Amidst public anger at big tech, there's growing impetus for community-run and cooperative digital infrastructure and services. For example, Coop Cloud aims to help small organisations host open source software, providing a software stack based on container technologies and open standards. Powered by volunteers and supported by a federation of community groups, they offer (some examples). However, Coop Cloud illustrates the challenges that non-profit organisations experience with maintaining momentum and continuity over time. Notable struggles include fluctuating levels of volunteer involvement, uncertain finances, and finding people to do boring work of admin, building organisational memory and shared tools - especially important in a federated governance model. This provides a valuable case study to explore the challenges of community-based approaches to building, operating and sustaining technologies.

In this talk, we aim to start a conversation about how we can build the structures, continuity and skills, drawing in people who have strengths in building coops and volunteer-run groups. We look to models such as community gardens, landcare groups, maker communities and tool libraries, considering what we can learn and how their approaches might be adapted for community run digital services. We explore foundational practices of listening with discomfort, interdisciplinarity, learning together through small experiments, and shared stewardship, and consider possible first-steps to involving the wider community through forums, futures thinking and roleplaying with low-fi prototypes.

POSSIBLE TITLES

• Community-run digital services: what will it take?

OUTLINE

• As momentum grows to build alternatives to big tech and cloud-based digital services,
• We’re seeing growth in initiatives for community-run, cooperative and local infrastructure and tech services. Initiatives such as Coop Cloud and other
• We’ll need new approaches to build, operate and sustain these forms of infrastructure and services:
  • creating continuity and stability while relying on volunteers (rapid turnover and intermittent levels of involvement) rather than ongoing professionals and responsibilities tied to a salary
  • coordination for commonsing and shared governance
  • negotiating shared ownership and shared responsibilities
  • financial models for continuity and payment structures that reflect community values, contributions and what people / groups can afford, ensuring equitable access to essential services
• This talk discusses possible approaches to organising, developing and sharing:
  • individual skills and roles for network infrastructure, hardware, administration
  • cooperative responsibility and governance
  • models of alliances between organisations (formal and informal)
  • spaces, places, resources and financial security
  • for equitable access, not just well-off neighbourhoods
• We’ll discuss our own efforts at Merri-bek Tech through the node steward and community partnerships; challenges, how we might overcome them - and the broader benefits for communities.
• Audience participation??? - would be so interesting to get people's input on models, and how we might partner with other orgs to build these capabilities.