We have been talking with Knowle West Media Centre for quite a while about doing some things together, so it was great to be invited to demo some projects at their "What if...?" event last week, which was oriented around the role of art in community technology. "Community Tech" is a term that has come about recently in response to "Big tech", the fact that services and devices do not seem to be built to serve the people or communities that use them - which leads to problems of trust, expense and just basic usability in a lot of cases. This is natural in the sense we are not the customers of these businesses, but the product - so it represents a big opportunity and urgent need to find different ways to make things.
A lot of our projects fit into this category, partly coming from the open source nature of our work - but more fundamentally by involving people at all stages of a design process, allowing them to shape and own the project more than would be possible in a profit based model. This avoids the situation, common in the current dominant model - where you have pre-existing solutions you are trying to find problems for to solve.
We demoed Smogoff, the Multispecies sward app, Organised Atoms - and had a lot of woven robots wandering around the event. One of the themes that came up a lot was the difference between the challenges faced in urban and rural situations, the nature of deprivation in inner city Bristol is very different to sparsely populated areas away from the coast in Cornwall, and the solutions in one place will not match those in another.