Serving Local Groups: Karrot
Several local grassroots volunteer and community building groups I'm connected to in town have been looking for how to communicate and coordinate activities, and encourage more of the same horizontally between members.
Currently, we've settled on the following technological answers, with heavy caveats:
- Email announce list
- generally one-way (or problematic reply-all discussion), managing a member list and subscriptions tends towards brand-marketing tools and framing for our efforts.
- Social Media posts
- mostly one-way, tends towards brand-marketing tools for sharing authority, not all members are present on corporate platforms, assumed to be public-visible for discovery and reach.
- Text group (Signal, Whatsapp, or RCS)
- Most familiar and common-denominator format now, but just a trainwreck of management and notification when applied beyond small group coordination.
As a sign of platform hesitation, Facebook Groups has been rejected for too much dependence on a surveillance capital answer, although it meets many of the additional wishes for coordination:
- General messaging and chat with threaded contextual conversations.
- Event calendar & activity scheduling and associated chat.
- Easy for members to join and leave and become informed on the activities of the group, without fully public visibility.
- Granular roles for sharing administration efforts.
A small group has been building an alternative over the last several years, Karrot.world, born out of a suitably specific need for volunteer coordination in food-sharing and food-distribution efforts mostly in northern Europe.
Karrot is a free and open-source tool for grassroots initiatives and groups of people that want to coordinate face-to-face activities on a local, autonomous and voluntary basis.
It is designed in ways to enable community-building and support a more transparent, democratic and participatory governance of your group.
In addition to demonstrating a useful combination of tools for managing, announcing, and discussing projects and places for local volunteer groups, the Karrot project drives in two philosophical directions I appreciate.
First, as a non-corporate open-source platform with an open process for developing and maintaining the software, direction, and user community.
And second, as an exploration of non-authoritarian possibilities for online community management: rather than “Owners” or “Administrators” for groups, members have tools for developing mutual trust in making edits and moderating discussion, and membership role decisions that looks both lightweight and human-centering.
Hopefully we'll experiment with it in practice locally soon.