar up on their Wordpress website:

I am so pleased you think you can link to what we already have. I was quite concerned about setting up something additional as we don’t have people with the skills or time to keep it all up to date. I have just about got to grips with what we do have!

– Susan Ash, Mossley Community Centre

GPs appointments are an average of 7 minutes. By making information really fast and easy to find, some local doctors are now using PlaceCal to “socially prescribe” in appointments.

I think what you’re doing is amazing, I think it’s really fleshed out the challenge of how we get information out. Do I know what’s going on half the time in PlaceCal? No. Do I know what’s happening locally? No. Having a tool to let people find this out themselves seems totally obvious, it lets people teach me stuff, like “oh that refugee service is better than that one”, that helps us find a way together.

– Alasdair Honeyman, GP at Manchester Medical

By focussing on creating a central public list of events, PlaceCal means there is no longer any need for expensive and siloed institutional contracts. This allows everyone to quite literally be “on the same page” rather than duplicating this work across each social prescribing organisation.

Alasdair at work using PlaceCal

There are many roles in communities to develop contacts and find out what’s going on, across health, social care, and social enterprises such as community pubs.

Many people need a few sessions to get the hang of using software, and many tech communities don’t really understand this human development aspect. Tech works most effectively when it is relevant to people’s everyday lives, especially in [Hulme and Moss Side], where many people are affected by poverty, loneliness and alienation.

– Rachele Evaroa, The Old Abbey Taphouse CIC

PlaceCal enables pubs like The Old Abbey to use their real life trust and knowledge to make themselves centers of the community by helping their patrons.

How are we planning on rolling out to other areas?

After all this work, we’ve got one last innovation to make - working out how to pay for it. To do it, we need to design a radically new form of organisation to own and manage it. People are already making large investments in all this information, as we covered. However, convincing a highly siloed public sector to cooperatively invest in mutually beneficial platforms is very complex with our current legal systems.

Our vision is to set up “The PlaceCal Foundation”, allowing it to be co-owned in a not-for-profit way by the people who use it. The Foundation will own the project and all the information, allowing people to control their own information. By doing this, we hope to pave the way for this and other innovations that will work holistically to put people back in charge of their own information.

All the software is open source, and we’re developing a comprehensive training and onboarding process with three other neighbourhoods. If you’re interested in working with us to develop this radically different way of thinking about technology that benefits everyone, please get in touch!

First posted 19 April 2019

Our work made us a winner of the AAL Smart Ageing Prize 2018⁶! (L-R Kim & Stefan)

More information about the workshop including proceedings is on their website. ↩︎
Manchester City Council deprivation statistics ↩︎
Government Digital Inclusion Strategy (2014) ↩︎
Campaign to End Loneliness ↩︎
“DH pledges to roll out GP social prescribing across England by 2023”, GP Online (2018) ↩︎
“The Smart Ageing Prize awards €50,000 to 3 innovative solutions for active and healthy ageing”, AAL Association, 2018 ↩︎

Mossley Heritage: one place to find out about Mossley's rich history

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Mossley Civic Society approached us to help them create a web presence for some National Lottery funded “trail boards” around the town. They had worked with four different schools in the area to make four heritage trails, each of which was going to have physical signs put up to create short circular walking tours.

The more we dug into this though through meetings with the civic society the more we found communications issues to address. Who are the civic society? What is Mossley Heritage Centre? Who runs the various Mossley heritage facebook groups? Why does Mossley’s history matter?

Working with the group we changed the brief to create a new brand to encompass and consolidate all these projects, which were being run by the same people but with very different (or no) branding. This included a rebrand of the heritage centre including new signage and leaflets! It’s not every project you start with a website brand and end up making a museum sign.

After discovering that none of the civic society were very tech savvy with an average age over 70, we created the website and web versions of the trail boards using a static site generator called Jekyll. This means there’s nothing to update or maintain – Facebook is used for blogging where their audience already is.

Mossley Heritage Society don’t keep visitor numbers but reported a big rise in people visiting the centre following the refresh. The boards are still there to this day and are a major Mossley landmark. Pulling all these elements together into one place gave the civic society a renewed sense of purpose and helped communicate clearly what they do to the whole town.

Strength Of Our Mothers

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Strength of our Mothers was a project led by the National Black Arts Alliance, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.

The project documents the lives of 23 white women in interracial relationships with African and African-Caribbean men from the 1940s to 2000. Each woman’s story is told in her own voice, or by her children.

Project outputs consisted of a book, a series of live performances, and a website. We produced the website and brand as a single page standalone site using a static site generator, so it never needs to be updated and is free to host. We did this as a pragmatic reaction to Heritage Lottery funding only covering web hosting for 3 years, meaning many heritage projects simply vanish after the 3 year period is over.

You can download the book and watch the launch on the website!

PlaceCal: The Story So Far

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve spent the last 9 months working with PHASE@MMU, Smart City project CityVerve, and Manchester City Council to deliver PlaceCal, a crowd-sourced community events calendar. It’s been an extremely busy time with a lot of learning in a very short amount of time, and as we head into Phase 2 of our development I thought it’d be a good time to recap the process so far.

To start at the end: here’s a little clip from our launch party on 1st Dec 2017, where we organised the Winter Lights Switch-on in Hulme Park. Confused what Christmas lights and children’s choirs could possibly have to do with a smart city project? Find out more in the video…

Where it all began: Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods

Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods (MAFN) was a project centred around four resident-led neighbourhood partnerships in different areas of Manchester, led by the PHASE consultancy at Manchester School of Architecture. It’s part of Age Friendly Manchester, itself part of the World Heath Organisation’s Age Friendly Cities program. PHASE stands for “Place, Health, Architecture, Space and Environment”, which hints at the range of perspectives used in the project: we will return to this later.

MAFN set up four resident-led age-friendly partnerships in different areas of Manchester in 2015. These partnerships aim bring people together from diverse organisations such as public health providers, emergency services, housing associations, community organisations, residents’ associations, local councils and neighbourhood teams. The partnerships are designed to help tackle issues in each area by enabling residents and organisations to work together to identify problems, and then research, design, produce and evaluate solutions together. Resident-led is the key term here. Rather than a top-down approach where the remit of the work to be done is decided in advance, this kind of partnership allows people who live in an area to decide what the important issues are and get access to regional providers who might be able to fix those problems.

This is methodology is called asset-based community development or ABCD: aiding the people, resources and organisations (collectively “assets”) in an area to overcome common problems together, rather than imposing interventions from without. The partnerships can fund both their own projects and ideas submitted to them, help evaluate and support those projects, and create and direct strategy to address lacks. The board meetings give a physical interface to anyone or any organisation wanting to get involved in making the neighbourhoods more age friendly, drastically reducing the friction especially large providers usually face when trying to get involved in grass roots action. Throughout this whole process, the partnership can access the skills and support of the university. By the end of the intervention, the idea is for the partnerships to be self-sustaining, like MAFN’s Old Moat pilot. Some example partnership meetings from our reports are shown below.

