Online groups

Wed, 22 Apr 2020

Groups that mainly organise online are new to Radar. Organising this way posses new challenges to many activists - and also to the Radar Group moderators.

Moderating

In case you don't know Radar so well: All events published on radar.squat.net are organised by autonomous groups. Each group controls their events and the information about them. Moderators accept the group after you created it. Online groups are the same, but choose the location 'online' as you would with an event.

New situations require new forms of organisation; and new groups and action forms are developing. This also makes accepting the groups different. If you're already connected by your networks to Radar, reach-out to us through those connections. That's not actually so different from offline groups. However, if you're not already connected, moderating your new group becomes a more difficult job. Existing precident sometimes don't apply in the same way. We're learning as we go along, trying to build networks for change: that's why Radar exists.

Corporate

Online organising is a bit different at the moment. There is a greater reliance on corporate services. Offline, groups have more experience, material and expertise of Doing It Themselves, of not relying on the whims and direction of corporations. Online, we have activist servers and services, but their availability, bandwidth, usability and capacity in this suddenly different environment is not always enough. In general, this highlights how important it is for groups to use and support alternative infrastructure all the time. If we aren't using these structures whenever we can, then we don't have them when it comes to the crunch. Corporations and surveillance capitalists aren't always going to help us organise. Even more so: They are already making arbitary decisions to shut down access for people whose actions they don't like.

Alternatives

Accepting the dependency on corporate controlled services makes moderating groups a bit of a challenge. More radical groups that fit 'Why Radar' closely are likely to get approved even if they make practical use of corporate communication solutions. But groups that are just falling back on WhatsApp, Telegram, Zoom, Skype, Twitter, Mixcloud, You Tube etc. etc. when they could be using alternatives are less likely to be accepted. Alternatives are for example Jitsi video conferencing, Matrix distributed encryped group chat, irc old skool text chat, Mastodon social media network, discourse discussion forums, xmpp chat, PeerTube distributed video hosting. You can also use archive.org's space for audio and video. [Several links in this list are to examples of the services, many are distributed and multiple groups offer them]. Your experience and feedback can also help develop these services further.

 

 -- See you on the streets/online [delete as appropriate]