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Socio-economic Considerations

Sustainability​

Digitalisation must respect the boundaries of people and planet, and be financed sustainably — considering costs and benefits for society as a whole, not just the initiative's direct stakeholders, and representing the interests of future generations too. A few frameworks offer useful ways to approach this:

  • Kate Raworth's doughnut economy — maps the ecological footprint, origin of raw materials, working conditions, and circularity of an initiative, while ensuring the right knowledge and skills are available to all stakeholders. Both the floor (basic needs) and the ceiling (planetary boundaries) matter.
  • Regenerative economics — asks not just how to minimise harm, but how an initiative can actively restore and increase the flourishing of what it depends on, turning negative externalities into positive ones.

Externalities that commercial platforms have no incentive to price in — environmental footprint, deskilling, dependency — have to be accounted for here instead. Every layer of the stack carries an environmental cost: the processes that shape it, the infrastructure it runs on, and the service itself as it gets used.

Social​

Externalities aren't only ecological — they're social too. The stack itself, the larger organisation, and society all depend on the same thing to keep functioning: the social reproduction of knowledge. Skills and understanding have to be passed on continuously, or they disappear with whoever built something. One of the risks of any technology initiative is that it concentrates skills in a small group instead, creating dependency — this stack is designed to spread knowledge, lower barriers, and make it possible for more people to participate, which is as much a governance commitment as a socio-economic one.

There is also a labour dimension, and it deserves honesty: the public stack is more cumbersome than SaaS, tools are less polished, people have to learn together, maintenance needs doing. That's a real cost. But the labour produces positive externalities rather than negative ones — we don't learn how to push up a vendor's bottom line, we learn how to make the movement independent. Not committing that labour has its own cost, too: deskilling. Specialisation might give focus, but it also risks losing the capacity to do — and to think — in those ways at all.

The software we run is FOSS, built by communities that include us as the intended audience. We're not commercial, and no one expects payment. But giving back — through bug reports, documentation, translations, or donations — is part of being a good participant in the ecosystem we depend on. The people running it are also a resource in their own right: by engaging with the broader FOSS and tech communities, they can become an intersectional bridge — between the labour movement, the housing movement, and the FOSS movements that build the tools they both depend on. Those bridges allow different movements to meet and strengthen each other.

Financial​

The public stack is itself a socio-economic choice. Paying for infrastructure rather than per-seat subscriptions keeps money away from extractive SaaS vendors and closer to values-aligned providers. Per-seat pricing is something a union in particular can't afford: with large numbers of volunteers who only need occasional access, it's exclusionary by design — every additional person who wants to help costs money, so the incentive runs the wrong way. The technology forces you to optimise for efficiency and closing things down, while a union needs the opposite: opening things up and duplicating capacity, so more people can get involved, not fewer.

More fundamentally, the public stack definancialises the digital environment: managing it yourself, as a non-profit, means it's no longer optimised to extract a return — money spent on it goes toward keeping something running, not toward growing shareholder value. Few digital environments are currently structured this way, since the public sector has remained largely absent from this space — and even when you pay little, or nothing at all, you're often still running on a deeply financialised surveillance capitalism, where the cost just isn't on the invoice, it's extracted from your data and attention instead.

What that means in practice​

Being aware of externalities — where possible, they get named and kept visible, not left as a vague gesture toward sustainability:

  • Environmental footprint — visible across all layers: the processes that build it, the infrastructure it runs on, and the software and services running on top.
  • Labour — hours spent on setup, maintenance, and learning together, kept visible rather than left invisible.
  • Education — how much knowledge actually gets passed on, and to how many people, is worth noticing too: pairing sessions, onboarding completed, documentation written.
  • Data — what's collected, how long it's kept, and who can access it should be just as visible as the rest, not left as a vague privacy promise.

Definancialised operating cost — tied to infrastructure use, not to members. It keeps money closer to values-aligned providers rather than extractive platforms.

Regenerating FOSS — giving back through bug reports, documentation, translations, or donations, and engaging with the broader FOSS and tech communities we depend on.