Tools to build community — Civic Tech Lab #2
On the 23th of February, Civic Tech Sweden organised a lab around community tools.
What do we define as community tools? We wanted to have a look at how some groups and associations organise themselves in a democratic and decentralised way and which digital services and software they use! Most of them deal with internal and external communication and some of them might already be known to you (messaging apps, forums, e-mails) but choosing them and making them work together is the real art.
To help us with that, we had the chance to have with us the fantastic Francesca Pick, who’s an active member of Ouishare and Enspiral, two leading organisations challenging the way we work and solve social issues, as well as the inspiring Hugi Ásgeirsson, who tackles these questions inside of Edgeryders, Blivande and The Borderland, three decentralised communities of hackers, artists and activists.
We also gathered a list of all the tools discussed in this lab, which you will find at the end of this article!
Ouishare (Francesca Pick)
Francesca is now a partner at GreaterThan but she is also one of the co-founders of Ouishare Fest, the Ouishare community’s biggest event. She has spent many years working in the collective and developing its international community.
She starts by introducing the trinity of communication tools. It’s a way of categorising them in three categories: realtime, asynchronous and static (see the summary from the The Hum).
These three categories have their own advantages and should be used for different purposes.
In the case of Ouishare, Francesca picks a concrete example of a project she would like to organise. The community needs to decide how to spend money to organise a project in a democratic way. The main tool used for that is Cobudget, which makes it easy to send money, to vote and to see all steps of the process.
But Cobudget is not the only tool used in the process.
To gather people to participate. Francesca reaches out to people in the Telegram channel of the group. In her message, she asks people to join her in a deliberation phase on Loomio where they can discuss in a dedicated thread and use the built-in functions to reach a decision through consent decision-making. Finally, the knowledge coming out of these discussions is documented in a more permanent way in the Ouishare handbook, a wiki built using Gitbook.
The process is not linear, Francesca and the other participants do a lot of back and forth between the tools. Over the years, the community of Ouishare has tried many of them and continues to evolve.
It’s not about the tools, Francesca says, it’s about the community.
Pick what works for you, don’t hesitate to try out and change!
Many companies making these tools try to expand their functionality to build “one tool to rule them all”. It might bring some convenience but it’s probably not what your want for your community. Don’t get locked in a closed ecosystem, she advises.
Francesca’s part ends with a playful exercise using Loomio, where participants can create their own polls and questions and interact with each other to reach consensus.
She gives three tasks to do as homework after the session:
- Make a list of the tools your organisation is currently using
- Have a discussion about the type of communication you want to happen on each of these mediums
- Write down a communication protocol (you can find inspiration in Ouishare’s protocol or this one from Genesis DAO)
The Borderland, Blivande, Edgeryders (Hugi Ásgeirsson)
Hugi’s mission is to find ways to build sustainable communities. He is a co-founder of Blivande, co-director of Edgeryders and a co-creator of The Borderland. Today, he tells us about the way The Borderland and Blivande are organised.
The Borderland is a community that meets yearly during an event co-created by its participants.
The Borderland uses several tools to organise and participants can connect to all of them using a single sign on (SSO). This means that they do not have to create different accounts for all the systems.
One of these tools is again Loomio, which is used to make decisions. However, Hugi says that the tool’s voting functionalities are used very seldom.
We observed that few people participate in these votes and that they are not necessarily representative. So instead, focus is put on involving a diverse crowd and making sure that those impacted and those executing the decision are involved.
This is explained more in details in their documentation.
The Borderland is also using Facebook as a way to inform and spread the word around what is happening in the community. Why Facebook, some of the participants ask?
Because you have to be where your community is, says Hugi. In the case of The Borderland, it needs the “megaphone effect” that Facebook gives. That doesn’t mean that you should keep your community and its discussions on Facebook. That doesn’t mean either that you can’t build a community without Facebook, it all depends on the people who are part of it.
Hugi shows a great example of decentralised problem-solving. A few years ago, the yearly event of The Borderland lost its location only 6 weeks before taking place. Members of the community immediately started to scout for new places, to adapt the event to new constraints… Without any hierarchy, a new location was found and approved and the event could take place. All the discussions were held in the open on the Borderland’s Loomio platform so that the community could follow. They are still available today.
In addition to Loomio, The Borderland has been using homemade tools to create what they call Dreams and Realities. They have now been gathered in a project called Plato, driven by Edgeryders, Blivande and Stockholm University with funds from Vinnova’s civic tech call. The result is a range of tools where members of any community co-creating a place or event can plan and co-budget projects (dreams) and map the needs and responsibilities of the community to make those projects happen (realities).
Hugi takes another example: Blivande. Blivande is a house for participatory culture in Frihamnen in Stockholm. People living and working there form a small community and they also use various tools to organise. One of them is Discourse, an online forum on which users discuss in threads.
Hugi shows how the house’s community interacts in the open. An interesting example is the construction process of Frihamnstorget, a village of containers used for different purposes. People share ideas together, make decisions and regularly post pictures of the construction process.
In the same way as Ouishare and the Borderland, Blivande uses different types of tools. For synchronous discussions, Signal is used, an instant messaging app chosen for its respect of privacy.
Hugi’s presentation also ends with practical exercises. Since Civic Tech Sweden also uses Discourse for its forum, all participants are invited to play around with it, create posts there and discuss in each others’ posts.
Hugi and Edgeryders gathered a lot of knowledge in tools such as Discourse while using them in these various communities and are now providing Discourse hosting with custom integrations to many other communities and research projects.
The homework given by Hugi is:
- To play around a bit more on forum.civictech.se and with the other tools mentioned
- To dive into the content already existing on communities such as the Borderland, Edgeryders or Blivande.
- To try out as many of the tools presented or suggested by the participants. Have a look at the list on our forum.
Collective Tools (Petter Joelsson)
Finally, Petter is our final guest to talk about Collective Tools, a project started to help put all these tools in the hands of communities, nonprofits and other organisations which don’t have the technical resources but still want to keep control over the systems and their data.
Collective Tools is a cooperative in which members pay to get access to tools such as Nextcloud, Rocket.Chat or Discourse. The tools are maintained by the team and they don’t need to care about servers and updates. More importantly, members decide together on where the cooperative is going.
How do you get started?
We hope that you’ve been inspired by all these stories and communities!
As you can see, there are many possibilities but no one-tool-fits-all and it’s a lot about the journey and the knowledge that you can gather along the way (isn’t it always? 😉)
In addition to the tools mentioned by our fantastic speakers, many were discussed by the participants. Our coordinator Pernilla gathered them all in a list on our forum and some of our members are already actively discussing which ones they are using!
Why don’t you join the conversation at forum.civictech.se?
