We aim to provide local partner organisations with community-run, open source digital services for their ICT needs, as alternatives to commercial tech platforms.

This document aims to provide a cheatsheet for conversations with community groups, with the aim of challenging, exploring, testing, refining and elaborating the points below, over time. 

Updated 20 Oct 2026.


===== Digital services that communities want =====
 
  * Org leaders want to be able to **store and share documents and spreadsheets** for administration, reporting, budgeting and continuity 
  * Team members want to be able to **create and collaborate on information** such as documents and spreadsheets related to their org’s purpose
  * Org leaders want to be able to **share information with the wider public**, (text, images and videos) about their activities, events and campaigns.
  * Team members want to be able to **share and discuss with others in their org** information and ideas related to their cause (some groups)

===== Pain points and challenges ===== 
  * Difficult to leave Instagram, Facebook entirely because they provide an important channel to communicate with the wider community (campaigns, events, etc). 
  * Many orgs have members who are unenthusiastic about new technologies, unlikely to proactively check new systems, may lose passwords, etc. 
  * Little continuity in admin, moderation and sysadmin volunteering; there are few people who want to do these roles, high turnover of volunteers, structured handovers rarely happen as intended. 
 
===== What Merri-bek Tech can offer: ====
  * Open-source communication and collaboration systems, on our own infrastructure, or on servers provided by a local company that we trust. 
  * A training session and how-to documentation for the people you assign to look after your digital services; initial help with migration and user setup.
  * Ongoing node stewardship 
    * Maintenance, updates
    * Security oversight
    * Break-fix and technical troubleshooting
  * Or, intermediary between community groups and server hosting companies

=====Local partner organisations would need to:=====
  * Allocate at least two people to look after your digital services
  * Migrate data, set up users and permissions, initial folder structures, with our support
  * Manage user accounts, permissions, storage (e.g. delete unwanted files) ongoing.
  * Content moderation; decide on and enforce rules for online conduct
===== What we would like from our community partners =====
  * Space to install a node (with network and electricity – ideally solar powered)
  * Ongoing monitoring, contact us if any problems with the node.

===== Participatory Action Research project =====
We would like local non-profit organisations to join a research project, which will be led by what a community wants, to create social change as well as academic knowledge. 
  * Participate in a stakeholder workshop in early December 2026 to envision and explore community tech futures
  * Help us identify the assets / resources, strengths and barriers within the community
  * Help us co-design the roles for non-technical contributions as well as technical roles
  * Identify priority digital services and supporting community processes
 
**Valuable contributions do not require technical expertise. **