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
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
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.