Seeking Abundance: Collective Dreams for Community Tech
Original image source: Design For Seeking Abundance by Roseanna Dias
Recommended tracks to play while you read:
🎵 Bloom by Raveena
🎵 Djougou Toro by Volta Jazz
🎵 Everything Is Connected by Zara McFarlane
“An ecosystem that does not scale across thousands or millions of users, but across the spectrum of time instead, regenerating the soil and community ties from one planting season to the next”
Xiaowei Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm describes ‘rice harmony’, introduced via Dama Sathianathan
Context
Back in November 2023, we brought together a roundtable of Global Majority (or Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) Tech Justice practitioners to explore and understand what life affirming community tech means to us, and how we can nurture it. This work builds on and takes inspiration from others in the field, in particular Tech Justice research by Siana Bangura and team for Catalyst, and the pioneering work in Life Affirming Infrastructures led by Healing Justice London.
Roundtable participants included:
Convened and hosted by: Roseanna Dias, Promising Trouble
Original image source: Agriculture landscape in rural China from pickpik.com
Part Blueprint, Part Manifesto
Having access to (facilitated) spaces to dream and imagine with one another is rare. Often we are forced to get straight down to business - but collective dreaming and collective imagination practices are effective tools for sparking and sustaining revolutionary thinking and action. That’s why it was so important to offer this as part of our online workshop agenda.
Using freewriting and prompts, then collective discussion and notetaking, we mapped out our vision for a community tech sector geared towards liberation and abundance where:
Community tech is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself. Community tech helps us proactively shift power imbalances and is a galvaniser of people-power.
Community tech creates many adaptive tools and spaces designed for community connection, health and wellbeing, rather than control and extraction.
Community tech embodies the mantra ‘access is love’, from disability justice campaigner Mia Mingus - which sees care, love and a desire to support full, thriving lives, baked into all designs/systems.
Community tech supports equitable data and digital infrastructures that embolden the Global Majority to design/develop/use tech to build economies and systems that serve them and free us from the constraints caused by the struggle or as Toni Morrison says, ‘the distraction’ of racial oppression.
Community tech enables many people to have the knowledge and time to tend to the tech or infrastructure that is held by their community.
Community tech supports ecosystems that regenerate over time, fostering community ties and reinvesting in the environments and conditions for more collective flourishing.
Community tech enables us to be super connected without feeling inundated - we’re able to maintain healthy boundaries and articulate our changing needs and capacities.
Community tech is powered by reflection, dreaming and experimentation. It is unhindered by predefined destinations or outcomes, and adaptive funding and project structures are normalised. This means we can all respond to the evolving needs of our teams and communities, offering more time and space for understanding desires, needs and appropriate co-design processes.
Community tech is actively challenging dependency and power imbalances within the sector, advocating for collective ownership to prevent siloed decision making.
Community tech grows projects that are self-sustaining and generate income, as well as offering more than monetary value to communities.
These statements form a part manifesto, part blueprint for Life Affirming Community Tech - one in which Community Tech supports abundance, is inspired by nature, regenerative and reciprocal systems, and is fundamentally non extractive of anyone or anything. Baked into this are holistic and collective care practices which ensure communities, places, the non-human and the tech we create, are cared for, repaired and sustained. Moving towards this vision requires a shift in both perspectives and practices.
“The example of the rice coop is about going back through traditional harvesting methods, with a focus on regenerating soil. They draw fascinating parallels around innovation in ecosystems and how it affects our notions of scale. With the rice harmony principle, they talk about scaling technologies in terms of how we infuse it with a lot of public trust, focusing on the longevity of tech products and services. So not thinking about scale across numbers of users, but looking at it from a perspective of how long and how incentivised people are over a long period of time to harness whatever is needed.”
Dama Sathianathan
In our next blog post we’ll explore what came up when we thought about what some of the realities of community tech and its infrastructure really are for Global Majority practitioners and communities; how far we are (or are not) from this dreamscape; and what we might do to get there.
Original image source: Design For Seeking Abundance by Roseanna Dias
Over To You
Whilst this conversation started within a circle of Global Majority folks, it is not contained there - it highlights the ways in which all of us might dream into different versions of what Community Tech could be, and how we might centre the experiences, desires and needs of marginalised folks.
This is a shared, sector wide endeavour. Whether you are a community tech practitioner or potential partner or funder, this is an invitation for you to take a few moments to do your own reflections and take action.
Why not start with this prompt? Freewrite, mind map or discuss…
Dream (Together if possible): How do you think community tech could support us all to thrive?
This prompt forms part of a six step framework for reflection on the topic of life affirming community tech. We will be sharing prompts as we publish each blog post in this series.
We also acknowledge the labour involved in reading this if you are a racialised individual. You can find after care resources by following these links for meditation, ways to rest, and inspirational readings.
What’s Next?
This is the second instalment of the Seeking Abundance blog series by Promising Trouble - a deep dive into how community tech can help dismantle oppressions and support us all to thrive. Over the course of 2024 we hope to work with others and continue the discussion. Stay tuned on our socials X / LinkedIn where we’ll be posting one Seeking Abundance blog post every week for five weeks, starting with 14th Feb.
Glossary of Terms
Decolonising - we defined it as the deconstruction of colonial ideologies, practices and systems to address the historical and ongoing impacts of colonialism, imperialism, White supremacy, and Eurocentrism on societies. Our understanding encompassed challenging, dismantling, and replacing harmful structures, rectifying historical injustices, and re-centering Global Majority folks.
Disability Justice - is a social justice framework that recognises the intersecting legacies of white supremacy, colonial capitalism, all forms of oppression and ableism in understanding how people's bodies and minds are labelled and policed.
Global Majority refers to the demographic majority worldwide of Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and Peoples of Colour. It helps to highlight the perspectives and experiences of the majority in a world shaped by White supremacy.
Tech Justice - 'Tech Justice is where technology is deployed in anti-oppressive ways. That can mean that technology isn't used against particular communities, or it's not used to make decisions that impact people disproportionately’ as defined by Siana Bangura and team in their Tech Justice research project.