Before continuing, it’s worth noting how hard it can be to write up this kind of work. What “the partnership” is or means to anyone at any given moment can be extremely hard (and often undesirable) to pin down. Decentralised resident-led groups, like most things in society, are complex structures that we believe offer the only real possibility for genuine change: however in doing so they make it extremely hard to write about exactly who did what when without making it sound like credit is being taken for the actions of a wider group. Therefore: when the rest of this article refers to “the partnership” or “we” it is referring specifically to me (Kim Foale), the Hulme Age Friendly Board, and PHASE@MMU working together to create PlaceCal and its requisite theoretical background. If anyone has any ideas how to resolve this issue with language, we are all ears!

1. A photo of a neighbourhood partnership in action. 2. A snapshot of a board meeting in Hulme

This process is designed to combat the widespread “silos” that exist across all sectors. Silos occur when local councils, housing associations, or universities for example act alone over long periods of time. Each institution ends up with its own strengths and weaknesses, and inevitably creates parallel and disconnected knowledges, skills, facilities, and funding streams. If you’ve ever been involved in a community group and wondered “why can’t we just book a room on the local campus?” or “how come the same organisations seem to get all the funding?” or as a researcher wondered “how come it’s so hard to work with local organisations and get citizen involvement?”, then you’ve probably encountered this first-hand. Resident-led partnerships’ direct aim is to de-silo and allow cross-agency work, producing interventions that enable community wellness by solving problems at the root level.

For example. When we looked at the spatial data, one part of Hulme had some of the poorest self-reported health in the area, the lowest rate of car ownership and no bus service within 800m. Interviews with residents revealed that getting to the local health centre required a bus into and then out of town to go a very short overall distance. Even if everyone was given a bus pass, basic access to hospitals, health clinics, activities and supermarkets was extremely poor.

It had been long suggested by residents and councillors that a health visitor could use the church hall in the area to do a weekly surgery: a common solution in disconnected areas. However, it was reported that the NHS were unable to use the hall due to the lack of a disabled toilet. So we reach an impasse. Residents and councillors wanted a disabled toilet in the church, but due to siloed funding streams had no access to the skills or funding needed to make this happen. The church hall was willing to make the alternations, and equally didn’t have the funding to build it, and needless to say the NHS’s remit doesn’t exactly cover building work in community venues.

This was one of the first issues tackled by the partnership. By identifying the problem together, making it a shared neighbourhood objective, and allocating funds from the partnership budget, we were were able to enable the architecture school, health authority and church to work together. Over a few months we were successfully able to create an accessible toilet in the church hall.

This story is a great example of how the things that prevent community wellness are often relatively cheap and easy to implement, once the problem has been successfully identified — and that often, these needs are ongoing problems residents or organisations have been dealing with for a long time. The local knowledge of residents could not be realistically divined solely by any quantity of top-down measurement or data-gathering process: people are experts in their local area and had clearly identified the problem for a long time.

This brings us back to the role of the architect in partnership work. Architects are commonly seen as people who simply design buildings. In this case, building a disabled toilet is something a second year undergraduate student or a decent plumber could do: and of course, someone does have to design the thing. The much harder work lies in identifying the problem using the available data: starting from analysing maps of bus routes and public health data, through talking to residents to find the reason for the problems, to creating the conditions to make the change itself.

The final result: not too complex!

At the time of writing, the NHS are still waiting to start doing surgeries there, such is the planning time on these things. However, Manchester City Council are already using the church hall for a new programme of health and fitness activities. Two people with physical disabilities who used to go to the food bank are now staying for the lunch club which is hosted afterwards — previously they got their food and left. And of course, the partnership now has access to a versatile and accessible venue that meets everyone’s needs in the area.

By fixing this kind of problem at a root level, the eventual outputs can be very cheap to implement compared to any solution a single agency would devise, especially when considering total costs across multiple agencies. In fact, as anyone who has done enough community work knows, the main resource in this kind of situation can be time spent in meetings! In this case, compare the cost and maintenance of fitting a new toilet, as opposed to providing free bus passes or taxis and the health costs of an older population with no access to exercise facilities. This is a great example of how fixing an ongoing and hard-to-address issue has already begun to create neighbourhood wellness — in this case, filling a void in community provision that improves neighbourhood capability— rather than a symptom-based approach that would have tackled only the issues arising from the lack of suitable spaces.

So how does this connect to PlaceCal? We’re getting there…

“There’s nothing to do!”

The research methodology for the MAFN process involved a series of research activities such as walking interviews, focus groups, interviews, surveys, mapping workshops, and secondary data search. The explicit goal of this process was to involve the partnership and other providers in coming to an actionable shared understanding and consciousness of their area. We’re producing an action plan for each area detailing these findings (an old draft for Hulme is on the area blog): stay tuned for updates.

One of the first, extremely stark findings in this process was that older people didn’t think there was anything to do near them. So we set out to find out what there was to do. This single observation ended up being the entire design principle for the project. Through partnership meetings and hundreds of phonecalls, chats and emails, we asked everyone what events they knew about or were putting on, and if there’s anyone else we should talk to. Pretty soon each area had a Google Calendar a bit like this one:

All the age-friendly events we knew about in Hulme and Moss Side this time last year…

These calendars were managed by the MAFN team, and were printed out and distributed at each Age Friendly board meeting; in fact, we’re still doing this. None of us quite realised how much there was going on in each area, or quite how many spaces people were using for events. We found that there were several age-friendly events almost every day for people to go to. We found that many major providers didn’t publish their data online or published a highly incomplete data set, usually managing some mass of leaflets and flyers, circulated and collated by the organisations themselves and a range of health providers and active citizens. Contrary to our initial assumptions there was a surplus of community spaces not a lack: however, most of these spaces were hidden and hard to find out about and access without a real-world local connection.

Very quickly we realised that these Google Calendars were going to be very difficult to maintain. Google Calendar is really not very good at browsing lots of events at the same time (OK, I did set the screenshot to week view for dramatic effect), and you’d either need to receive a printed copy by hand or be an active Google Calendar user to get the event information. It’s hard to see where events are at a glance or without clicking further, which turned out to be one of the most important factors in people choosing events. Most of all, it’s very clunky and not really designed for this task: it’s designed to manage a personal agenda, not a regional listing service.

More concerning than these issues though, it requires constant updates and maintenance by the team. This is a bottleneck for several reasons.

It placed a high degree of expectation on initial contact with organisations. Anything missing after an initial meeting would require sending a change by email or a chance conversation. As most organisations were struggling to do any event promotion at all, and the event promoters themselves might not be using the Age Friendly calendar we were printing, it wasn’t viable to expect anything to stay updated after initial contact.
We later discovered when we let organisations update their own calendars, in some cases they listed twice as many events as they did in what we thought was a comprehensive face-to-face interview. In other words, even people managing event spaces didn’t know everything that was happening in that space.
Having a single point of ownership means a single point of failure. As soon as our funding ends, there is no obvious resource to maintain the calendar information unless a resident steps in to take over, which experience has shown is a big ask. Any sustainable system needs to be tolerant to funded roles and motivated community development workers coming and going, and allow organisations to manage their own data. Distributed ownership was therefore a prerequisite for a sustainable system.
The job of maintaining the events scales proportionally with the number of organisations. In other words, we risked becoming a victim of our own success the more organisations started to use it, as the administrative task scales linearly the more people come to rely on and use it.

