Geeks for Social Change

...but are afraid to tell you because we can't afford to piss you off

When facilitating community projects, one key question is ‘how do we make this sustainable?’. The answer, supposedly, is to look to funding bodies for financial assistance, by applying for funding bids. This talk explores the realities of relying on funding like this to carry out projects, where things fall through the gaps, and the impact this has on the work that we’re all ostensibly here to carry out.

This episode of the Geeks for Social Change podcast was recorded as part of an NHS Start With People event on March 30th 2023. As this was originally delivered as a talk with slides, there are audio descriptions of each slide as they come up.

In the early days of Facebook, the Events feature was the bedrock of a lot of community organising. It was free, all your friends were on it, and it worked well. Events you were organising showed up right in the stream of pokes, icanhazcheezburger and failblog memes, and commenting on your friends' "it's complicated" relationship updates.

Fast forward a decade and it barely works. Facebook's insistence on video content, the effective closure of their APIs for community groups, and increasingly exploitative business model means it's harder than ever to get small community group's events in front of people's eyeballs without paying Facebook a hefty sum for the privilege. As a result we are seeing a mass exodus from the platform and feel like the impact of this for community organising is not fully felt yet.