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We aim to provide local partner organisations with community-run, open source digital services for their ICT needs, as alternatives to commercial tech platforms.
What concrete outcomes do we want to deliver?
- 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)
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 server stewardship / system admin o Maintenance, updates for security; Responsive security / break-fix o Intermediary between groups and server hosting companies; Local partner organisations would need to: - Allocate at least two people to look after your digital services - Migrate, set up users and permissions, initial folder structures, - Manage user accounts, permissions, storage (e.g. delete unwanted files) - Content moderation; decide on and enforce rules for online conduct What we would like from you. - Space to install a node (with network and electricity – ideally solar powered) - Monitor and 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 2027 - Help us identify the assets / resources, strengths and barriers - 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.