We needed something better.

Enter PlaceCal

As this article so far has probably hinted, our approach to this was going to be different from the usual product-centred approach to software design. Our fieldwork demonstrated that a shared feeling that “there’s nothing to do” stemmed from several sources: a lack of joined-up data sources, technology, staff hours, computing facilities, and resources in general. Through this process we discovered why so many of these kinds of initiatives have struggled in the past, and started to get an idea of the scale of holistic change needed to change that.

Making a community calendar is not a new or novel idea, and many people have tried them before. We realised to succeed, we’d need to let the social needs drive the technical ones, focussing on using technical tools to enable human connections rather than being driven by techno-solutionist imperatives. To quote renowned experimental physicist Ursula Franklin:

Many technological systems, when examined for context and overall design, are basically anti-people. People are seen as sources of problems, while technology is seen as a source of solutions¹.

We were determined to change the current product-focused approach to technology, and move towards a system where we enable people to achieve their goals using technology. We realised what we needed to build is a low social capital social network. Social capital is a sociological term referring to the wealth that people have through their social networks: who you know often being more important than what you know. Existing social networks are designed around increasing social capital through the app itself: the barely concealed goal of Twitter and Facebook is to gain followers, who you can then influence. In order to do this, you can spend money on advertising to boost your reach: literally turning economic capital into social capital. Recent news is showing the disastrous effects of this widespread approach to software design, summed up by Zeynep Tufekci as “building a dystopia just to make people click on ads”.

Our goal instead is to encourage real world interaction. We realised we needed to create a site that has as little interaction as possible: where someone could be referred by a library assistant or GP to a social group, make some friends, and never need to use the site again. We needed to create not another place to gain online kudos and trade “likes”, but a tool designed around the imperative of creating a shared understanding of our hyperlocal social spaces. Promoting a big party to a willing audience of socially mobile younger people is very easy using existing tools: finding out how you can talk to your neighbour two doors down at a coffee morning is almost impossible. This design principle ended up having profound effects on the whole process.

Technology as neighbourhood strategy

Our initial findings led to the pretty clear conclusion that neighbourhoods have extremely poor information about themselves. As well as a lack of combined area events listings, there’s a general lack of information sharing within each individual institution in any given area. This is especially prevalent in larger organisations with dozens or hundreds of employees like City Councils, health providers or housing associations which operate top-down systems for publishing polished and well promoted teams that they organise using a top-down structure. These organisations can promote these extremely effectively at these large-scale efforts, but struggle to find out smaller and more poorly resourced activities that are organised by people within their organisations. By contrast, smaller organisations struggle with any promotion at all, relying almost entirely on word of mouth and referrals to engage with local people.

We realised that to succeed, any joined-up source of information must seek to be the de facto information source in an area, that multiple agencies work on together. If we have a single source of information then there are many knock-on benefits: it can be used for social prescribing, as a source for printing out leaflets and posters, as a way to evaluate social isolation and social resources in an area, and a common tool for workers across many organisations to focus on together. In addition it could function as something of a local tourism office, making it easy for local newspapers, radio stations and YouTube channels for example to do weekly or monthly highlights as part of their regular programming.

We put together a successful proposal to gain funding from CityVerve, Manchester’s Smart City Demonstrator project. In contrast to the other Smart City projects in the program that focus on new or emerging product-based technology, we worked with the Health and Social Care strand to create a work programme focused almost entirely on social technology. In other words, how can we overcome the digital divide and enable community organisations to work together to make a great source of information for everyone?

Despite the current focus on high tech solutions, most people’s IT skills are actually very poor, with up to 40% of the working-age population struggling with basic skills like deleting an email. For older people it is likely much, much worse: see the graph below. With a project focusing on older people we knew this was likely to be much, much worse. We currently exist in a bubble where the most technically able 1–5% or so are making apps and websites for a high tech audience, while the average person installs zero new apps a month, for example. We needed a completely different approach — one focused around capability, not products.

Internet use stats showing a huge drop-off for over 70s²

A capability-based network

Another name for asset-based community development is the capability approach. It’s used by the UN and World Health Organisation as a methodology for development work both Age Friendly work and their efforts as a whole, and asks a deceptively simple question: what are people able to do? This is the same methodology used for the MAFN project as a whole. One paper summarises the need for this approach as follows:

The deficit-based approach to health tends to focus on health problems, with health-care provision being designed with the aim of solving these problems. An implication of this approach is that communities in and of themselves are not competent to solve their own health problems; rather, health problems and deficits in communities require the expertise of professionals for their solution. (Durie & Wyatt, 2013, sadly not open access)

As we’ve discussed, the capability model states that people already know what they want to do (being experts in their local area), and are unable to due to not having skills, ability or resources to do so. A product-centred approach would be to have a service to do the work of listing information for people: this is how existing statutory service providers tend to operate. Using a capability model, instead we aim to enable everyone to publish their events themselves, eventually not requiring our intervention. The importance of this education-based approach as an axiom of a kind of technological democracy cannot be stressed enough. As noted by sociologist W E B Du Bois: “education is not a prerequisite to political control — political control is the cause of popular education” (1920). Education had to be the cause of PlaceCal: for us, digital inclusion and popular education are one and the same.

In the accessible toilet example given earlier for instance, older people wanted to be able to use health services in their local community centre, but were not able to do so. The health authority wanted to be able to run clinics, but were not able to do so. The partnership together works to help regional providers understand citizens, just as citizens then learnt capabilities to change their social standing.

Returning to the issue at hand: most community organisations struggle with basic web presence, let alone updated events listings. This was a familiar landscape to me from working on Street Support, a platform for services about homelessness. When I was collating the data for the first version of Street Support, the data was coming from all over the place: Facebook pages, broken Wordpress blogs, flyers we found, emails we got forwarded, phone calls. Event information for PlaceCal was no different. Even major providers in the areas who run centres didn’t have the capacity to publish anything past a paper flyer, which didn’t go on their website.

I’m keen to emphasise that given the current landscape, this is quite pragmatic. It’s not a failure of organisations to not publish their activities: on a hyperlocal level, websites are one of the least effective cost/benefit tools. Websites are generally expensive to produce and update, and without a broader platform to plug into they tend to not be very cost effective for organisations with hyperlocal foci. With a target population in a small geographical radius, more traditional forms of promotion like posters, flyers and work of mouth are far more productive and targeted. The core communication problems of organisations making it easy to find out about them and what’s going on are hard to fix, and a website is a crude tool to do so that requires investment and lots of time and training.

We therefore decided to focus on the simplest possible way that people could list event information, and make it our job to publish it. This was to use the software that people are often already using: Facebook, Outlook, Google Calendar, or other similar free or cheap calendar software. All of these platforms as well as the human readable interface have a computer readable feed called an iCal or .ics feed that can be read in by other software. They have stable and mature interfaces that work on a variety of devices, saving us a huge amount of development time to produce. This gives people access to a large range of options, effectively meaning we have several alternate admin frontends out the box, with little development effort.

