 which, this mic, this mic, left, okay, this one, great. Hello, so I've never been to EMF. I thought maybe there'll be like 20 people in a tent. This is so many people. Hello. So if this goes a bit too fast or a bit too detailed, then we've put all the notes on a page that we'll share at the end. So I run a studio called Geeks of Social Change, which I started in about 2015. This kind of came out of a desire to blend together kind of activism, technology and research. So sort of by actually working within community groups to make things better. My heart, I'm kind of more of a scrappy activist than anything else. I'm kind of really embedded in sort of feminist, trans, abolitionist, anti-racist politics. And I just couldn't see myself represented anywhere in tech. And a lot of the existing stuff out there just felt really wide of the mark for me. So as I'll get on to in this talk, I was also just really burnt out from doing this activism and wanted to do something joyful and fun and to be able to deliver projects with a sort of very fully automated luxury queer communism vibe, which is kind of what we tell from my cardigan. So to get away from the cold face, a lot of activism can get at where you get really burnt out and sort of actually start building this world we keep talking that we want to live in. So this talk's going to go through how we've been doing, the work we've got planned, and maybe how you can take part. Do you want to talk to us? So part one is about making... Just making as the basis for experiencing joy. So I imagine almost everyone here uses making, coding, producing, sewing, sculpting, or whatever your creative output is as a form of coping, right? So the world sucks, but I can make a nice thing and it kind of gives my life value. It feels like we can't change the world or it's... But we can make some cool doodads and this process kind of is therapeutic, it keeps us mindful, lets us use our hands, work in non-hierarchical ways, and generally, you know, mess around and find out with sort of low stakes. I think this is really, really deep and something that doesn't get enough attention and at the core of often what gives our lives meaning on what we centre our densities around. However, we're not really living in a society that allows this joy to be at the forefront of our lives and it's often something we have to fit into the cracks. So I've got a long quote here. Oh, hang on, my notes just went off. So... Let me get this up. So this Delos quote which I read out, so we live in a world which is generally disagreeable where not only people but established powers have a stake in transmitting sad affects to us. Sadness, sad affects are all those which reduce our power to act. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves and this kind of goes on but the gist of this is, it's like there's this force of the world which is preventing us from doing things which make us happy essentially. So Delos here talks about desire of production as the basis for our being and this is an additive process that drives us, be it everything from sort of like the desire to go for a wee to eat a burger, to play with your phone, to like design a shader on stage or build something out of scaffolding or turn Mercury into gold or all the other things we've seen this weekend. So like this kind of comes onto this doing stuff as an escape from the drudgery. A lot of the effort that's needed to begin and maintain these things is really something that needs attention. So many people I think have got jobs they hate or think are kind of useless and do this stuff in the weekends and the gaps to feel valued. David Graber pointed out that the more you get paid like the less likely your job is to have value to society and he's written a whole book about it called bullshit jobs. That's very good and I recommend it. So we learn all these skills and then often the daytime application seems boring and we do this stuff in the evening. So like making is literally our escape from oppressive power structures. So you know, these are the things that we don't necessarily have to jump through hoops to do so. They exist in this space where we can do our niche interest with our friends that bring us joy and we can do it actually like collaboratively and collectively. So I would say like joy in this context doesn't mean the joy you get from sort of like going to a party, getting drunk, taking drugs, whatever you want to do. I think I'm talking here about the satisfaction of like setting your mind to a really hard problem or a really hard challenge and then fixing it or for some value of fixing it. You know, I think this stuff makes you feel alive and it gives you a feeling of agency and like you can do something. And I think this is more a kind of like months and years not days and weeks feeling generally. Doing good projects can be one of the most rewarding things and I think anyone who's been part of a big event or a group or a festival probably feels this and that's probably in large part why people are here today to share what they've been working on. It can form part of your identity and it literally changes how you think about the world and how you interact with it. So to summarize, doing and making stuff is not just fun but possibly like a really basic form of interacting with the universe. So like capitalism is kind of bad and gets in the way of this and yeah, if you think, it sounds like I'm describing communism, you're probably right. I should look into that. So the difficulty then comes when you wanna do it with other people and this is where it gets hard because like people are messy and relationships are messy and the world we live in is messy. So this might be sort of taking your personal practice instead of doing it by yourself, setting up a hack space, forming a Dungeons and Dragons group or a knitting circle, going lapping, making a Minecraft server, maybe even just a weekly meetup at the pub. It could also be trying to mobilize some friends to go to a protest, form a mutual aid group or like a trans clothes swap, like a zine fair or putting on sort of a vaguely