Hey all,

Nice work on the questions Kim!

On the gatherings question this is terribly written but...
Tipping Point runs the Tech Hub, which is aiming to provide nationally available tech support for grassroots groups working towards climate justice. This involves working with regional organisers, who host gatherings in their regions to run "Tech Clinics" where anyone can drop in with simple tech questions and we can offer guidance and practical solutions. This can be everything from talking through someone how to use their smart phone to getting into the details of campaigning tools and setting groups up with tools we can offer them.

On general tech hub stats:

Here is the slideshow of our reporting this year (written in March). In one year:
  • 96 new groups on our network plan with free access to Action Network tools.
  • Supported 144,435 people to take digital and offline distributed action through events, petitions, letters...
  • 139 new admins became digital organisers of groups on our network with training.
  • Groups using Action Network actively grew their membership by 103,147 people (315%)
  • Our Canva Pro account and Large Zoom Rooms are used by 40-50 groups & organisers regularly
  • We provided deeper long term support to 10 groups with more tech.
  • We supported groups with setup and running of simple Wordpress websites.
  • We’ve trained 158 people who represent at least 43 different groups to think through their digital security. (Common Knowledge led on this one)
  • We introduced new tools:
    • Zetkin: An organising and membership management tool based around phone calling as a strategy for organising.
    • Distributed Petition Tool: We developed a platform to make Action Network more accessible to non-tech savvy organisers and provide an entry-level interface which helps campaigners create petitions and keep control of their supporter lists’ data.
    • Baserow: An open source data management solution like Airtable. We use this when a group needs a niche issue solved. We use our self-hosted version of Baserow to help groups manage and analyse large volumes of data. .
    • n8n: An open source automation tool we use to support groups in automating elements of their work for eg. creating media monitoring tools to help Fossil Free London track their growing impact and reach.
    • Climate Justice Calendar/PlaceCal: We’ve been working with Geeks for Social Change to create a “Climate Justice Calendar” in the North East. This will bring together a wide range of listings of events in the area when launched.  We aim to launch this nationally after piloting in the North East.

Solidarity,

Joe

--
Joe Irving (he/they)

Tech @ Tipping Point UK
Bringing powerful digital tools to grassroots groups, in the fight for climate justice. I work 3.5 days a week, so may not always be able to get back promptly. Feel free to book a meeting with me.

Support Tipping Point UK
We organise with grassroots groups in the UK for climate, migrant and social justice. Can you help fund this work? Please give £5 per month, or whatever you can afford, to help us build the movement.


On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 12:31, Kim Foale <kim@gfsc.studio> wrote:
Thanks for feedback. Yeah I think we have been limited to date because all the examples we're been using have come from our own work and we've not had time to compare notes on each others' successes where we were using a CTP-like approach.

I think it makes sense to narrate CTPs as the formalisation of whats going on on the communtiy level anyway between "techy people" and everyone else -- but right now its unformalised, theres no professional network for it, vocab, methodology, potential to share results, etc.

I think we can be quite honest about this with the lottery but that they still will want to see some results in terms of impact - if anyone has a project to share thats been developed along CTP-y lines please do send it over. I think the key thing that makes it CTP-y to me is that any tech work done on a thing was done as a participant member of a collective, not as a client/studio relationship. It's about high recpiprocity due to actually being part of the group that commissions the thing, you have skin in the game.

Maybe we should even run an evaluation within this little group - it might be good for us all to reflect on what we see in the proposal?

And yes we crrently have 50k down for tech partners and 10k down for community partners altho that assumes they dont ask us to reduce the budget which they prob will.

Kim

On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 12:25, Jan Baykara <jan@commonknowledge.coop> wrote:
Hey Kim, hope you had a nice time off. Good signal that they're interested.

For evidence of community tech partnerships actually working, it's not all "place based communities" in the cosy traditional sense of a parish or something, but maybe we can point to existing projects with communities like:
  • Joe's/TP's work providing tech to his network — the tech hub and all its offerings, maybe some stats?
  • GFSC's Manchester/other locations case study of PlaceCal for communities
  • CK's work building Mapped for a community of campaigns
  • ... and more like this?

All of which combines to make the argument that umbrella + infrastructure orgs with a digital staff are essentially community tech partnerships. That might be a stretch or it might not be, I'm not sure, but if it feels right then we could reach out to other umbrella orgs for different causes and ask them for case studies and metrics too.

Jan

—
Jan Baykara (he / him)
Research & Software Engineering at Common Knowledge

My working hours are 9-5pm Monday to Thursday
Common Knowledge is a not-for-profit workers cooperative building digital tools for grassroots activists. Website / Twitter

On October 14, 2024 at 12:15 PM, Joe Irving (joe@tippingpointuk.org) wrote:
Hi Kim,

This is great they are showing interest.

I am just back from 3 months off, so getting my head around the application again. Great work on it. For the third question, about listed partners getting funding where did we land on that? From my understanding of the original idea is that partners would get split amounts of the funds to continue their network contribution to the overall project, did I get the right idea?

And for the impact one, I could pull out stats from our campaigning tools like Action Network that could be potentially useful for broad impact above case studies?

Solidarity,

Joe

--

Joe Irving (he/they)

Tech @ Tipping Point UK
Bringing powerful digital tools to grassroots groups, in the fight for climate justice. I work 3.5 days a week, so may not always be able to get back promptly. Feel free to book a meeting with me.


Support Tipping Point UK
We organise with grassroots groups in the UK for climate, migrant and social justice. Can you help fund this work? Please give £5 per month, or whatever you can afford, to help us build the movement.



On Mon, 14 Oct 2024 at 12:04, Kim Foale <kim@gfsc.studio> wrote:
just got back off my hols and great news - its not a no, but we prob have a little way to go towards yes!

the last one - impact - is what we have struggled with from day one - all ears if anyone has any ideas or success stories for their thing locally.

will update you all when theres more to update.

kim

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Nadine Salter <nadine.salter@tnlcommunityfund.org.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Sept 2024 at 14:28
Subject: The UK Fund - request for further information
To: kim@gfsc.studio <kim@gfsc.studio>



Hello Kim,

I hope you are well. I am one of the Portfolio Officers working on the UK Fund and working on assessing your application. There a few areas from your application that we would like some clarification/further information on:

- what are the gardens of sanctuary and what locations do you plan to expand these to in this project?
- the application states 'we will create a national network' and mentions a 'network of networks'. Is this in place already and you plan to grow within the project, or is this new?
- will the listed partners be receiving funding through this project?
- aside from the case studies, do you have any further evidence that the approach you have taken in the past has worked? This can include project evaluations or anything else to demonstrate the impact of the work. 

If easier I am happy to chat these through briefly next week, or you can answer by email - whichever is easier for you. 

Kind regards,
Nadine
 
Nadine Salter
Swyddog Portffolio – Portffolio’r DU | Portfolio Officer – UK Portfolio
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Dr Kim Foale (they/she)

Working hours: Mon-Wed 10-5pm.


 

If anything about this email is confusing or unclear please let me know. I am happy to provide information in different ways such as clearer language, over a phone call, with a voice note, or in plain text. Please don't feel the need to ever apologise for responding to my emails at your own pace.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.