The platform was therefore designed to be a nexus for these calendar feeds. If we could train someone in each organisation and convince them of the value of maintaining a single canonical source of information using the software they were already using, then we should take that as our starting point and develop our platform to hook into these feeds. This allows organisations to focus on the key competencies of creating public events listings, without having to learn new software.

By doing this we therefore improve capability from both ends. By creating a “fitness landscape” through training and software that drastically lowers the technical capability organisations need to publish events, and simultaneously training organisations in the use of the simplest possible technology, we co-constituted not just software platform but a neighbourhood strategy for information sharing. We think this creates a network of cooperation rather than competition, where the more people contribute to the system the better it works for everyone. The greater the number of organisations that use it, the more it will be taken seriously by local health providers and statutory authorities as the de facto information system for the area, and becomes a canonical source of local knowledge.

Towards a truly open design methodology

This bottom-up design upends the usual product-centred approach in favour of a decentralised one. The Silicon Valley product-based paradigm is like the Beetham Tower, a large towerblock in Manchester. It’s a luxury hotel and apartment complex, with swimming pool, gym, and swanky bar on the 23rd floor. Our internet landscape currently is four or five giant towerblocks like this: the Facebooks, Twitters, and Googles of the world. So predominant is this model of a building, the predominant narrative and structures of tech innovation almost entirely favours tiny 100th scale versions of the Beetham Tower: replete with tiny swimming pools, gyms, and hotels. This vertically integrated model is extremely good for Californian plutocrats backed by billions of dollars of venture capital backing who want to dominate a cultural sector; we suggest that qualitatively and quantitatively different models are needed for genuine social transformation.

By contrast, we aim to move towards a network of people publishing their own data, using low cost and simple methods. It’s akin to building roads into rural areas that are disconnected (without the environmental implications). By focussing on enabling people to control their own information, we drastically improve the overall technological health of an area. PlaceCal is an enabling conduit that works within this new data landscape, rather than being the landscape.

Initial development findings

I’ll write more on the technical implementation at a later date, especially as we’re about to do some heavy restructuring. I’ll leave a few initial revelations that we’re still tackling.

Location data. One major finding was that geolocation was way, way less important than we thought. Who was putting on an event and what venue it were in were far more valuable than quantitative measurements like distance. This makes sense on reflection: people are more likely to go to venues they trust and know how to get to than they are to seek out something further away in an unfamiliar place. Social capital is strongly correlated with the distance you’re willing or able to travel for an event. While people with high social capital go to other countries or cities, let alone the other side of town for an event, most people with mobility issues are often limited to a radius of a few streets around their house. Of course, mobility isn’t the only indicator of social capital, but even within this limited parameter it has a marked effect. The Longitudinal Study of Ageing shows the vast differences in walking speed based on education and age, as well as other factors.

Differences in walking speed based on education and age³

Typology. Our second major observation was that most of these events are not big one-off well promoted and ticketed shows, they are coffee mornings, daily exercise classes, gardening groups and craft sessions. This starts to explain why current platforms like Eventbrite or Facebook are serving these groups so poorly: all major platforms are based around a commercial ticketing and advertising model, not something wanted or needed for the organisations we are working with. This has fundamental knock-on effects for not just the design of the software but the conceptualisation of the platform as a whole: we’re dealing with hundreds of repeating events with little data, not one-offs targeting ticket sales with time and money for promotion. The resources to event ratio are orders of magnitude apart.

I’ll return to the technical implementation at a later date. Overall I’ve been stunned just how significantly the nature of the events and organisations we are hosting has transformed the nature of the entire development process. We did about four months fieldwork before starting any code at all and I’m really glad we did as the insights and complexities of the issue were a long way from where we initially presumed.

Back to where we started then: our launch party!

The Launch: Hulme Winter Lights Switch On

Somehow, through the partnership, we ended up organising the Winter Light Switch On in Hulme Park: and then slowly realised we could use this for the PlaceCal launch as well. We knew we’d never really get anyone to come to a launch for a website other than people who work in the tech sector, but by organising it as part of the winter festivities we had a great chance to demonstrate the website and initiative to residents who might never try it otherwise.

From the start we were set on using PlaceCal as a source of data for flyers and posters, so what better opportunity to pilot it than collating all the Winter parties in Hulme? December is an extremely lonely time for many people, so it seemed self-evident that helping organisations promote their offerings could help people get out and about, and give agency workers a plethora of options to try and get people out to.

In the end, the two-sided leaflet we produced for this was probably one of the most technical jobs I’ve ever been involved in. Through a series of neighbourhood meetings (pictured below) we contacted everyone we knew about their winter offers. Every single data point on the final leaflet came through multiple people and multiple agencies, and had to be reproduced on the PlaceCal website itself. In the end though we created what we’re pretty sure is the most comprehensive winter events listing Hulme has ever seen.

The lovely neighbourhood team sorting amends. L-R Lesley (One Manchester), Debbie (Martenscroft School), Patricia (Buzz), Kyra and Janet (People First Housing), Matt (MAFN), Mark (Squid), Patrick (MCC)

Between us we distributed 10,000 leaflets and posters down the major shopping streets in Hulme and Moss Side, put them through people’s letter boxes, gave them to parents at schools, and generally plastered the area. By now you’re probably getting the point that by making one really good source of information together, we multiplied our capacity and reach. Through this process we had loads of conversations with local shops and businesses, made some more connections, and got some great feedback. We’re looking forward to being able to go back and see how people got on!

10,000 leaflets is a lot of leaflets…

The event itself was a huge success with hundreds of people coming throughout the day. Over the course of the day we had carols from local schools in the park, live music, the One Manchester bus, a fire engine with a snow machine, loads of food from local organisations, mosques and churches, and of course the PlaceCal demonstrations which nearly got lost in the festivities! We also got to line up with Z Arts current production for people who wanted somewhere to go afterwards. The highlight for me was wondering why it had got quiet for a bit, before realising the imitable DJ Lord Kemoy Walker had a dancefloor full of kids dancing to Gangnam Style just before wrapup!

Photos from our launch

I hope this article has given you an insight into not just the PlaceCal design process, but what we hope is the groundwork for a more connected way of delivering technology in a community context. In future pieces I’ll cover what we have planned for PlaceCal in 2018, and document this methodology that we’re calling Community Technology Partnerships. As it happens, we’re also starting a bus service…

If you want to keep up to date then you can follow us here, on Twitter or Facebook. If you’re an organisation looking to get involved in the platform, or a neighbourhood partnership, health provider or local authority who would like to have a chat with us about rolling our PlaceCal in your area, don’t hesitate to contact us by email: support@placecal.org. The PlaceCal design and illustration is by the awesome Squid.

Oh yeah — and we had a photobooth!

Ursula M. Franklin’s (1989) CBC Massey Lectures, “The Real World of Technology” ↩︎
“The digital divide has grown old: Determinants of a digital divide among seniors” (Friemel, 2016) ↩︎
“Men’s and Women’s age trajectories of walking speed by educational subpopulations” (Weber, 2016) ↩︎

PlaceCal

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

We were approached by Manchester School of Architecture to help them work on a neighbourhood project, Manchester Age Friendly Neighbourhoods (MAFN). MAFN had created four age friendly resident-led partnerships, one of which was in Hulme where GFSC are based.