political film festival or organizing a club night for a minoritized group. You know, the gap here between political and non-political is very blurred. You know, the personal is political. So there's no real clear distinction here although there's kind of obviously a spectrum. So while the core of these activities is very different, the actual activity becomes the same. You're building relationships and literally like community organizing for whatever value of community you're working with. Again, these relationships can be the ones that give our lives meaning. These are our friends, our family, the people we work with, the people we feel comfortable with, the people we're not sort of like obliged to hang out with like we are with, you know, sort of like colleagues or government or other people. It's important to note that like, we're not really taught how to work cooperatively at any point in our educational work systems. People are very used to being in these rigid structures and they have a boss they moan about and underlings that they do whatever they want. So despite the fact it's more or less the default way of doing hobby groups, we don't really learn about doing consensus, conflict resolution, restorative justice or a bunch of other things that would really help. So this kind of organizing stuff with other people can get really tricky just because we're kind of missing this human relationship toolkit. So it's this relationship work that's kind of now where I'm gonna start focusing on. So this is a kind of key concept we've used in our work a lot, the differences between communities of place and communities of interest. So we all exist within both and they're kind of, they're worth like thinking about a little bit. So a community of place is basically just where we live. It's our immediate neighborhood, the things we walk past every day. So I think this used to be the main space which would be what you would consider like community life. Like sometimes someone asks you where you live, you don't say the city, you say like your ward or your town. But so now this can feel very alienating, I think especially to people who live in cities. I live in a really mixed inner city area which is human Manchester if anyone knows it. And it's kind of enormously divided by age. There's a student population that keeps itself to itself. The older people live in a lot of these like cul-de-sacs with their own community centers and they kind of don't mix. I mean, the university is literally erected these gigantic fences to keep them in too so it doesn't really help. But you kind of end up with like, you've got on the ground, people can live near each other in ways that are kind of invisible even though it seems like we live in the same place. So like this is still somewhat self-selecting. Like where you live at birth is still probably the single biggest predictor of your life chances. But in the rarefied world we live in, this is probably a lot more like the finger quotes real world than the sort of self-selecting hobby groups we end up with kind of online. Or again, over a larger area, you can end up sort of working in this sort of sub-sub-sub-set of a city. So communities of interest are kind of exactly what they sound like. I think this is why most people are here. They'll be in a hackspace group or a friendship group around an interest. I think the rise of the internet has made these far easier to do and they've sort of shoved out communities of place to some extent. The interplay between these can be really hard and I think this is why it can feel so hard to get stuff done right now. We're sort of in this new era where such a large proportion of the internet is like very online in ways that are controlled by gigantic companies who directly set what behaviors are accessible or like discoverable. This is both kind of increased alienation between people who are on and offline but also kind of like within these communities. So online communities, you know, famously tends, you get into scene drama very quickly. So on some level, we're working on a crossover between the two. The size of the geography expands as the size of our interest gets more niche. So for example, if I think about trans-organizing, this makes no sense on a ward level which is about 10,000-dish people because there's a group that's about 0.3 to 0.5% of the population, we need to cast a wider net. But on the flip side, if I'm thinking about protecting a local park or meeting neighbors for coffee, I'm thinking a couple hundred meters from my house and also like everyone else is gonna have their own place they go for coffee in their own local park so you're not expecting that to be of interest outside of where you are. But these things silo fast, so interest groups, then it ends up being kind of like death metal genres where you're kind of like, oh no, we hate them, they hate us. And this scene drama can kind of take over. So I think this sort of like real thinking about returning to communities of place and trying to leave our comfort zone of communities of interest is kind of an important thing. And then I just say, doing it under the Tories sucks. I hope this isn't very controversial for this audience but it's extremely disempowering. It feels like talking about possibility and change whilst it's, we're struggling to exist. So you know, we've kind of got this intersecting cost of living crisis, the ongoing pandemic, the corrupt and often fascist government, there's a social isolation and loneliness crisis and upswing and structural racism and hate crime and kind of highly coordinated and well-funded attacks on trans people that are creating an incredibly intolerant environment for making any kind of change happen. I think COVID especially has torn apart a lot of the normal functionings of how student groups especially integrate with local communities that we're still sort of coming to understand. Seems water. I think a lot of us, especially who are perhaps if you're like two or more of kind of trans, disabled, a person of color, neurodivergent, working class, queer, carers, I'm not all of these