You can't change anything from the outside in. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.⁴⁸⁰

Working from within social movements resists the contained clarity and problem-solving of the traditional service model of design: where volunteers help in their spare time, agencies respond to briefs and complete the occasional (pro bono) project. This doesn't align with the actual nature of movement work, which is relational, distributed, non-linear and open-ended. It requires us to recognise how entangled we are with each other, with the groups we work with and the messy political realities of our time. Rather than delivering isolated outcomes in response to client briefs, we need to recognise that we exist within a wider social movement ecology and begin from there⁴⁸².

I'm writing this essay as one interdependent part of Common Knowledge, a worker cooperative of six members that supports social movements through design, software development, facilitation and training. We do this specific work because it’s an expression of each of our professional experience and political commitments. We met each other through our involvement in social movements in London: spending time in movement spaces, working for tech cooperatives, and organising with our peers. Our collective reflects each of us as individuals, our values, needs and desires, yet it is also something much more than that. Each person who joins brings something different to the organisation, changing its direction and the relations between all of us.

Social Movement Ecologies

Our cooperative is an ecology that exists within a wider social movement ecology. Just like the ecologies of the natural world, social movements⁴⁸³ are composed of many different types of organisations and networks⁴⁸¹. Within this, there are groups that take many different forms, strategies and tactics. Taking an ecological approach means tending to the relations⁴⁸⁴ between these actors, rather than trying to solve problems for each organisation individually. It means accepting, as poet Diane di Prima puts it, that no one way works⁴⁸⁵. The aim is to have a myriad of organisations that can complement each other and coordinate strategically, with strength and resilience emerging through diversity and mutualism. In nature, unchecked growth and monocultures rapidly become unstable. The same applies to social movements that are organised around ideological purity, unwillingness to coordinate across groups, and competition over increasingly scarce resources.

In an ecology, we can have interdependence without unity, working in collaboration with each other without being completely aligned in terms of our motivations, strategies or goals. Within our cooperative, we navigate this through a decision-making framework called sociocracy. The core principle of sociocracy is consent over consensus: you don’t need to fully agree on everything, you just need to be able to find a shared range of tolerance⁴⁸⁶ between everyone’s standpoints and desires.

Once established, sociocracy can be a highly efficient way of making decisions because it optimises for efficiency and experimentation over perfection. However, it only works if there is a high level of trust and commitment between everyone involved. No decision-making and governance process on its own can overcome a lack of strategic alignment, poor communication or inequitable power dynamics. Everyone needs to participate fully in the process, communicate with openness and honesty, and genuinely commit to giving up some of their own power and control. It can be uncomfortable to disagree with each other or to feel like you're compromising, but navigating these tensions together is part of the work. Interdependence sometimes requires us to forgo some individual agency and control, but in exchange we build more collective agency and power. Ultimately, this commitment to building collective power is key if we are going to have any chance of winning real political change.

Boundary Objects

We can apply the same logic when working with organisations outside of our own. We don’t need total alignment in order to collaborate — we can find our common ground and build from there. One of the ways we do this in our practice is through creating boundary objects⁴⁸⁷: design outcomes like diagrams, visualisations, prototypes, and pattern libraries, that different groups can gather around and interpret from their own perspective. Just as in sociocracy, where we negotiate to find the shared range of tolerance between multiple viewpoints, boundary objects help us find overlaps and translate between intersecting social worlds. Rather than seeking the lowest common denominator compromise, a good boundary object moves between the abstract and the concrete, holding enough specificity to be useful, and enough openness to accommodate different readings. They ground collaborations in shared knowledge, a starting point for finding understanding across diverse viewpoints without forcing consensus. Creating boundary objects is a natural part of the design process, a means of synthesising many sources of information and visualising complex ideas or feelings. The power of boundary objects is in their plasticity and incompleteness. They are open-ended: a tool for asking questions⁴⁸⁸, not a solution in themselves.