This project ran for four years and had 6,000 conversations with older people, divesting £200,000 to community groups. Through extensive co-research processes the MAFN team created an evidence base detailing the priority issues to make the neighbourhoods better places to live for the over 50s.

One key finding across all neighbourhoods was that older people who were socially isolated commonly thought “There’s nothing to do in my neighbourhood!”. In communities up and down the country, this has led to social isolation and loneliness for a number of citizens, and therefore a lack of community resilience.

This is a big issue in the UK in particular, where it is estimated that 2 million older people will be lonely and isolated by 2024. Studies show that social isolation and loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking two packets of cigarettes a week.

Despite massive investments of time and money by big institutions such as city councils and health providers into event listings, asset maps and community directories, still no one could find out what was happening in their area.

We continued to work with age friendly partnerships in Hulme and Moss Side (our pilot area, where we are based) to find out why.

We found three big problems

People were not working together. Every large institution was working on their own community information websites, with different organisations gathering the same data.

This top-down approach of people in large institutions trying to gather information on small community groups was inefficient and missed out large swathes of activities and groups.

It also resulted in duplication, or several low quality results rather than one really good one.

Current software wasn’t working. Existing community information websites were either maintained on behalf of the groups by institutional staff or required community groups to regularly log in to keep their events updated.

This meant that community groups had to input their information in one site for each provider, in addition to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, creating an ever-increasing amount of work for a very small amount of publicity.

Tech skills are very low. Digital exclusion has affected community groups disproportionately, particularly in deprived areas such as Manchester. Groups often don’t have the skills or tools needed to promote themselves effectively.

Staff at many institutions have felt equally left behind by recent innovations.

Most groups in our neighbourhood had never published anything online about their group at all, relying completely on word of mouth and thereby missing out on many opportunities to connect with new and enthusiastic participants.

We realised we would need to fix all these together to make an impact.

Our solution

We created a three-part solution to the problem that tackles social and digital inclusion together, creating a new neighbourhood infrastructure.

Collective, not-for-profit ownership. To be sustainable, everything must be owned and managed directly by institutions and community groups working together.

This supports the existing efforts being done in neighbourhoods by partnerships of councils, community organisers, and public health services.

Software built on existing tools. Our software builds on top of tools that community groups are already using, such as Google Calendar, Outlook 365, and Facebook.

These listings are then converted into super simple, highly accessible and constantly updated listings for each neighbourhood, community group and venue.

A training program that includes everyone. Our educational program for institutions and community groups alike walks everyone through the process of publishing and updating their information.

It operates on a ‘train-the-trainers’ basis, so key people in the community can pass on their knowledge to other groups and organisations.

This means no one is left behind, helping to close the ‘digital divide’.

What’s happening now?

PlaceCal won the AAL Smart Ageing prize in 2018, and Nesta’s “Tech to Connect” prize in 2019. We have since set up a new company, Place Health Technology CIC, and raised £220,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund in 2021 to expand the initiative nationwide. We’re currently planning a national rollout.

We’ve also launched The Trans Dimension, our first standalone application of our methodology. This is for the London trans community in collaboration with Gendered Intelligence, and you can read more about it here.

We are actively seeking both funding and clients for PlaceCal, which we not-so-humbly are calling “the next Wikipedia” – please do get in touch if you have a community you want to use it with!

Hulme Community Garden Centre website consultancy

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Hulme Community Garden Centre approached us looking for a website, but they didn’t have the budget to have us develop for them. Instead, we hosted some workshops to help them strategise, deciding what needs to go on it, who reads it and what they’re looking for.

Though this research and consultancy we created a clearly defined brief that a staff member was able to implement themselves in WordPress without our help. With their permission we share the final Trello user story board that the site was created with.

This process saved money and time while making sure that key information was right where people wanted it, including loads of information that wasn’t previously on the site but was crucial to planning a visit. HCGC don’t keep visitor numbers but staff anecdotally observed a large uptick to visits following the site relaunch.

Tech culture is failing communities. How can we make it better?

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Californian design principles have taken over the internet, turning people into products. We need a roadmap towards truly community-owned technology.

The shift in internet and technology culture over the last decade has been phenomenal. Most of the services we use today haven’t been around long at all — Facebook is thirteen years old, Twitter ten, and Instagram six. The first iPhone — and arguably with it the modern concept of an “app” — was released in 2007. And yet despite all this technology that’s supposed to bring us together, social isolation is a major player in the current epidemic of depression, loneliness, eating disorders, suicide, and other social problems. How has this happened?

With these new technologies has come a rapid shift in the culture and industry which builds, markets, and owns them. Broadly, this has seen Californian men working alone in their bedrooms suddenly get pushed to global fame, propelled by a seemingly endless supply of speculative venture capital funds, themselves also overwhelmingly run by enormously wealthy men. While we currently find ourselves in many other spheres challenging overly white, rich and male political structures, it feels like there has not been similar mainstream political critique of the ownership of our new, virtual, civic spaces.

The Lean Startup model has sparked a trend towards functionally limited but highly profitable software: doing “just enough” to justify a purchase point or app install. The hype around apps has meant that every new technology product is required to follow the same Californian design principles: vertically integrated, extremely expensive to produce, for the most part free at point of use, and highly branded, with all data stored in the cloud and owned by the company. I’ve found it difficult explaining to clients looking to do something new that there are other ways to do things, or that an app is one solution of many, especially when solving social problems. Honestly, I still don’t quite understand what an “app” is when someone asks me for one — the concept seems wrapped up in a concept of a kind of experience that you’re expected to have with it. But I digress.

A decade ago, technically-savvy activists like me thought news sites like Indymedia were the future. We thought that aggregation with RSS was the eventual endgame for a decentralised, community-owned internet. We were talking about making cooperatively owned mesh wifi networks to provide free wifi for everyone, the obvious and inevitable move towards everyone using Ubuntu (or other Linux flavours), and building thin-client networks from recycled computers in community cafes to provide free internet and computer access. And now we’re talking about commercial apps, corporate social media, and Mechanical Turk. Any mention of communities and working with people seems to have vanished, in favour of an almost pathological focus on software and software culture itself. Something went wrong.

American, and especially Californian audiences at this point might be pointing out that these older values are actually part of a long-standing “maker culture”: and what I’m talking about is Silicon Valley and the “Californian Ideology”, not California in general. I agree that this is unfair, and the irony of publishing this on Medium is not lost on me. This piece is written from a Northern British perspective. The reason for my sensationalism is to encourage internet consumers to think about where their technology comes from in the same way we do with fruit and vegetables or electrical goods. From a non-American perspective it’s sometimes hard to remember Silicon Valley is an actual place, not a metaphor — so please forgive me my clickbait!

Manchester (where I’m writing this) has a long and proud history of labour and human rights progress; I want to explore what this means from a technology culture perspective. I’m developing a manifesto to get back to this kinder, community-oriented tech culture I remember from my twenties. I’m calling it a Community Technology Partnership, or CTP. Starting to write about this, I’ve discovered that the rabbit hole is a lot deeper than I thought. As a result, I’m going to syndicate the development process so I can get feedback and generate discussion along the way. This is the first part. Following this will be more on the methodological principles, the overall aims and objectives, and information about two pilots I’m working on to develop the concept.

