Democratic Technology

The problem

Technology for associations, unions, and movements is chronically underfunded, and what does exist is largely built on designs meant for commercialisation. Building and running infrastructure competes for the same scarce time and budget as every other kind of organising work, and it rarely wins: a SaaS subscription is one line item, while a self-run alternative asks for skills and ongoing labour that are hard to justify against more visible priorities.

Where associations do invest, it's often in the wrong kind of tool. What's easiest to adopt — Slack, Google Workspace, Mailchimp, Facebook Groups — is built to centralise: one vendor, one platform, one point of control over data and access. An organisation whose whole purpose is distributing power ends up running its internal life on infrastructure built to concentrate it, instead of the federated, interoperable alternatives that actually match how it organises everything else.

Part of the problem is what these tools are optimised for. Commercial platforms are designed to maximise engagement, retention, and margin — efficiency on the vendor's terms. The alternative is designing for sufficiency, the freedom to choose what fits, and reducing rent. Vendors also have no incentive to price in externalities like deskilling that creates dependency, and environmental footprint. Those costs don't show up on an invoice, so they get ignored until they can't be.

Technology doesn't just serve an organisation's existing way of working — it shapes it, and constructs a citizen within it. A tool built for centralisation trains members into centralised habits: routing decisions through whoever administers the platform, treating information as something a system controls rather than something they share and act on together. Structure that was supposed to emerge from the people using it starts emerging from the software instead.

Values and people come first

Technology is not neutral — it's designed by people, and it carries their choices and interests whether that's acknowledged or not. That's why values and people, not the technology itself, drive the choices made here. The Foundation — starting points, rights and values, governance, socio-economic considerations — is what shapes those choices. A tool gets adopted because it fits what the organisation stands for, not the other way around.

The people who use, build, and maintain the stack matter just as much. The Citizen Perspective — resident, maker, steward — and the Processes that connect them — organising, designing, living, maintaining, archiving — are how those values get lived out day to day. Read those sections first to understand why something was chosen, not just what was chosen.

That's why this documentation is framed around the Public Stack methodology rather than a list of tools: who's affected, what values are at stake, and how decisions get made and maintained are part of the same design problem, not an afterthought. It's applied with a strong democratic, self-organising flavour — no vendor, no central IT department, no single administrator, just members organising the infrastructure the way they organise everything else.

Imagine a future

Imagine a future where technology is federated — where local associations operate in full autonomy, but stay in sync through shared protocols and standards rather than a shared vendor. Where data moves whenever people want it to, easily, but never without consent, and never to earn someone else money. Where forming a new alliance costs little more than deciding to, and politics regains the dynamism it's lost.

Imagine tools built for usability, accessibility, delight, and trust, not for engagement metrics — because the people who use them are the ones who get to decide what they optimise for. Where your attention is not mined but treated as the most precious resource, and nobody is excluded to make a quick buck. That looks more beautiful than commercial tech, and retains its own identity while doing so.

Imagine being more than a consumer: a creator and a steward too, informing the design of what you live in day to day, together with the people around you, rather than having it decided by some external party. An environment optimised to protect the planet and social equality, because the people building it are accountable to both.