Our Work
UnTechCon
We hosted an online unconference with our community around the theme of 'un-tech' and we learned a lot!
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.