What follows is a list of overall values for a CTP manifesto. It was pointed out to me an event on post-fact politics the other weekend that the former concepts are all human; the latter ones all inhuman or robotic and part of that Californian ideology that I critiqued at the start of this article. So maybe it really does all start on this basic, structural level.

Complete > Perfect

Embrace messy data.

Programming is forgetting. All computer systems — from Facebook to Word — throw anything away they don’t understand. You can’t create a Facebook event and set the date later. You can’t do a painting in Word. More subtly, what a piece of information looks like is based on a designer’s desires: the concept of “a conversation” is different and incompatible between email, Facebook and Google Groups, for example. It simply doesn’t make sense to try and synchronise all those things; they are fundamentally incompatible.

Some of these systems are more prescriptive than others. Taking the Facebook event as an example, there’s a surprising amount of prerequisites. Not only you already have a Facebook account and friends on it (to make it worthwhile), you have to know the date and time, location and title before being able to create it. A scan of a flyer simply won’t do, for example.

Clearly, real-life is not like this. Community information is huge, and varied, and a tiny fraction of it ends up online in an organised way. Messy knowledge ends up being word of mouth, and reaches very few people. Some examples of this might be:

You can book a free room in a community campus building (if you know who to talk to)
There is an underused computer suite in a local housing estate
The local library runs free computer classes
The community garden centre is looking for new directors
A new planning application that would affect the area

Yes, you might find these things out via a chance post on social media, if you use it. But we do not have even the mechanisms to store these things and present them to the community in an accessible way. Corporate apps work fine for solved problems for engaged users; they do not work well to enable community resilience. A CTP aims to collect knowledge first, and worry about what to do with it later. Our systems should not be deciding what the important information is: we should.

Let’s build systems that have the lowest possible bar to entry, find out what we don’t know, and develop new ways to record community knowledge.

Communication > Code

We should be flexible and holistic in what we do with information.

If what matters is people getting access to accurate, useful, timely information, then we can say that communication is the goal, not code. In the tech sector we talk a lot about what platform or framework is being used, and very little about what is being communicated. I’ve been to countless tech presentations where the talk has been entirely on the structure of the app, and not a word about the people who are using it and how it’s changed things socially. By focusing on communications as a holistic problem, we can see the internet as one tool of many to facilitate information sharing.

For example, we could automate things like aggregated posters and brochures of local events, enable people to work together to distribute flyers, or create interactive displays of current planning applications. We should not see the technology as the goal in itself, but creating informed and engaged local citizens who are able to get what they want from their neighbourhood.

The 596 Acres project is a particularly good example of this. In their own words:

The seeds of 596 Acres were planted when founder Paula Z. Segal obtained a spreadsheet of all the publicly owned vacant land in Brooklyn and created a map of it to distribute. This map was the first tool designed to let people know about the unharnessed potential hidden in plain sight throughout the city’s neighborhoods. It appeared on a poster highlighting vacant public land in Brooklyn, and as an interactive tool on our website. Getting the word out — in print and online — has been at the heart of the project ever since.

I went to a fantastic presentation on this project where this point was emphasised. The website and open data provided the impetus and structure to get the project rolling, and it couldn’t have happened without it. But it was going to every plot of land and zip-tying the contact details to it, answering the phone, and talking to people that made the project a success.

Let’s focus on making sure people get the information they need in a way that suits them, and stop seeing the internet as an end in itself.

Distributed > Centralised

Facilitate people using the technology that they want, rather than imposing new systems.

Just as the corporate internet is designed to be perfect, it’s also centralised. Many interventions attempt to introduce a new platform, and worry about how to make people use it later. A CTP sees this as completely the wrong way around. We should be enabling people to use existing technology, mapping out what is in use, and providing training to enable people to make incremental improvements. The internet works because it is distributed not centralised — the current top-down order of sites like Facebook almost entirely being a product of massive capitalist investment. We need to start owning our own information again.

This means that we want to help organisations improve their data offering. For example, many community centres have no centralised list of all the services they provide — something we started work on in the StreetSupport project. Very few have their event data in a structured format that allows it to be read by others. Maybe, at a later date, the need will emerge for a centralised platform — but these platforms should not be zero-sum, and should leave behind the education and principles for organisations to understand what is needed for others to be able to use their data.

By owning our own information and publishing it in a structured way, we can open the door to a new generation of co-operative web services.

People > Computers

Focus on improving people’s skills, not on any given technology.

Fundamentally, computers are not that interesting (at least to me). The internet can be thought of as a giant mechanism for handing around Post-It notes — the interest is in what is on them and who they are being passed between, not the notes themselves. Technology professionals have so neglected human needs that now an entire sub-industry has had to be created with job titles like “human centred design”, “user interface design”, and “usability designer”. In my experience, talks at technical events almost never feature feedback from people who use the platform, focussing instead on technical minutiae and evidence-less theorising. The industry’s current focus is on getting toasters and toothbrushes online — apparently more interesting goals than getting poor people, old people, or people with learning difficulties online.

A CTP prioritises people’s needs directly. The goals are education, cooperation, and building community strength. The technologies we use to do this should reflect community needs. The digital divide is growing again, and evidence suggests that as time goes on internet use will come to simply reflect existing social divides.

Existing social media platforms are designed to try and replace real-life interactions with online ones, so they can be analysed and used for marketing. Services from Amazon Prime to Uber attempt to simply remove them altogether.

We should build internet services to enable and facilitate real-life interactions, and in doing so work towards reducing the social isolation epidemic.

Locality-based > Interest-based

Focus on communities of location, not communities of interest.

Your postcode at birth is still the single biggest guide to your life’s chances: from employment opportunities to life expectancy. However, the communities we tend to make online — be they for work are leisure — are even more selective than those based on our location. In order to redress some balance, we must urgently turn our attention to our own neighbourhoods.

Almost any night of the week in Manchester you can go to a tech event in a fancy Northern Quarter office with free pizza and beer; it’s so common it’s barely remarked upon. On some level, why would you go anywhere else? Of course, from a community activist perspective it’s hilarious to even think that a company would consider sponsoring your meeting of a group working against austerity, racism or sexism with free pizza and beer. And yet the demographics between these two sorts of meeting could not be more stark. The last tech event like this I went to was about 30:1 men:women by by estimation, almost all I would guess age 20–40. Most community meetings on the other hand are a much more diverse mix of people: age, race, gender and other issues much more in balance.

I’m not blaming anyone for this state of affairs — I’m grateful for free food and beer, a good talk and a warm office too. My point is more that we need to redress this balance: we need more people with technical skills working in local communities, and more tech events that specifically focus on community needs rather than individual technologies.

By focussing on one specific geographical area — where we live — we can attempt to break this impasse. Anyone who’s been in enough meetings knows that the real progress happens before and afterwards, in the pub, a chat on the street corner on the way out. This chance emergence of ideas interactions and friendships can’t happen if people simply aren’t meeting in this way. People spend a lot of time looking at how to make the tech sector more diverse; and yet this always seems to be initiatives from within, not without.

