Seeking Abundance: Life Affirming Community Tech Takeaways

The fifth instalment of the Seeking Abundance series by Promising Trouble - a deep dive into how community tech can help dismantle oppressions and support us all to thrive. Read parts one, two, three and four on our website.

This blog post presents key takeaways and from this series which has shared insights from a roundtable discussion on community tech, Global Majority communities and how we might seek abundance together.

At the end, you’ll find a Glossary of Terms as well as a six step framework for reflection and action to support you and your teams in your own journeys exploring what life affirming community tech might mean for you and your communities.

Original image source: Design For Seeking Abundance by Roseanna Dias

Recommended tracks to play while you read:
🎵 Got To Be Good by Gotts Street Park and Pip Millett
🎵 Be Careful by Greentea Peng
🎵 Own Your Own by Yazmin Lacey

“The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.”

— Toni Morrison, introduced via Debs Durojaiye

When I began my journey as Inclusion Research Producer at Promising Trouble in 2023, I aimed to connect with other Global Majority (or Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) Tech Justice practitioners in the community tech sector, seeking to understand their experiences and aspirations. Informal discussions highlighted a shared desire for a space where Global Majority practitioners could gather, reflect, and share practices. In response, in November 2023, I organised an online roundtable focused on exploring what our dreams, realities, barriers and needs were for a community tech sector that promoted thriving - a sector that was life affirming for us as Global Majority practitioners, our communities, and others in the sector and in society.

Roundtable participants included:

You can read up on the themes we covered during the roundtable in our other blog posts: Decolonising vs Life Affirming Community Tech; Collective Dreams for Community Tech; Exploring Realities and Options; and What Does Being Resourced Look and Feel Like?. We hope these writings have surfaced some interesting insights for you and the work you do, and perhaps provided some framing around how we might move towards the things which help us to thrive as people, and how the sector can be a vehicle for these changes.

Key Takeaways

In summary, key insights/calls to action from the Seeking Abundance: Life Affirming Community Tech series include:

Let’s move away from inclusion frameworks of ‘decolonising’ community tech which centres oppressors, towards using (or at least also including) frameworks that ‘seek abundance’ and re-centre Global Majority folk, our empowerment and our value.
Let’s recognise community tech as a means to achieving justice (not a means unto itself), alongside other sectors and systems, and the intersection and potentials of more joined up thinking/working.
Let’s look to people, the planet and our ancestors for inspiration, existing practices and profound metaphors for potential new systems, ways of thinking and behaviours.
Let’s deepen how we practise solidarity in our day to day and reconsider our relationship to money as a driver.
Let’s get real about investing in shared infrastructures and community tech projects so sustainability and longevity (of people, planet and the tech we create and care for) are front and centre.
Let’s build and populate spaces for reflecting, sharing and experimenting.

“How do we think about committing our time, effort and care towards building these kinds of solidarity networks, and collective ways of being which are hard, right? They require a different type of thinking and approach that we’re not used to because it’s counter to the life in the society that we currently live in.

I think solidarity networks are also very important in moments of crisis or a peak - those networks are necessary for literal survival. And when there is a peak, you might realise ‘oh, I don’t have the community that I need to engage or deal with this’, and it’s difficult to build the people in when you’re in those peak moments

So how do you use day to day survival and community to build that kind of infrastructure so that when things do pop off, you already have your folks that you can rely on and that you can support?”

— Dominique Barron

On Labour

Our roundtable and these blog posts are part of an ongoing conversation and we are searching for opportunities to come together again, with others too. We are grateful to all our roundtable participants for such a rich conversation and reflective process (prompts were sent) both before and after the roundtable event itself: this enables a layering of ideas over time.

To acknowledge the emotional labour of doing this work involving race and oppression, each participant received a small stipend for rest as part of their fee - this is a practice adopted from the small business I run called Studio Susegad, which incorporates rest fees and emotional labour within all budgets and contracts. This practice models how important it is to make visible the often invisibilised labour at play in these discussions and changemaking endeavours so that power dynamics and imbalances are surfaced.

In changing the underpinnings of our systems/budgets, even on a very small scale, we can start to make a difference, shift our perspectives, change our behaviours. We also acknowledge the labour involved in reading this blog post if you are a racialised individual. You can find after care resources by following these links for meditation, ways to rest, and inspirational readings.

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 wake up to the realities of what’s hindering liberation, and what possibilities there are for moving towards it in empowerment and solidarity. This is a shared, sector wide endeavour.

Over to you

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. These suggested prompts relate to a step by step framework for reflection on the topic of life affirming community tech:

Ground Yourself: What does decolonising / life affirming community tech mean to you, in theory and in practice?
Dream (Together if possible): How do you think community tech could support us all to thrive?
Get Inspired: What’s already out there that gives you hope?
Get Real: What barriers, binaries, gaps or assumptions are holding you back?
Build Capacity: What could being resourced look and feel like for you and for others?
Take Responsibility: What is your role in this? What actions will you take? How willing are you to take those actions?

Use these prompts solo or collectively. Freewrite, mind map, discuss. You can also use these as the basis for a longer workshop or gathering.

What’s Next?

This is the fifth and last instalment of the roundtable editions 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. Sign up to our mailing list or stay tuned on our socials (X / LinkedIn) to follow the project as it unfolds in the coming months.

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.

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.