How did Gathrer start?
I originally wrote this on June 27th on medium.com/gathrer
Gathrer has one function at present. It crowdsources statuses of Grenfell Tower residents. But that function will expand.
The website was registered, originally, under the idea that one day, Gathrer would become a community builder. Particularly, Gathrer would help young people in the UK to collaborate, co-ordinate and express themselves politically.
Joshua, who registered the domain, started a number of successful Facebook groups in the past. Including Project Remain and Leuven Food Sharing. Following the UK’s vote to leave the EU, the 48% who voted to remain, were politically underrepresented. Project Remain became a task and objective oriented group, where only posts aiming to get things done were approved. It skyrocketed. But more clear than ever was, there were many others groups trying to be the same thing.
To centralise initiatives under one umbrella, would not only of been inefficient, leading to management diseconomies of scale. But it also would have disempowered the spontaneous movement, and richness and variety of individual views, perspectives and approaches that represented. When all these perspectives compete, collide, revise, you have a movement that is organic, continuously learning and tending towards a form of efficiency. What the Remain movement needed, was therefore like any organism; blood vessels, roads, a system of circulation of independent entities. What it needed was collation and curation.
Enter Gathrer. Its initial purpose was to build on Project Remain and give the UK’s young generation a voice, via online communities like those Joshua had built before. The project was put back.
After watching Newsnight, Joshua was not happy with Theresa May’s answers. He wanted to do something. So he asked:
Do you need a spreadsheet online, to count and find those missing at Grenfell?
Although that post had soon been deleted, it received 25 shares, and over 50 likes. The resounding answer was yes. Joshua asked a commenter, Emmanuel, whether the name Gathrer would be a good one. He already had that domain lying around. Answer was yes. That said, it was clear that the name Gathrer would be a much more powerful reference point for something else. Both, social co-ordination and collation. Gathrer was born, but the concept was still not well formed.
Thanks for reading. The next post explains Gathrer’s methodology and rationale behind that. This post explains where Gathrer’s heading.
