2 min read
Fri 19 Nov 2021 Writing

Common Tools

We're working on a project to generalise and share effective tools and best practices for digital organising.

Our mission is to work with grassroots organisers and communities around the world to build power and achieve radical change. We use digital technologies to multiply the impact and capacity of social movements. This work can take a number different forms: from designing and building software to coaching and training to creating strategic plans with and for organisations.

Part of this work involves ensuring that the methodologies, tactics and technologies we develop or use become more accessible to a wide range of organisers and technologists. We see contributing to the commons as our opportunity to have the biggest impact in this space.

Over the last few years, we've noticed a number of unmet needs at the level of general infrastructure that are common to a diverse range of social movement actors. We've worked with a range of off-the-shelf and open source tools that we really rate, as well as a few that we'd rather avoid. We've also created our own custom tools, techniques and patterns to fill in gaps and speed up our workflows. Thanks to the generous support of the Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung , we're working on a making these findings public.

This project has three objectives:

  1. To contribute to a more general awareness of the available digital technology for organising.
  2. To add elements to this organiser toolchain that will improve the capacity of grassroots organisers.
  3. To share the knowledge of how to use these tools effectively.

As part of this work, we're going to publish a Movement Backlog, an open source list of digital needs shared across social movements. We're a very small team, so we know we don't have the capacity to work on all these needs. By making it public, we hope to facilitate other technologists to contribute to the same issues, improving visibility and coordination between disparate efforts.

Over the next few months, we're going to be publishing our progress and findings. Watch this space!

If you'd like to contribute to our research and have a say about what we work on, please fill out this short survey .