Resources for collectives

This post is a small collection of resouces for people working in collectives who are (like us) trying to muddle their way through the work of self-organisation.

This is an image of a rat king sourced from Wikimedia Commons: Edelseider, derivative work Lämpel [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Organisational Structures

How to make decisions, divide labour, rotate roles and minimise hierarchies. Ideas for alternative organisational structures and how to define them.

Technology

As a collective, we are generally pretty unsatisfied with the way social media and proprietary software companies treat their users. The issues with multinational software corporations are widely covered elsewhere, so there's no need to go into that deeply here, suffice to say that we believe individuals should be able to own and control their data and that massive private companies shouldn't control the internet. Trying to set up your own tech infrastructure for a collective (especially self-hosting a raft of applications for collaboration) is no small feat, and it's nothing short of daunting if you aren't a tech person. This is a list of tools we already use, have tested or would like to use, and links to other lists and resources that will help with tech infrastructure.

If your organisation is involved in activism or civil disobediance, there are some organisations out there that are set up to help:

Care and Communication

It's important to us not to mimic the same patterns of overwork that we see everywhere in a productivity-obsessed capitalist world. This means a variety of different things ranging from cooking meals for each other to checking in when someone needs help to pushing deadlines forward to protect us from burnout. We certainly haven't got this 100% figured this out, but we're trying our best.

If you have suggestions for additions to this list, please contact us at mail [@] aaasoftwa.re or write to us on twitter @aaa_software_