As people with a background in technology, let’s re-engage with our communities and find out what we can do for them and what they can do for us. And maybe it’ll fix a bunch of other problems along the way.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Use fewer, better technologies.

Most organisations and individuals have tiny budgets (or no budgets) for technical products and services. Money spent on these things is explicitly not going on services for their users. And yet the tech industry is constantly trying to sell people expensive products and services, and work with five- or six-figure website budgets. Of course, a good web-presence and good quality design are positive things to have that organisations should aspire to. But in general we should be enabling organisations to do more with the limited resources they have.

Reduce means to simply use less technology, in order to improve the offers that are there. There is a massive amount of duplication. Most low-budget websites end up being over-specified (I should know, I’ve built a few). We should be helping organisations to use fewer, better technologies, and understanding what is necessary over what is nice.

Reuse means that people are constantly re-inventing the wheel at a low level. There are multiple organisations who maintain a database of voluntary organisations in Manchester, for example. We need to build trust and inter-operability to enable people to pool resources to build systems that work better for everyone.

Recycle means that we should have a patternbook of solved problems for small organisations that can be easily used as off-the-shelf fixes. For example this could be bits of code to convert a Google Calendar or Facebook Events feed into a static page on a website, or a set of supported, tested templates for organisational brochure sites.

This post is the start of a discussion about the axioms of the technology we product: the things we think so self-evident we barely inspect them. It’s time to start being more critical about the nature of the things we are making, who they are for, and what impact they have on people, community, and planet. We need to get back to a more holistic, community-grounded technology culture that we own and develop ourselves, for the good of everyone. I’ll leave you with Tony Benn’s classic five questions about democracy that we should perhaps start applying to to technology we use and create as well:

What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
How can we get rid of you?

Stay tuned for more on the CTP concept, including details on the pilots due to start in the next few months! Comments and suggestions welcomed with open arms. If you like, find out more about my work and practice on my agency site: Geeks for Social Change.

Artwork by Rebecca Michalak. Thanks to everyone who contributed to or gave feedback on this draft, and especially to Erik Davis for the reminder California is a big place.

Data is meaningless without social power.

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I went to a film screening and discussion last week about Mark Duggan’s shooting by the police, and the conditions surrounding him and his family¹.

The event was one of the best I’ve been to. The documentary itself was authentic, engaging, and honest, showing a slice of life in London in a similar fashion to an episode of The Wire. The discussion after was a real eye-opener for me: many speakers across two panels with so much to share and say. At the same time, I was rolling an idea around for this blogpost for Open Data Manchester’s Echo Chambers and Post-Fact Politics event.

Police use of body-worn cameras (BWCs) came up in the discussion at the end. A recent study showed that the presence of BWCs reduces complaints against officers by 93%². The reasons for the reduction are still under debate, but the authors propose an idea of “contagious accountability”. The research methodology was to get half of the shifts at participating police forces to wear BWCs, and half to be the control. One key finding was that both the control and treatment groups had a marked reduction in complains. The authors suggest that the introduction of BWCs engendered an atmosphere of officers obeying the rules, becoming more accountable, even if they were not wearing the cameras.

However, the anecdotal but widely corroborated feeling at the event was that the police are still stop and searching young black people illegally, even wearing the BWCs: the children and young adults simply don’t know what the procedure is so they don’t ask for it. The BWC footage isn’t reviewed because, paraphrasing one speaker, “if noone gets shot, noone looks at the footage”. And noone, especially noone who the police harass already, is going to make a fuss over missing documentation.

Then it hit me: we have the data, but choose to ignore it. Much as racism ³ is meaningless without social power, so too is data.

We have an enormous amount of data spanning decades on the institutional racism in the UK. 1578 deaths in police custody or following contact with the police since 1990, with 0 convictions⁴. We know that Muslim candidates are 2.5 times less likely to get a job than their Caucasian counterparts with identical CVs⁵. Identifying barriers to Muslim integration in France. We know that black people are 17 times more likely to be stop and searched than white in some areas⁶. So where is our “big data” and “data science” for racism?

When we think of an echo chamber we tend to think of the social media bubble, but we think less about the echo chambers of our communities of choice or employment. Social media has strongly shifted the emphasis on who we talk to: from communities of location or demographic, to communities of choice. I think to break out of these bubbles, we need to look locally, look at power and who has it, and look at habitus: all technology is a product of its social context, and the agendas of the people creating it.

Currently there’s a huge amount of hype and money around the tech sector. At the screening, it was commented that the University of Manchester barely represents the communities in Moss Side and Salford around it; so too our startups and tech events poorly reflect those they try and represent (or at least, should be trying to represent). I wonder if this lack of interaction is inadvertently simply reproducing the same power imbalance in the world as a whole, and that by not being embedded in community organisations, not working with community groups to understand and create solutions together, we are in no position to challenge the “echo chambers” that are currently emerging.

By way of example, Tin Geber, a technologist involved in refugee action, asks people simply to stop making apps⁷. Apps, to Geber, do nothing to solve the important problems facing refugees. He urges readers to get involved first, and listen a while, before trying to plough on with a solution. By contrast the app is the almost default strategy of the technology initiative or hack day. There are dozens of hack days in Manchester. As far as I can tell, none of these have focussed on topics as difficult or complex as racism, sexism, migration or homophobia⁸, in favour of easier topics like connecting your toaster to the internet⸮ This is not to bash on hobbyists, but an acknowledgement that as technologists, we should be engaging in social issues first, and building software second.

We need to be drawn not to the extreme, exciting, new, or sexy technology, but to the needs of our community: which should be just as exciting in a different way. We need to spend a lot more time listening and engaging and being part of solutions. We need to be compassionate, talk about lacks and power, and look without and within to understand and help with problems. Borrowing Paulo Freire’s critique of education: social good is not a bucket you fill, in order to deliver it to someone who needs it. Social good is working together to challenge the conditions that create inequality in the first place. I feel there can be no solutions that don’t address both the stark contrast between online and physical communities, and the erosure of the subtle in favour of the instant headline.

As socially engaged citizens who work with data, we cannot ignore the power structures that create, manipulate, publish, and use, data. Just as data is only given context by interpretation, so too we need to analyse the power structures that surround it. Only by working with communities to use data to its fullest extent can we hope to challenge the inequality in the world today. Let’s let technology ride the back seat for a while and get back to getting to know the people around us.

Amponsah (2016). Hard Stop. ↩︎
Ariel, B. et. al. (2016) “Contagious Accountability”: A Global Multisite Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effect of Police Body-Worn Cameras on Citizens’ Complaints Against the Police. Criminal Justice and Behavior ↩︎
I use the definition that “[…] racism is prejudice plus power, and therefore people of colour cannot be racist against whites […]. People of colour can be prejudiced against whites, but clearly do not as a group have the power to enfore that prejudice” (Katz, 2003) ↩︎
inquest.org.uk ↩︎
Adida et. al (2010) ↩︎
The Independent, August 2015 ↩︎
Geber (2016). Hackathon and refugees: we can do better ↩︎
Please correct me if you know of any, or indeed want to set one up! ↩︎

No False Users

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m always struck in technical meetings how quickly people dream up imaginary people. People with very specific needs that they didn’t know they had. A recent meeting I was in suggested that if streetlights and hospital shift patterns were connected to the Internet of Things, we could potentially make sure that nurses can get home safely at given times, by increasing lighting at the end of shifts. Or that by comparing bus times with air pollution data, we can start to think about where buses are idling and reduce respiratory disease. But of course, they’re just possibilities! We don’t know yet! Think of the potential!

