Collective Dreams for Community Tech

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.