Geeks for Social Change

“EMF started back in about 2011 when a load of folks from the London Hackspace wanted to go camping/make something a bit like the European Hackcamps. We ended up in a park near Milton Keynes that we could set up a microwave link to a near-by data centre from, filled it with some tents we borrowed from a LARP for use for workshops/villages (folks who wanted to camp together, like the various Hackspaces) and put a bar under the M1.”

“Any time someone asks ‘would EMF be interested in...’ the answer is yes. We've had talks on all sorts of topics from special effects, to lock picking, to all the ways you can legally dispose of a body in the UK. Something we've really worked at is actively making EMF inclusive and welcoming. If you do that, folks from all sorts of walks of life will turn up and feel able to talk about their special interest or hobby.”

“We're still running after a decade. It's been really difficult but maintaining a wholly volunteer-run organisation, especially one that goes dormant every other year, is a huge accomplishment. In any organisation loss of institutional knowledge is a big risk but this only gets worse when you're relying on volunteers and everyone is trying to remember how to do a job they last did 18 months ago.”

GFSC are a collective helping communities use technology to do community stuff If you’d like to be part of our mission you can come to a drop-in, join our discord, support us with a subscription, or of course, follow us on Mastodon.

Distros Back in the early noughties, small artists on DIY labels were still using paper catalogues and cheques in the mail to distribute records. You’d read a list of descriptions of bands and trust labels to bring you interesting music. Ordering often meant waiting weeks or months A big part of going to DIY shows back then was to browse all the little distros that would show up.

I think the same has also happened to information: we have lost a sense of shared distribution. The collapse of this infrastructure of place and interest has perhaps done more than anything else to allow the billionaires to mediate our lives. We used to use a wide range of local forums, sites like Indymedia or WeMakeZines, and dozens rather than single digits of commercial sites. Now our context has collapsed to the handful of social media sites that dominate public discourse.

At some point, everyone started doing their own promotion, sales, PR, and distribution. We’re all expected to be our own vertically integrated mini-enterprises, The sense of localism has gone, and everything is on the world stage.

Shared Infrastructure A group of artists took over a disused shopping centre near us, and really enjoyed having the shared space which allowed them all to sell their own goods while maintaining common areas and a shared identity. But when the ‘meanwhile use’ arrangement ended, there was no shared digital infrastructure there for the artists to survive it, and they are all scattered into the wind again.

EMF Camp sells out quickly. How do you cope with that popularity? “When it comes to setting our ticket capacity we're trying to balance three things: keeping the event community driven, making sure the event doesn't stagnate and not burning out our volunteers. This latter puts a pretty hard limit on how big we can go (as does keeping the community vibe).”

How can people get involved? “Drop us a line at volunteer@emfcamp.org (or come to the volunteering tent during the event). We also do semi-regular shoutouts on Mastodon and Bluesky if there are specific roles that we need filling. Many thanks to Sam for the interview! The 2026 camp is fully booked, but their CfP (Call for Participation) is open. They're looking for talks, workshops, installations and performances. You can hear from EMF Camp at @emf

It occurs to me that if you can read this, you *are* already reading this on Mastodon. Maybe explaining the fediverse here was redundant! Fun fact: most people I talk to in the 'real world' look blank when I mention the fediverse, so I've falled into explaining it as often as I mention it. Let's see if that can change.

@gert i think thats roughly what we are going for! to me unions are more a tool for collective bargaining tho - this doesnt have to sit within workplace politics. but perhaps splitting hairs :)

More about how you can support us here: https://gfsc.community/support-us/ cc @commonknowledge @autonomic @andypiper @quinnmx and prob more if i could find your mastodon @s lol

Practical Examples: PlaceCal What if we helped every organisation in a given community individually to publish events however they want? That's PlaceCal! It's specifically a community information aggregator: You publish your event and then we will aggregate it into our listings automatically.

Why PlaceCal? A local librarian has told me she is expected to log in and upload every event the library does to 5 competing events management systems, at least 2 of which are operated by the library. They all have different fields and requirements and this takes up hours of people’s time. By contrast, PlaceCal populates the Manchester Libraries site using five Outlook calendars linked to staff profiles.

PlaceCal is not an app and not a platform, which means people can use the sites and systems they already have, and PlaceCal will draw the data they publish from those. It's a very different process to the default “shut up and use our app” approach that product-based initiatives use. We’ve been opening up PlaceCal recently to anyone who wants to give it a go at our monthly dropins.

Practical Examples: Mastodon Mastodon is microblogging software that looks a lot like X, Bluesky or Threads. The key difference though is it’s de-centralised: everyone is free to start their own server’for just themselves or their community, but all servers can ‘speak’ to each other. This means that no one person or corporation owns the network, and we genuinely get data sovereignty and escape the cycle of enshittification!

More on Mastodon The good side of this is that it leads to a tighter knit community. Because of the way federation works, you will see more content ‘closer to home’, i.e. on servers you and people on your server are connected to, and less from random strangers. No algorithm, ads or sponsors, and connecting feels intentional.

Mastodon is decentralised, but to me it currently feels culturally homogenous: The things that make it interesting – the open protocol, the decentralisation, the independence and self hosting, the diy culture – naturally mean it mostly appeals to specific sub-community of developers. Strongly-espoused tech views abound. The project founder compared even discussing AI to killing puppies yesterday, It may be too intense for some.

The Future What would it take to meaningfully onboard other communities onto it? It would mean doing it with a bunch of groups at the same time who all commit to giving it a go and trying to bring their audiences along with them. People want less social media, not more, so until it can replace another social media site, it's not looking like a great option.

Despite my complaints about Mastodon, it’s the only social media I regularly use and so I’m invested in trying to make it better in a way I never could on a corporate site.

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed -- William Gibson What next? This look at our business plan for community technology will continue next week. You can find a fuller form of it on our blog at https://gfsc.community/our-vision-for-the-community-in-community-technology/

Drop-in peer support sessions. We'll turns to say what we are working on and see if we can give support or encouragement. Good for accountability / check in sessions as well as troubleshooting. Feel free to join our discord if you'd like to attend or to know more: discord.gfsc.studio

The corporate web killed it Online shopping and digital stock control has now made it fairly trivial to buy anything that might exist. As a result, this distribution layer feels like it’s eroded a lot in terms of our cultural sense of identity — a bit secondary to the production of zines, music and books.

Rebuild this shared layer Until we are able to start designing, building and commissioning software that crosses organisational lines and lets us collaborate, we are fighting a losing battle against the vast economy of scale that corporate tech operates at. This week's blog looks at this situation, the ways to build lasting infrastructure, and the ways GFSC's work is funded. You can read the full piece at https://gfsc.community/our-social-business-model-how-gfsc-plans-to-fund-community-infrastructure/