Our pod experimented with implementing a platform to avoid having information scattered across various places, but even more importantly, to foster a genuine connection among the members of the community.
Collectivibe
What architectures might support collective organization?
We would love to reimagine what communities and collectives mean and how they meaningfully come together. We dream of having an online platform where all those wishing to reimagine peace can come together - to have a place where we can work through our different perspectives and tensions and come together to explore potential solutions.
Our hope was that by having a virtual space to gather, we would keep the energy and momentum flowing between our in person meetings. Our aim was to use the platform as a place for exchange, discussion, learning and solidarity.
Through our work at a national level, we’d experienced how digital platforms could play a pivotal role in deepening connection and purpose across actors that would otherwise typically only engage virtually, and we want to try to bring this to a translocal space - to create a virtual space for our own Community. By launching a pilot platform, we hope to explore its potential to allow us to gather, to keep the energy and momentum flowing between the in person meetings and to promote an online place for exchange, discussion, learning and solidarity.
Our partnership with Collectivibe was key to this experiment. They had prior experience of building virtual communities, and thus we could work together to translate this experience into a co-created platform that could serve a translocal community, and could meet our Community’s specific needs.
Taking an experimental approach to a digital platform was challenging - necessarily, the platform needed a significant investment of resource up front to create it, and sufficient resource to sustain it and explore with the community who it could support us in meeting our goals. Our internal procedures for experiments and for budget allocation were misaligned with the specific needs to launch this platform quickly.
We learnt that establishing a digital platform that serves our community takes time and more extensive interaction between our Pod, the Community and Collectivibe to continue to co-design the platform together. We believe that it would have been easier to launch this work closer to our actual face to face gathering, taking advantage of the momentum generated by meeting face to face.
As we close the first phase of this experiment, we remain committed to the potential digital spaces to deepen our connection during those periods where we work virtually, but need to keep on experimenting how we can do this. We need more time to test the platform and keep exploring and reimagining how digital tools can foster and deepen translocal solidarity.
Collectivibe
