• 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)

• 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.

• 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

• 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

• Space to install a node (with network and electricity – ideally solar powered)
• Ongoing monitoring, contact us if any problems with the node.

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.