to be clear. And other marginalized groups have sort of never been further from kind of political representation. The party sucks. The alternatives to that party sucks. The alternatives to that party sucks. And at some point we're kind of all the way over here. And I think we've then got this billionaire press that only allows certain stuff to come through and whatever the hell is going on with social media right now. So a lot of us not only see no representation of ourselves at all, maybe through our community of interest and that's it, which is another thing that tethers it to it. We've kind of, these sort of daily attacks on our kind of ability to exist. So to be clear, I do really respect people who are trying to make change in these systems. I'm just finding increasingly I'm giving up, my friends are giving up, the networks I'm giving up with and we're trying to come back to this sense of like, what can we do on the ground to make joy happen in our immediate communities. I'd say too that injecting these sort of big P politics into our work and folding really confusing in complex ways. Honestly, there's something really cringe feeling about talking about any politics, which I think is maybe why I'm so nervous. I feel like everyone I talk to, who does anything related to activism or community organizing, they hate all the terms, all the terminology, the culture and all of it. It's, but yeah, you know, I'm very much working on being cringe and being free. Feels good. I think a lot of this stems from the fact that people think of activism as being like going to a protest or kind of being obnoxious on Twitter. And for many people that is the front door, at least has been historically, but I think we simply have to find better ways of being more able to resist the state of affairs that are kind of inherently joyful, sustainable, inclusive, can pay people a wage to do so, could sense of the needs of structurally marginalized people and take us back, excuse me. So what matters all about this, which is kind of enabling the sense of collective joy from which I think springs all resistance effectively. There's a real talking about injecting politics into everyday life, there's a real issue here. So we were invited here to do this talk under this kind of equality, diversity and inclusion banner. And I think it's just worth saying, like you know, the fascism of our diverse realizes it, it's trying to fix it, which I think a lot of organizations are doing right now, which is great. There's a lot of structural reasons why this is the case that a bit too personal to get into, but I think, and the idea of it being someone's fault isn't necessarily helpful, but I think it's good to look at the structural issues behind this. So this study kind of blew my mind when I read it, we said that men have five hours more leisure time a week than women. So like this is a whole hobby. I mean, how many things do we spend five hours a week doing? And like, you know, there's the side of all this free labor, of this some finger quotes free labor that is radically classed and gendered. I don't, they've not done this study based on other demographic factors. I only have this number and I'd love to know more. But I think just thinking about the freedom of having leisure time and having so much of it, and people having different quantities of it, it's something that really needs like some consideration. Whoops, I lost my place again. Be right with you. Okay. So, and I think the problem that we get into here comes because there's such this unequal distribution of free time, what we do in that time tends to represent it and kind of comes around this sort of accidentally quite sort of normal normative kind of grace and pericles that like the default man, you know, who has the free time to do this and everyone else needs kind of an extra affordance to be part of this. So, in the context of disability studies, I've got this quote from Joss Boyes, if it's, did we put that on the slide? Oh, there's the thing stopped. Oops, sorry, there we go. This is kind of a long quote. So, but I think it's important to read out. So, why does the idea of disability being creative and avant-garde seems so absurd? Is it because of the taken for granted assumptions about disabled people that they are in need of the help of others, a passive consumer of services, constitute a minority of individuals in society who unfortunately must bear the brunt of their own medical problems? What if instead we see that rethinking disability enables us to explore critically and creatively assumptions about disability and ability, which in turn can offer better ways of understanding the implications of both bodily diversity and everyday social-special practice? So, this is from an architect who wrote this, but I think this could sort of be applied to most contexts we work in, right? Where it's like, if we put this idea of who are we including first, it creates different interesting challenges that are just as interesting to solve. So, I think anyone who's tried to organize anything will know how hard it is. There's stuff you hear over and over again where like, if you're trying to get involved in things, it can often feel like, oh, I tried to join this activist space and everyone was just yelling at each other. Sometimes I'm doing the yelling. I think there's also this sense that people involved in this space are complete dicks, which is true, some of the time. And you get in trouble for stuff because there's a lot of other things going on in that space. Or like the other way, which is you try and help out a community center, they don't really have a volunteering program, they don't get back to you, you sort of get easily put off. And from the side of kind of trying to organize a group, it can be just as frustrating. So, a really common thing is like people come to you and they just want to offer a skill for an hour and actually it doesn't quite work like that. If we had something we could fix in an hour, someone would have probably done it. So, you know, like people thinking they can fix homelessness with a poster or something