# GFSC Tech Partners 2025-07-29 https://meet.google.com/hdt-rsrq-gtb Present: Kim, Quinn, Aadil, Joe Chair: Kim Minutes: Joe ## Agenda - Admin - checkins / intros - set date for next meeting OR do doodle for a new date - update on gfsc.community progress - Update on next lottery bid with Profit for Purpose and A Brilliant Thing - Group mission statement - Review Kim's mission statement (below) - should/can we open the group up to more people? - is this the right framing / name? - Resourcing - Can anyone take over running this bit of GFSC? Or other parts? - what other sources of income can we look at? - what would make getting paid membership of this group more attractive? ## Minutes Check this date is still the best one * 16th September? Kim to email in and see if that works for people Update on project * Two posts a week for first couple of month, now on once a week, and starting to take its own identify and shape. * Did a stream about history of placecal, good to tell the stories at our own pace. * Good to work with Sean (see below) Next lottery bid partnership * Nicola who came last time has done phd on how the not for profit model is broken, got a fair amount of CICs to deal with this * e.g. meanwhile use mall where they funding ends and they want to keep working together, or groups looking to use tech without just using meta. * Keri & Kim working together to balance what is broken and what the prolem and recogising what all community orgs need help with * ... * TLDR this is where the mission statement comes in * Need to codify what this group does for it's members and make it a bit more public * Would be good to run open source services collectively * Quinn - not paid in yet, would be helpful to understand that (ultimately a business decision) needs to be some justification beyond say donating to a crowd funder. * First line of mission statement end with trying to create a better world, this is what everyone says, even the fascists! See edit below * KF Maybe it is a crowd funder type thing like a campaigning view. Is it a business thing or are people paying in to support it? * QD - unclear to me, to folks who don't know Kim this is even more unclear * A lot of crowd funding seems very circular, often pulling into one place * PlaceCal subscription £20 a month to also get access to their servers and self hosting * Could build this - https://mobilizon.org/ * Is there a user community? * Quinn is part of network of people in Leeds ctreaing co-housing for Leeds older queer people who are making network of events etc * Rakesh working in NE * Network of artists studios in ss * Other groups * Want to be somewhere between big tech and colsultancy * Networks exist but they are failed by technology * Blog is set up to capture stories about how this is all possible * Google workspace free if you have tax exhemption document, didn't care about what kind of org register you are * One of the cool things about open source tech is that if it doesn't work you can change it. Difference between eventbrite and placecal is you can change it if other orgs also want to change something * Allows you to have a choice * This group will likely remain small, and don't need money to be a barrie * Great OS successes have been because people have paid in with money and using the tech * PlaceCal slowed down and now people could go to sales for placecal sales for it. PlaceCal has never been the offer, it has been the tool to connect people up to others. * QD - without a community manager in place that is paid to coordinate the groups that are in a placecal instance. Pride of Place is paying a admin, but one person needs to be named as email point of contact for the place. Not sure how you finance it. People are getting the tech but not the person. * KF - there is a value in how much info people get from this site, and there should be a way of getting funds from thius * QD - someone in Leeds called Rob that everone knows , doesn't want anythign to do with it, and someone who runs stuff on instgram that doesn't want to move things from there, no solution to those challenges. * QD - critial mass issues if not enough people on it then people don't want to be picking sides * KF - biggest issue with this from the start, and trying to take over the ?? listings. Would be good to get other people delivering the training on an activist capacity. Would be great to do a * JI - would be a limited group of people who could train people * KF - would be good to get people to pay £20 / month. * QD - Activists hate tech in general, and people resist stuff and don't like using technology. Green party, no activits care about tech. People don't like to think about it, and want it all to go away. All on instagram. Queer stuff is all elderly lesbians, don't want to be useing tech * KF - working with trad activism there is a particalar way young activists work, and have a colonial attitude about what community looks like, then they end up thinking they are better than everything else. Cooperation Manchester, had to all talk about their film, talked about seizing a black cultural space that is crumbing, weird approach that young people have that they are the first to do something. * QD - seems to be an endless struggle that * KF - not looking to commonality * ## Actions - [ ] KF send doodle with 16th Sept date ## Sean copy Finding out what’s going in your area should be one of the internet’s easiest wins. After all, if search engines can’t easily outstrip the parish newsletter and the community bulletin board, then why have we been carrying computers in our pockets for a decade? Thanks to Nick Clegg’s avarice the internet is instead fragmented, commercialised and complicated. It’s not easy to stay up to date with whats happening around you now. Basic information is trapped inside one of the competing social media empires, algorithmic rankings push and prioritise what information you get to see, AI summaries, surveillance and non-stop advertising make the act of searching and discovering labyrinthine and disorientating. I accepted the internet into my heart but now I’m lonely and my thumbs hurt. In comes PlaceCal, an events aggregator that collects and serves information from various events organisers and serves it up in a simple accessible webpage. PlaceCal has successfully served several communities across the UK but there are still challenges ahead for making non-commercial solutions like these sustainable in the long term. In this interview I, Sean Morley, that’s who i am, hello, speak with PlaceCal creators, Professor Stefan White from the Manchester School of Architecture, Dr Jay Stewart from Gendered Intelligence, Rakesh Prashara from Tipping Point, Dr Kim Foale from Geeks For Social Change about PlaceCal’s past successes and the challenges ahead in making a non-commercial community project sustainable in the long-term. ## Mission statement We are a collective of tech practitioners working to help communities own their own tech, and resist the billionaire technologists working to send us into a technofascist dark age. Much like climate justice work a decade or two ago, tackling big tech feels insurmountable at the moment. We need to address the culture, practice and stories around technological transformation by talking about the people and projects doing it, and celebrating our wins and learning opportunities. A lot of open source software is sadly quite far from a dropin replacement for the incredibly mature and stable corporate stack. But perhaps a bigger problem is that tech is always never at the top of things to fix in anyone's theory of change so it bubbles perpetually in the wrong quadrant of the urgent/important matrix. If we are going to ever reduce our dependance we need to: 1. actually state the problems we are trying to fix with technology (and stop buying more magic bullets), 2. commit to working together to find out how we can collectively address them (and have a chance of de-siloing our work in the process), 3. in doing so, use adapt and create software actually fit for our purposes that we collectively own and run The GFSC Community Tech Partners group are all working within this framework, with different specialities and approaches: * Creating websites and webapps: Lutalica, Common Knowledge * Adapting and using existing open source tools: Autonomic * Developing, maintaining and hosting our own open source tools we want others to use: PlaceCal, Mapped, Resilience Web, Mastodon, Karrot * Raising money for these alternatives and creating sustainable economies: Donor Whisperer, Profit for Purpose * Helping community groups access technology: Geeks for Social Change Studio, Fractals, Tipping Point All of us have a set of shared principles (we need to work on these!) We meet regularly to help nurture and grow left-tech economy, skills and experience We deliver services individually and as a collective, keeping each other accountable and creating a culture of best practice and sharing nicely