Mapping

Maps are one example of a boundary object that helps us visualise complexity and reveal patterns. Like any boundary object, we shouldn’t see them as a complete picture — what is included or excluded in a map is always a political decision⁴⁸⁹. However, they can be useful snapshots, simplifying reality in order to facilitate productive conversations. The process of map-making⁴⁹⁰ is a social and collaborative exercise, helping us integrate different perspectives and develop a shared understanding of a problem. Our cooperative is deeply interested in creating maps because they ground organising in place. Place is crucial to organising because at the end of the day, organising is all about relationships. To build relationships you need to meet people where they are, in the workplace or on the streets, and have conversations with them.

Maps are such a central theme of our work that in 2023 we built Mapped, a strategic mapping tool for organisers. Mapped enables organisers to easily create interactive maps⁴⁹¹, visualising their membership data alongside other demographic, political, spatial and environmental data sources. This gives organisers a more holistic view of their campaigns and facilitates strategic action at movement scale. These maps have been used for many different purposes: from hyperlocal door-knocking for anti-fascist campaigns⁴⁹² to emergent directories of movement spaces⁴⁹³ to understanding patterns of civic infrastructure⁴⁹⁴ provisioning and community agency on a national level.

The idea for Mapped emerged not in response to one organisation’s brief, but as an aggregate of our own observations of common movement needs and consistent requests from many different organisations that we’ve worked with over the years. Rather than continue to respond to each of these challenges in isolation, we decided to build Mapped as movement infrastructure, so that we could address them together and benefit from economies of scale. Mapped is an example of taking a movement ecological approach to design, building shared infrastructure that strengthens relationships between different actors, supports a plurality of organising strategies, and builds power across the movement.

After building an initial prototype to test the concept, we assembled a cohort of movement organisations organising for climate action, health justice and migrants rights to help us shape the next iteration. We ran workshops with the cohort⁴⁹⁵ where they shared their strategies for the upcoming election and the problems with their existing digital infrastructure. We looked for overlaps between their strategies and challenges, and generated new ideas⁴⁹⁶ for digital interventions that could facilitate their work, always looking for the common ground that would benefit the broadest range of groups. From there, we designed and built the next iteration of the tool, tested it to gather feedback and refine the brief for the next iteration. We’ve repeated the same cycle again and again with different cohorts of organisations over the past few years, gradually evolving Mapped from an experimental prototype to a platform used by around eighty organisations.

Building and Maintaining Movement Infrastructure

We are continually iterating Mapped in response to emergent movement needs and desires. One of the biggest challenges we face is deciding which of these features to prioritise. We constantly have to decide between adding specific features that would perfectly meet a narrow organising use-case, or only adding more generic features that would benefit a broad range of use-cases. We tend to be overly influenced by whichever group we're actively working with at the time, changing the interface to suit their needs at the detriment of other groups. It’s a difficult challenge — on one hand, we want to build opinionated tools specifically for grassroots political organising, hardcoding our politics on the level of the interface⁴⁹⁷ and responding to the specific contexts of the people we work with. On the other, we need to design interfaces that are powerful yet simple and easy to use, without overwhelming people with too many options. Sometimes the needs of one organisation will directly oppose that of another organisation, so it is impossible to find a compromise that everyone will be happy with. There isn’t one easy solution here. We can only attempt to make the best decisions with the information we have at the time, prioritising according to our strategies and our assessment of what will be most effective, and building in time for reflection and learning as we go.

Another big challenge is how to sustain the project financially. Just as the cooperative form of our organisation influences the work we produce, the funding model we use for Mapped is just as much a design project as the interface — our choices here will inevitably influence the end product. Common ownership and control is at the centre of the cooperative model, concentrating economic power in the hands of workers rather than capital. Within platform capitalism, increasingly no one owns the software we use — we just rent it for higher and higher prices. Creating cooperatively owned and controlled infrastructure ensures that it can’t be sold off, closed down or made more expensive, a common fate with Silicon Valley tech products.

In order to work outside of the usual economic logic of client commissions or venture capital, we pool funds for Mapped from a number of different sources: philanthropic grant funding, our own surplus⁴⁹⁸, paid commissions and small donations. Although this is working so far, it takes continuous fundraising effort. Developing digital tools can be incredibly slow and expensive — they are complex and always evolving, requiring continuous time and effort to maintain and ensure stability, particularly as more and more organisations use the same infrastructure. This maintenance and support work is often invisible and not as exciting as designing and building new things, so it can often get overlooked or deprioritised. On top of all of this, we also face the more structural problem that most people expect software to be available for free, thanks to platform capitalism making it appear financially cheap in exchange for the harvesting of data and attention.

