Finding out what’s going in your area should be one of the internet’s easiest wins. An open goal for the information superhighway. After all, if search engines can’t easily outstrip the parish newsletter and the community bulletin board, then why have we been carrying computers in our pockets for a decade?

In this interview we speak with Professor Stefan White from the Manchester School of Architecture, Dr Jay Stewart from Gendered Intelligence, Rakesh Prashara from Tipping Point, Dr Kim Foale from Geeks For Social Change about PlaceCal’s past successes and the challenges ahead for making non-commercial solutions like these sustainable in the long term.

Find out more about our work and sign up to our email list at https://gfsc.community

VOD version of this available on YouTube

...but are afraid to tell you because we can't afford to piss you off

When facilitating community projects, one key question is ‘how do we make this sustainable?’. The answer, supposedly, is to look to funding bodies for financial assistance, by applying for funding bids. This talk explores the realities of relying on funding like this to carry out projects, where things fall through the gaps, and the impact this has on the work that we’re all ostensibly here to carry out.

This episode of the Geeks for Social Change podcast was recorded as part of an NHS Start With People event on March 30th 2023. As this was originally delivered as a talk with slides, there are audio descriptions of each slide as they come up.

Transcript of this episode: https://gfsc.studio/blog/2023/everything-we-want-to-tell-you/

References

• David Graeber's book, 'Bullshit Jobs' on Penguin Books
• Blog post about participatory budgeting and the ladder of citizen participation
• Dean Spade's book, 'Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)' on Verso Books

Credits

• Music: Cooking, Sharing, Happy Seasons! by Megan Arnold
• Audio recording: NHS Citizen #StartWithPeople event
• Audio production: honor ash
• Transcription: Amy Ní Mhurchú

Find us elsewhere

• Geeks for Social Change website
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In the early days of Facebook, the Events feature was the bedrock of a lot of community organising. It was free, all your friends were on it, and it worked well. Events you were organising showed up right in the stream of pokes, icanhazcheezburger and failblog memes, and commenting on your friends' "it's complicated" relationship updates.

Fast forward a decade and it barely works. Facebook's insistence on video content, the effective closure of their APIs for community groups, and increasingly exploitative business model means it's harder than ever to get small community group's events in front of people's eyeballs without paying Facebook a hefty sum for the privilege. As a result we are seeing a mass exodus from the platform and feel like the impact of this for community organising is not fully felt yet.

In this podcast, Kim talks to two highly experienced event organisers: David Hayward, founder of Feral Vector festival, and Rachele Evaroa from The Old Abbey Taphouse in Hulme who was recently voted Manchester's most eccentric landlady. We discuss what the future could look like and our plans for our own PlaceCal platform.

Full information and transcript for this episode: https://gfsc.studio/podcast/2