is like a real thing I've seen. Or like, you know, someone says they'll make a website is a really common one and it doesn't work and they didn't listen to anyone and it sort of hangs around and there's all this awkward half-life of like institutional websites that are broken. Or like, they just volunteers come and promise the world and then just like vanish off the face of the earth the next day. So, like I say, there's no easy fix to any of this stuff. It's just we're kind of dealing in this world of like unfunded stuff that's made structurally hard in centers that have been kind of cut and cut and cut over the years. I think a lot of this happens because as soon as you step outside of kind of, you know, these structures that might be oppressive but people know their place and kind of a hierarchy, you start dealing with these actual breakdowns and they can be really jarring. So structural discrimination is really ugly, operates on multiple scales and the dynamics have sort of existed long before you got there and will exist a long time after. Putting your toe in can feel like it's getting bitten off. It takes a lot of hard work to kind of start decolonizing ourselves and learning the kind of racist transphobic classes things. I'm still working on it. And it's kind of meeting people where they are and they have the power and it can be, it's really disconcerting. So like, I don't have any answers for this unfortunately. I'm hoping that by sort of bringing it up we can start to have discussions about it. But I'm now gonna talk about the work that we've just started doing on community technology partnerships. So we're trying to take a lot of this good stuff. This kind of desire to make, the desire to do things, to do them with your friends and kind of put it together in a way that overcomes these ideas more from the ground up. So we're still working through this. We've got some funding, we've got a couple of years to work on it. It kind of infuses all of our work anyway. So we'll be in the, I'll probably go in there, the one with the picnic benches over by the main tent. If people wanna come and talk about it, we'd love to find out what you're up to. So on the surface of it, it seems simple. So yeah, like I'm saying, people have skills they wanna use. Community groups have unmet needs. Why is this so difficult to happen? What we've found is that a lot of tech methodologies are actually really unsuitable for this. So the two of the big ones are like design thinking and human-centered design. And they sort of proclaim it to be liberatory, but if you read through them, it's still very much with this idea that we'll sort of helicopter someone in, put them on the ground, they'll fix a problem, we'll take them away, and we kind of have this experts and non-experts thing. It's taken quite a lot to sort of piece to pull this apart. Where we're coming from this instead is this approach called the capability approach. So this is kind of a human development approach that's sort of used by the UN and the sustainable development goals developed by Martha Nussbaum and Martha Sander, the two really famous names. And it asks quite simply, what is it that people are able to do and be as a group? And then what things are getting in the way of that? What blockers are there? And how can we remove them? So rather than it sort of starting from this idea of the thing we're trying to do, like the one thing, we're sort of looking at the hundred things that might be in your way if you're trying to say serve a community group or whatever. So this can seem like a simple question, but it's actually a very concrete ethical test that represents people's fundamental existence. So rather than having choices made for them on the basis of kind of external characteristics or assumptions of their abilities that might come, you know, if you're not a part of that community, it re-centers the communities at the center of interventions. So like by basing our work on this approach, rather than something that's been kind of invented by someone in California, it usually is, we think we've found a way to reconfigure this. So we call this community analysis partnerships. We think people are the best judges of their own personal circumstances and the best place to fix it. Our approach to developing this has been these three stages that we've used a few times now. So step one is like direct engagement with an involvement of, so you've got to work directly with people in a sort of place-based creative partnership. So you can have interest, but there has to be an element of place-based because that's how you keep it honest and kind of de-siloate. And then using this to actively enable the realization of self-defined opportunities for individuals and groups. So it's about working together to improve our collective capabilities. The explicit goal of this is to increase our power to act. So if you've ever lived somewhere where you don't think it's possible to get anything done and then you've perhaps moved city or come to a maker camp and all of a sudden you're awash with ideas and possibilities and creativity and meeting people, that's kind of what we want. But like it's like a day-to-day thing and not like the rarefied thing we get to go to a few times a year. To illustrate this, this has been a lot of theory. I'll give you a few examples from stuff that we've worked on with various groups in our neighborhood. So the first one is a project called I'm Okay. We worked with a local no-borders Manchester group who wanted to create a tool for their signing support network. So as part of the hostile environment policy, people seeking asylum have to go and sign into one of 14 signing centres in the UK. It's kind of a bit like a parole system. It's been repeatedly described by people as like the most dehumanising aspect of the whole asylum process. There's an abolished reporting hashtag that has a lot of stuff on it and this group is working on this. They tend to put these reporting centres in the middle of nowhere. There's kind of no seating or shelter. They've kind of been in industrial estates. On