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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.
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, 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.
