Starting Points and Assumptions

Stakeholders

Members — the primary stakeholder, in whatever role they take — resident, maker, or steward — and that includes future members — we design so they'll have a voice and control too, even though they can't speak for themselves yet — and the people who help us and the people we help, whether or not they're members themselves. The infrastructure exists to serve them, not the other way around. So does the cause the union exists for, which shapes what counts as success just as much as any individual member's request does.

Nested collectives — not everything that looks like "outside" actually is; it's more a matter of degree, a spectrum of independence. Affinity groups, and campaigns sit closest in: made up of members, functioning as organisations within the organisation, with their own needs but no independence from it. Dependent organisations, a step further out, rely on parts of what we run without being members themselves.

Allied movements — further out again, allies beyond the domain entirely: the FOSS community whose software this stack depends on, the energy and environmental communities (Extinction Rebellion and others), the healthcare community, and broader political movements. Different cause, same logic — solidarity extends past what's directly ours. Many of these ties exist because members carry them: someone who's a union member is often active in one of these other movements too.

The wider public — further out still, people with no operational relationship to the union at all: outside observers who read the website or encounter the work without ever joining, funders and donors subsidising it whether or not they use any of it, academics studying what we do as a case worth learning from, and advisors who guide decisions without carrying them out.

Starting point

These stakeholders are also why the stack has to be self-organised, with real independence for the grassroots. Each of these groups — affinity groups, campaigns, dependent and allied organisations — needs its own identity, manages its own resources, and pursues goals that can genuinely differ from the union's own. Forcing them into one shape, one account, one set of decisions would be optimising for convenience over fit — exactly the trade-off democratic tech is meant to avoid.

Furthermore, our starting point is that technology can help us. This is both a starting point and an assumption, but a crucial one: we want to use technology to facilitate life. Without that belief, dealing with democratic technology and a public stack at all would make no sense. Our opponents are using technology too, and have been adapting to it far faster than social and environmental movements have — ever widening the gap in organising capacity. Closing that gap, even partially, is worth the labour this asks of us.

Assumptions

The major assumption underneath a self-organising public stack is that the values are actually lived up to: that self-organisation will happen, that mutual aid gets practiced, that people take action themselves rather than waiting to be told. There's good reason to expect that in a grassroots union — if it weren't already true, the union would have failed. The further assumption is that this carries over to technology just as it does everywhere else.

Furthermore, we assume the movement is not in decay but growing — capacity needs to be built, and that only makes sense if there's a future to build it for. We're optimistic: we assume people will commit a bit of their time and will welcome the chance to learn and make things, given the opportunity. We also assume they're currently blocked from doing so, and that technology can play a part in unblocking that potential and empowering them to do great things.

Opportunities

Documenting concrete needs grounds the work in reality and makes it easier to prioritise. A few kinds worth naming, and the services that fix them:

The need to get work done

• Shared workspace and tooling
• Basic organisational infrastructure
• Automatising other work

The need to communicate

• Finding information quickly
• Reaching each other and our audiences on our own terms

The need to remember and understand

• Casework and organising grounded in knowledge and data
• Documenting the organisation