GFSC State of Play¶
I've written a bit about this now but the very tl;dr history is that from 2016-2020, GFSC was just Kim and was a reading group and then a web studio that responded to briefs in Manchester to make some tech that eventually became her job. From 2020-2024 this ended up having 11 employees at peak. From Dec 2024 all this funding ended.
Kim split the project conciously into two parts: GFSC Studio, which is now her consultancy work (temporarily on back burner), and GFSC Community, which is everything else: the discord, social projects, movement building stuff, etc. This came out of a general realisation that tech activism is on a very very low ebb in the UK right now and we simply don't have the social infrastructure needed to roll out most of the things that came out of this "active period".
On a pragmatic level, GFSC Community is a not-for-profit CIC with a directorship that is working on getting direct donations to pay for its day-to-day expenses, and is working on funding bids for project work. GFSC Studio is now just a limited company Kim uses to do their consultancy with.
How it's being run now¶
Right now GFSC is a benevolant dictatorship that Kim is very keen to shift from being that but this is hard as they've been running it for a very long time and that's a tough thing to disentangle!
Discord
PlaceCal / Trans DImensions
Tech Partners
How I'd like it to run¶
Wildlife Trusts as inspiration
- Central hub that exists to service the member groups and collectively and provide shared infrastructure and support
- Regional and interest groups are encouraged to form around our shared values and mission
- Groups can be GFSC-branded and are welcome to use our IP (i.e. PlaceCal / Trans Dim) - or can be affiliate groups wanting tech support
- Groups can offer their infra to the network
- We can create more IP together
What we need to make to make this happen¶
- Write a manifesto of what its all about and why you'd be involved
- Standard code of conduct
- Establish overall community values
- Create overall theory of change
- Brand / IP pack
Core principles WIP¶
- Volunteering is always a route to paid employment
- Liberation not charity
- Bottom-up
Questions!!¶
What was the reading group about?¶
Ethics and technology - readings here :)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IrLTfjajJE3T9KWJYziNdO31kHS2vRo1?usp=drive_link
What were the Manchester briefs about?¶
CityVerve was a smart city accelerator project that got us the initial funding for PlaceCal. (circa 50k)
Lankelly Chase are a charitable foundation who funded me as an activist to do tech work on placecal in Manchester specifically (and no longer exist, sob) - this was the bulk of it, 250k over 3 years
https://gfsc.studio/our-work/theme/hulmeandmanchester/
Is this the same as the funding?¶
Yes - plus a national focussed fund from the national lottery (250k) that mostly did its work in manchester
basically - most of the work we got was due to my reputation as an activist locally - then didnt scale very well as there wasnt enough work to sustain a team bigger than me long term
How did you get the paid people for the project?¶
funding bids and client work
Why was the the project split into two parts?¶
so i think its the typical problem of trying to scale a creative practice - what i was doing as an activist wasnt a good thing to make a business around!
the work came in through my community links - but this work was almost entirely on my shoulders to do to get work for everyone else
so now ive made a clean split - and i think the community for me is the most important bit, im kinda indifferent to tech itself, its just a useful thing to build communtiy around and try and make some means of production :)
Any notable etcs. In the GFSC Community part?¶
not sure what this is?
Any stats about tech activism you might know about?¶
no, but i am noting that theres a lot less of it than there used to be. we used to have indymedia.org which had a big national network of meetups to support it. in germany they have things like chaos computer club - so i think loads of untapped potential here
‘Active period’?¶
all the above work came to its natural conclusion nov 2024 and we had to make all the staff redundant - the intervening phase has been me working out what next as a volunteer :)
Any tldrs about GFSC projects anywhere? If not that’s fine I’ll look into their respective pages¶
What’s preventing you from transitioning to the Wildlife Trust system currently?¶
people! i just need a bunch of people willing to help out. the bus factor of gfsc is 1 and i would like to increase that!
More things about Wildlife Trust anywhere? (Structure-wise) / What led you to find out about this structure?¶
we did some work for them - it didnt go hugely well lol. but if you read about charity models online it comes up as one of the rare examples of a federation. i got on with them tho and could deffo ask a few people for help down the road.