Community Tech kick-off workshops May 2022
image by Alina Kholopova
Promising Trouble and Power to Change hosted two workshops in May, kicking off our programme looking at Community Tech and shaping a major new funding programme.
We got together with around 30 community businesses who are working in areas as diverse as community energy, food production and delivery, and community media. The goal was to play back our research from last year to see if it made sense to them and resonated with how and why they are making their own technologies.
Key to this was interrogating our working definition of Community Tech:
Technology that is accountable to and made by, for, and with place-based communities
There’s a lot to unpack in that sentence, so I’ll talk through some of the issues that were raised in the workshops.
Firstly, what do we mean by accountable? How can a piece of technology be accountable to a community? We’re not talking about literally holding an app to account, but ensuring that there are mechanisms in place by which the makers and managers of the technology can be accountable for their actions, and the community interacting with the technology can contact them, ask questions, interrogate how it is working, and have a meaningful way to get changes and improvements made. The needs and desires of the community should be central to what the technology does and how it does it, and there should be transparent ways for the community to understand it and intervene. Ideally the technology should be directly owned and governed by the community.
The biggest debate was around ‘place-based’ as a core component of Community Tech. Power to Change’s work with and for community businesses is very focused on place, as most community businesses spring from a geographically defined place. And many of the examples of Community Tech we’ve seen so far, like Chilli Studios’ developing social media platform for its members in the North East, or the Bristol Cable’s member relationship system for its readers in Bristol, are firmly place-based. However, some of our workshop participants create technology for communities of interest, rather than place, or that can be used in multiple places. A community of interest might be, for example, people who share a common hobby, all have a particular health condition or disability, or a shared faith. The thing that binds the community isn’t where they are, but something else they have in common.
We debated this quite a lot in the first workshop, and have interrogated it amongst ourselves plenty more since then. We will have more to say about it very soon.
We moved on to smaller group discussions to get into more detail and start to look at how a funding and support programme might practically help community businesses to make more tech, and tech that is accountable to and addresses the needs of its community.
This is a summary of some really rich discussions, which gave us a lot of food for thought.
What are the blockers to and opportunities for more community tech?
Blockers include
the tech and innovation landscape, particularly funders, expects organisations to want to scale up and make profits, which are often not ambitions of community businesses. Funding for maintenance and sustainability of community tech is therefore hard to come by
funding is often time-limited and doesn’t allow for experimentation
finding and affording the right technical skills to build and maintain technologies
community tech can be built in non-standard ways, which makes maintenance and change difficult
having to compete with / fit in to commercial products and markets, which is challenging when also maintaining community values and without commercial levels of investment.
Opportunities include:
access and use of more and different types of data for community benefit
sharing innovations, tools etc between community businesses
community tech has purpose and accountability built in.
Is there scope for more collaboration and reuse?
There was a lot of interest in working with and learning from other community businesses, with the following more detailed points:
case studies help to spark ideas about what is possible for community businesses
interest in sharing resources across organisations
support and funding is needed to support collaboration, sharing and reuse / repurposing
collaboration can be ‘baked in’ from the start of a community tech project e.g. through using open source software
collaboration between communities and technically skilled people is also relevant, bringing together imagination and skills
what does a funding or support ecosystem look like that supports and fosters sustainable collaboration?
we need to recognise the costs (time and money) for community businesses to take part in collaborative activities.
What support would make the most difference for how your organisation makes or uses Community Tech?
We finished with a ‘tell us one thing’ question to identify the most immediate or transformational change that would help their work on Community Tech, which broadly fall under three categories:
Funding flexibility
funding for expertise, to enable community businesses to pay for the skilled staff they need, and/or a pipeline of trained developers to come and work in the community sector
funding to develop new products
funding that trusts community businesses
Collaboration and sharing infrastructure
mentoring, sharing ideas and building confidence
resource to enable more and easier take-up of Community Tech products
support for co-design and co-ownership
Systemic change/ strengthening
help to bring stakeholders on a ‘journey of change’
bringing some coherence to the movement, connecting people and effort and creating joined-up advocacy for the sector
support to develop robust and effective ownership and governance models.
What’s next?
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