Building movement infrastructure is an attempt to work through these tensions. The power of taking an infrastructural approach is that it retains money, time, knowledge and resources within the movement, with organisations of all scales contributing to and benefiting from the same technology. Grassroots organisations with similar needs can come together to collectively advocate for and fund a certain feature. Bigger and better resourced organisations are able to contribute funds towards building features, knowing that these will also benefit smaller organisations. What we learn from one organisation’s campaign can be integrated back into the tool, sharing data and strategies between allied organisations through shared infrastructure. As well as taking the project outside of the usual capitalist economic logic, working in this way also allows us to move beyond the usual cycles of urgency that define political campaigns. Thinking in terms of infrastructure requires a shift of mindset: whereas digital technology is commonly thought of in terms of innovation–moving fast and breaking things⁴⁹⁹–infrastructure is about longevity and maintenance. It is an expression of collective care and responsibility⁵⁰⁰: a shared, long-term commitment to each other. This enables us to do deep, slow, intentional work⁵⁰¹ that anticipates crises before they arrive and compounds over time.

Pattern Libraries

The same infrastructural logic extends beyond digital tools: movement infrastructure can be any tools, spaces, social protocols, materials and resources that enable us to organise, sustain, and reproduce our collective life. As well as ensuring longevity, building movement infrastructure allows us to expand and scale the impact of our work, a necessary step if we are to build mass movements capable of responding to the intertwined crises of cannibal capitalism⁵⁰¹. Unlike the capitalist understanding of scale, which is about linear expansion and unsustainable growth, scale in this context is about identifying shared needs and patterns that can be adapted to new contexts. Context is so important to political organising: what works for one campaign or group won’t make sense for another, so we can’t simply transfer strategies and tactics as templates. We can, however, share these openly, reflect on how they worked, and look for ways to abstract the outputs we create (whether that’s the organising strategies, processes, interfaces or systems) into patterns.

A pattern library is another example of a boundary object: plastic enough to adapt to new contexts yet robust enough to maintain coherence across different groups. New groups can take these patterns and adapt them to their own contexts, according to their own knowledge and experiences. One example of this is the Transform your Work library⁵⁰² that we developed in collaboration with the Autonomy Institute. This project builds upon the rich history of workers’ inquiries, a methodology that combines research with organising to build knowledge about workplaces from the perspective of the workers themselves. We distilled previous workers’ inquiry case studies into general approaches and methods that other workers could apply to their own context. Another example is the Game Worker Solidarity Project, a living archive of collective organising in the games industry built in collaboration with organisers from the IWGB Game Workers Union. Actions are linked together by location, company and type of action, such as strikes, boycotts, collective bargaining and occupations, so that organisers can understand what kinds of strategies and tactics might be successful in their own workplaces. Projects like these can be useful in sustaining collective memory (mitigating against the inevitable entropy of social movements) and forming connections across campaign, industry and country boundaries. As Dean Spade puts it in Mutual Aid, this approach means that “governance and innovation remain local, but knowledge, support and solidarity are networked and shared.”⁵⁰⁴

Whether it’s in how we collaborate without hierarchy within an organisation, make decisions collectively with other groups or establish common infrastructures to sustain our lives, the approach is the same⁵⁰⁵. It begins with a willingness to recognise yourself as part of the ecology and act from this starting point, tending to the relations within this ecology as much as the individual actors. It is about accepting that there is no one person or group in control, no fixed outcomes we’re working towards or top-down view that we can take. Instead, we need to give up the illusion of certainty or control, distribute power as widely as possible, and prioritise collective (movement) needs over that of an individual (organisation). Only by working together can we build long-lasting shared infrastructures that outlast specific political events and work across a variety of contexts. Part of our method is to consider the economic models that determine the shape of our work and to turn specific organising experiences into patterns that can be used and adapted across different contexts. In doing so, our working model shifts from reactive to accumulative – compounding our positive strategies and strengthening the movement as a whole.