And sure. All those things are possible. But they’re fantasies. And it’s OK to start with a fantasy – decades of science fiction have guided science and engineering. Everything starts with an idea, at some level of application. But those ideas rapidly get blown wildly out of proportion. The problem is that by creating these stories and allowing them to persist, they get repeated ad nauseum as post hoc, ego propter hoc justifications.

User stories¹ are meant to be non-fiction. We should not be in the business of giving any more airtime to fictional user stories than we need to, given how easy it is to gather them. The cart should not lead the horse. I’m sure that if you asked medical staff their top 20 desires, the lighting on the way home wouldn’t even factor, and that streetlights are part of a carefully orchestrated city engineering process. And I’m sure that if one really wanted to reduce air pollution, having a networked grid of air quality sensors would give useful information, but do absolutely nothing to tackle the problem of air pollution in cities. And in the vacuum of applications for these ideas, I suspect these “straw users” will have already been referred to half a dozen times as hypothetical benefits².

Adam Smith famously described in The Wealth of Nations the obvious progression of how humans moved from a barter system, to coinage, to a bookkeeping system. This version of economics is widely accepted as the obvious - if not inevitable - backdrop to modern society. Except, he totally made it up. There is no anthropological evidence of a society where barter existed before other forms of currency, anywhere in the world. David Graeber (2011)³ explains:

For centuries now, explorers have been trying to find this fabled land of barter - none with success. Adam Smith set his story in aboriginal North America (others preferred Africa or the Pacific). In Smith’s time, at least it could be said that reliable information on Native American economic systems was unavailable in Scottish libraries. But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan’s descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published - and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses where most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women’s councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information.

Stanley Jevons, for example, who in 1871 wrote what has come to be considered the classic book on the origins of money, took his examples straight from Smith, with Indians swapping venison for elk and beaver hides, and made no use of actual descriptions of Indian life that made it clear that Smith had simply made this up. Around that same time, missionaries, adventurers, and colonial administrators were fanning out across the world, many bringing copies of Smith’s book with them, expecting to find the land of barter. None ever did. They discovered an almost endless variety of economic systems. But to this day, no one has been able to locate a part of the world where the ordinary mode of economic transaction between neighbors takes the form of “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow”.

There’s a moral somewhere in here about the power of persuasive storytelling. John le Carré comments in many interviews that it is his job to make characters believable, not truthful. And much like a good piece of misdirection from a spy, Smith’s fairy tales about fictional civilisations have made us believe something fundamental about human behaviour that isn’t true. The great revelation here of course is that fundamentally people share, and support each other: not something very palatable to colonial Britain’s Whiggish⁴ history.

Clearly, something about Smith’s tale was so believable and so persuasive that it has fundamentally changed the way we think about money. I’m not suggesting that anyone is doing this by making stories about products - but I do think that the stories dreamt up on the spot like this have a habit of sprouting wings and taking flight. And we should be extremely careful to not release our personal fictions masquerading as technical specifications into the world.

There’s an underlying, unspoken assumption with technology projects that “if you build it, they will come”, much like the Whigs’ belief that we simply march forwards towards greater enlightenment. As Maslow famously remarked: when you’re holding a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. But we must be careful to not allow these ideas to persist without testing them straight away. There’s a lot of power in stories, and we shouldn’t be using them to justify the enormous expense and time commitment that most technology projects command. The irony is we live in a world with unprecedented potential for gathering data: asking a few nurses what they think about it would take minutes on something like Twitter or Facebook. And by doing so we can put the cart back behind the horse, and make technology solve people’s problems, rather than inventing problems to justify technology.

Making solutions to problems no-one has is a waste of everyone’s time and our planet’s dwindling resources. Innovation shouldn’t mean disengaging from society and has no built-in moral “goodness” - unchecked, it simply will replicate and support the injustice and inequality already in the world. Imaginary scenarios are a fine place to start, but user stories should be non-fiction, and we need to be careful to separate the two.

A common software development technique where individual tasks someone might want to do are listed and prioritised. (Wikipedia). ↩︎
Including myself when describing the meeting to my partner in the evening. I had to say them out loud before realising how silly they were. ↩︎
Graeber, David (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, New York. ↩︎
“…an approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy” (Wikipedia) ↩︎

Home on Geeks for Social Change

Greater Manchester Trans Organisers Fund

Who are trans organisers and what do they do?

What we’ve done

First round of funding

Who we contacted

How we analysed the responses

What do you want to achieve as a trans organiser in Greater Manchester?

What are the barriers that stop you from achieving what you want to achieve?

What is your vision for the world you want to live in?

How has your group been funded so far and what challenges have you faced?

Conclusions and next steps from the first round of funding

Second round of funding

Who we contacted

Responses we received

What kind of spaces do trans organisers use?

What are the features of these spaces?

Round 2 conclusions

Recommendations

Landlords should…

Groups should…

Funders should…

Want to use PlaceCal in your community?

We’re ready to onboard PlaceCal Organisers!

Who is this course for?

What’s in the course?

How will it be delivered?

Course details

Dates

Pricing

Ongoing support

Who is carrying out the training?

How do I sign up?

Our first year of Community Technology Partnerships

What is a CTP?

We are developing ways to create tech outcomes from community needs

We are understanding the underlying problems stopping people bringing groups together to form partnerships

We are helping individual community groups overcome their barriers to having a web presence

We are building the evaluation and training tools to manage all this

Our first year of CTPs

The first year in numbers (May ‘22 — April ‘23)

The first six months: setting up our infrastructure

The next six months: grassroots development

What have you learnt?

We need to retarget PlaceCal at Organisers, as they are the key to engaging with grassroots communities — but they are struggling

Community digital tech overall is in a much worse case now than when we started — and we need to adjust expectations

Partners are struggling to make something suitable for their needs and need a lot of support before we can onboard them

It’s really hard to know where to apply effort best

No one really has a model for how this should work

We need to develop organisational structures that are more fit for purpose

What’s next?

Community Technology Coordinator for the Trans Dimension in Greater Manchester

Role breakdown

Partnership Building (Essential)

Technical support for grassroots trans and queer organisers (Essential)

Reporting (Essential)

Social media authoring and support (Desirable)

About us

How to apply

The craftsperson and the scientist

The craftsperson

The scientist

Building on shifting sands

Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?

Decisions and responsibilities

What is fixed and what can change?

Setting time boundaries

Outlining expectations

Explaining ‘why?’

Our approach

Nextdoor Nature

Gendered Intelligence website and rebrand

Georgie, Administrator at Gendered Intelligence

GFSC's 2023 roundup

We launched Trans Safety Network’s website and rebrand

We hired some new people

We developed our own website to reflect our growth as a studio

We continued to develop our flagship project, PlaceCal

We continued our research and practice around Community Technology Partnerships

We developed the Nextdoor Nature hub for the Wildlife Trusts