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Month Notes: June


What we got up to:

✊ United Voices of the World

We continued our ongoing work with United Voices of the World (UVW) to improve their casework and membership systems.

Our goal is to improve the effectiveness of the union without bureaucratising it. We're aware that technical inventions won't solve any problems if they don't fit with the organisational culture of the union and the people within it.

We're trying to address this risk by having regular contact with UVW staff and caseworkers, ensuring that they're part of the entire process, from research to implementation.

We're currently collecting their feedback as they use this prototype, so that we can update and improve this tool in a few weeks time.

We're planning to do a public presentation on this project at the end of this month. If this sounds interesting to you, let us know by emailing hello@commonknowledge.coop.

🏡 London Renters Union

We also continued our work with London Renters Union, launching an updated version for the Can't Pay Won't Pay site.

Renters could enter the details of their current situation, in order to get an overview of their legal rights and what they could do to address these problems.

We added a heatmap to show that other renters in London supported the campaign and were in similar situations. This was overlaid with personal stories from different union members.

In order to reflect levels of local support whilst protecting the privacy of campaign participants from targeted retaliation by landlords, we randomly adjusted each signup location to anonymise them.

The goal of the site is to reassure renters that they weren't alone during this time of crisis, and to give them the resources and support to collectively address their problems.

🌹 Labour Together

The Labour Together General Election review was published towards the end of June. We contributed to the report by researching:

  • Labour's ground game: the organisation of local activities, such as canvassing, leafleting, and persuasive conversations; and
  • The digital technologies that attempted to assist these activities.

We've published an in-depth reflection on this review and our involvement with it.

We've also published the two subsidiary reports that we contributed to the main review:

We were glad to have participated in this research and would be happy to discuss our findings in more detail – if you'd like to you can book a meeting with us.

⏩ Forward Momentum

Our congratulations go to Forward Momentum for their decisive victory in Momentum's National Coordinating Group (NGC) elections!

We helped the campaign in a few ways: we set up built their website alongside their in-house designer, configured their mass emailing system, ran their electronic primaries using data analysis and low-code tools and provided strategic counsel for their distributed organising and general campaign strategy.

We're in the process of writing a more in-depth post on the strategy aspect of this at the moment. More on this soon!

✨ Quarterly planning day

This week, we also set our objectives for the next quarter. We reflected on how the last quarter went, and set ourselves three new objectives:

  1. Regularly communicate our work, processes and learnings with a wider audience.
  2. Focus on efficiency and reusability in our design and development work, to lay the foundations for future product development.
  3. Achieve financial viability by carefully choosing work that fits this goal.

We like setting objectives each quarter because they help to clarify and focus our intentions. Some of our most enjoyable objectives have been ones that challenge us to adapt our basic working practices.

Not only do we get better and more coherent as a team, but we also prove to ourselves one of the core aspects of adrienne marie brown's Emergent Strategy:

What we pay attention to grows.

👀 What we've been reading

Thinking of a crisis as something that ends or that can be fixed is itself part of the problem. Framing it even as a problem might be part of the problem. The word "crisis" has largely come to be synonymous with chaos, but its etymological roots trace back to something far more pointed: choice. Typically the choice was implicitly a decisive or significant one, a turning point of sorts. Still, a choice.

Just this week, end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal included its own photo blurring feature, one that couldn’t come soon enough as its user base spiked thanks to the massive adoption since the protests started.

If you've read this far, you are a Common Knowledge super-fan!

We welcome any feedback you might have – just reply to this email.

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