Organizer technology needs: Action and Organizing Tools

What does your role look like? What kind of tools are you already using?

All our union conversations over signal. zoom for meetings. google docs for notetaking.

A lot of organizing is project management. Have you tried any productivity tools?

• gitlab
• powerbase
• nextcloud
• freescout for ticketing

mobile friendly? there is a mobile app for kanban boards using nextcloud. and of course signal groups.

actionnetwork - mobilizing tool, blasty stuff. email, events, chapter based. donations, fundraising, petitions.

actionbuilder - labor and community organizing CRM. saas model.

empower - relational organizing, helping friends talk to friends and family. stuff for canvassing, distributed canvassing. phonebanking, text banking, helping organizers follow up. paid relational organizing, where a funder can hire organizers.

p2p texting or text banking: there are different tools that allow you to do one at a time mass texting. In the US it is illegal to buy a big list and then automatically blast them all, but you can have humans one at a time click a button and then respond to any replies.

what are people using these days to organize and plan direct actions?

many things are just organized over gdocs. :(

fluidity - in practice, people are using all the tools, mixing and matching, using what seems to fit best at the time.

decision making - it has been difficult to make decisions outside meetings. we tried loomio, it has a nice selection of poll and decision making mechanisms. it has been a challenge because it is its own thing and doesn't integrate with other things.

stv - "steve" a single purpose voting tool.

crabgrass - still hosted but not actively developmed social organizing platform, with groups and networks and secure wikis and decision making and discussions and files.

does any have a doogle that that is actually good? maybe whentomeet or crabfit? not free software.

what is a good way to map influence relationships among people? be able to look up a person and see who might influence them, or see who influences a lot of people.

email delivery is a huge challenge. fundamentally, we are sending things that look a lot like spam, activist tofu. the big providers are always doing things to prevent delivery.

summary: people organize with a fluid approach, in complex distributed constellations, using different tools in different situations, changing as new tools are available or needs change. A hope for the future is better interoperability and data portability to reflect this reality.