Weeknotes 11

Wrapping up Labour Together and going on a podcast

What we got up to

We sent out our first newsletter on the weekend! 🎉

Subscribe here for leisurely Sunday morning updates around once a month.

Labour Together

We've concluded our research into the Labour Party and its digital and community-oriented organisation last week. This is for the Labour Together General Election Review . There's a lot to be said!

You can get a flavour of it from this Novara Media article with some commentary from us about politics, technology and organisation in general and the Labour Party in particular:

Labour has enough tech-literate people on its side to make digital transformation a reality, but until it shifts away from bureaucratic silos dominated by party management, their efforts are going to be severely hampered.

You can also check out this organisation chart of the Labour Party that we crowdsourced from our interviews.

The full report will be out at the end of the month. Fun fact: around one in every ten party staffers on this diagram have the word "director" in their title.

Podcasts

Alex chatted on Another World is Podable with Peter Bloom, Professor of Management at the University of Essex.

Peter's research "critically explores the radical possibilities of technology for redefining and transforming contemporary work and society. It focuses on better understanding the human aspects of organisational existence and the potential for constructing more empowering cultural paradigms for organising the economy and politics".

We met Peter a party put on by Space4 and fellow tech co-op Outlandish . We are really grateful for the community of activists, academics and co-operatives that mingle here. And speaking of movement spaces...

Any Other Business

We've started working out of MayDay Rooms every Thursday and we love working from here!

Get in touch if you're passing by either location and we'd be happy to show you around and get a coffee.

We met with members of Code-Operative , another CoTech co-op that are visiting from Newcastle.

We did a teach out at the UCU picket line at London College of Communication, about why art workers should unionise.

We also did a fair bit of work around consultancy, finances and administration. We paid some invoices, we chased some invoices. We wrote more project proposals, finalised some proposals and filled out our budget for a very exciting upcoming grant.

What we're reading

It's not from this past week but we really dig Mijente's exploration of data, tech, surveillance, police and the white supremacist state under the banner #NoTechForICE and Take Back Tech.

They've done a stunning job with the resources and clearly really care about these packs being shareable in the communities that most need to understand them.

It's almost impossible to read anything on the internet at the moment that doesn't mention Coronavirus.

A while back Jan read Albert Camus' The Plague and now he has the vague pleasure of being able to preempt existential thoughts.

What we're thinking about

We'd love to do more workshops this year. We ran one at The World Transformed last year, which we've written up . We'll be facilitating some strategy workshops in the near future.

Email us at hello@commonknowledge.coop if you think your informal collective or formal organisation would be up for this.

Upcoming events

Our Power Is Real: A Festival of Grassroots Social Change is happening on 28 March – we think it looks great!

Notes from Below are running a series of four workshops on workers inquiries , starting this weekend.

The Small Axe are hosting an event with Action Network next week, on how we build and use technology more effectively to build the power of the labour movement.