attending you get asked a range of completely inane questions that just seem no one can quite understand what they're trying to get to. It seems just to annoy you. But like at these centres, the crucial danger is if they do decide to deport you, even though they're not meant to, they will and have immediately detained people, driven them to the airport and tried to extradite them on flights. So this whole process is incredibly stressful because every time you go, it's kind of like, you know, maybe there's a one in 50 chance I'm just going to get deported. So what the no-borders group have been doing was doing this manually by standing outside, registering people when they go in, checking they come out. This was requiring a massive amount of labour on the ground. So they basically approached us and we talked about this and what we've ended up making is it's like a little piece of bot software. It's MIT license. You can do what you want with it. But it sets up a telegram bot and people can just text in when they go into a session and if they don't check, press out when they come out after 30 minutes. The telegram group chat gets a notification. So the idea was we were using all the tech they were already using, kind of mobile phones, it works on SMS and telegram. And like, sadly, we've not really got to test it because of the COVID, the changes in COVID, they changed how they do it, but we're working on doing a proper pilot and a second release. So yeah, that's our first example. It's on our GitHub. The second example is kind of an even simpler one. You know, the last one, it was like a very big social problem and we ended up actually making quite a small, simple tool that like is designed for us not even to own in the end and we think it's got other applications. This was simply a case where when COVID started in my neighborhood, we've got a lot of sort of very deprived older population. The landlady at the community pub was just like, we need to do something about this. They had some family in Italy and we're seeing what was happening there. So we had a group who was willing to do deliveries which was Acorn, a renters union. We had one of these schemes where they pick veg that's on the fields going off and they had the kitchen and they had the drivers and they just needed someone to basically put it all together. So this ended up literally just being an air table database, but it was kind of like well designed. We did a proper service design. We got to think through the problem. We made a database that fit it all together. So it was probably ended up being, you know, kind of a week's worth of, maybe not even a week's worth of tech labor and this is now fed, you know, delivered over 5,000 meals to people's house. The final example I'll give is this flagship tech we're working on that hopefully we'll come and tell you about next year called Playscal. So this came out of a huge co-produced project that happened where I live in Hume. The one I had to examine the causes of social isolation and loneliness for the over 50s was the focus of the project. This had thousands of conversations, divested loads of money to community groups and found this really common thing where people thought there's just nothing to stir in my neighborhood. This has really led to social isolation up and down the country. In the UK, there's estimated there'll be 2 million people who are lonely and socially isolated by 2024. And there's long-term longitudinal studies that show that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking two packets of cigarettes a week, which is crazy to me. So despite these massive investments of time and money by city councils, health providers, housing associations, into loads of community directories, they just weren't working. The information wasn't getting to people, so we went to find out why. Just have a bit more water. I think I'm a little running out of time. So very broadly speaking, rather than trying to do this as a kind of one-off top-down tech intervention, we worked with all these local partnerships to get them actually working together, we built some software that basically aggregates data from Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook, Meetup, Eventbrite, whatever people were using, and it sorts it all and filters it all out by region, and it's got a community of interest-hagging thing too. I would love to go into this more, and we can talk about it later, but I say I have two minutes left. And then we also designed a training program to go with it. So it was very much like this three-tiered approach of working with local strategy that's already there on the ground, the existing partners in the neighbourhood, using the technology that people already had so we didn't expect them to install another app. We were often training them to use things they already had on their phone, and then building a training program around that, so again, using these tools they already had. This worked incredibly shockingly well, and we ended up with about 250 events a week for our little ward. We're currently working on a version for this for the trans community in London called The Trans Dimension that will be launching at the start of July, so you can look out for that. But we made this with gendered intelligence, who are lovely people, and have been coordinating a partnership there for about 30 groups. So I will leave you with some final thoughts. As I said, we've got lottery funding to explore this idea, and we've got a little team together. We'd love to find out what people are up to. I will leave you with this final quote, which is just, which it says, the space beyond fixed and established order structures and morals is not one of disorder. It's the space of emergent orders, values and forms of life. So this is where we're getting at. We're not trying to make new structures. We're trying to enable things to form organically. And yeah, I look forward to telling everyone how we're doing this time next year. Yeah, we've got some info here. We've got a Discord. We've got some little flyers with our info on. So thank you all for listening.