Building a Community Platform

Activists and educator communities need to talk to each other. To do this, they require robust, secure, and accessible platforms to facilitate meaningful discussion, decision-making, and collaboration. Activists and educators have different needs to those provided by mainstream social media or chat apps, instead  privacy, decentralisation, and resilience against surveillance or censorship. Over the last few months, the Community Platform Team has carried out research to help figure out what kind of technology would be appropriate for our new online community. 

We’ve talked to community members, run focus groups, carried out surveys, and looked at examples of digital tools used by other activist communities. We also revisited some key patterns and lessons learned through other initiatives. This research has surfaced set of required features and functionalities for a robust community platform that can serve our broad and diverse community. 

Broadly speaking, we need features for things such as:

• Communication: Email integration, notifications, and search functionality
• User Management: Profiles,  permissions, and trust level systems
• Safety & Moderation: Legal compliance, moderation tools, and privacy controls
• Recognition Systems: Engagement tracking, digital badges, and impact reporting
• Accessibility: Screen reader compatibility, multi-language support, and inclusive design
• Content Management: Bookmarking, templates, and easy sharing capabilities

Community Platform Recommendation 

Once we identified the features our new online community would need, we created a longlist of 29 candidate platforms that would meet these requirements. From this list we used criteria obtained from user stories and research to develop a set of constraints that would help us create a shortlist. 

It’s worth noting that in addition to these constraints based on user features, we found certain technical constraints. For example, given the worsening state of human rights in the USA, it is becoming less tenable for an organisation such as AIUK to host data in this jurisdiction. Therefore, we felt it necessary to only consider solutions that do not rely predominantly on US-owned technical infrastructures. As a human rights NGO, while we want to encourage and enable communication between activists and educators, privacy and security is paramount. 

Such considerations helped us create three filters that would help us decide on a shortlist of platforms: 

• Critical Requirements, which covers everything from privacy and security through to sustainability; 
• Integration Requirements, covering the ability for the community platform to integrate with other platforms controlled by AIUK;
• Future Requirements, which covers exit strategies and threat models. 

Eventually, we narrowed our list to a shortlist of four platforms. While any of these four platforms would have been a good choice, only Discourse ticked every box to provide the comprehensive community building tools necessary for effective human rights organising. The platform's advanced moderation tools position it as the optimal choice for AIUK's community platform requirements.

Discourse has a sophisticated trust system that directly addresses our community’s need for graduated access to sensitive information. It also allows community members to interact with it via email, ensuring everyone feels included. 

Discourse is a robust platform that can be configured to look and function in many different  ways. It will help the AIUK community with tools to encourage meaningful dialogue and collaboration, so long as we configure it correctly (we’re working on it!). We believe this technology promises long-term benefits in engagement and decentralised activism.

Wider Ecosystem

We know that activists and educators use other platforms, and Discourse is not going to replace other very useful platforms that activists and educators use to organise. However, as a place to convene, we believe it is a useful hub to support one another with better tech choices and recommendations.

For example, we know that SIgnal is a popular and secure messaging tool. We hope that activists choose this over WhatsApp in the future and hope to help people understand why. There is a wider context here around resisting ‘Big Tech’ platforms in activism around human rights.

Amnesty Tech, for instance, notes that “What we read, who we know, where we go, even what we think. Our every move is constantly tracked by a handful of powerful companies, including Meta and Google.” Amnesty’s report Surveillance Giants outlines the threat that Big Tech poses to human rights. As a result, we believe that we should carefully consider the values behind tools being used for the purposes of communication and community engagement. 

Some ideas we had while thinking about how to best support our activists and educators:

• Different activities have different risk levels, and AIUK Activists and Educators need to select communication and coordination tools based on those risk levels. If that means that you need to create a Signal group, we want to support that.
• Activists are better protected by choosing open-source applications that can be hosted on servers under Amnesty’s control, ideally within jurisdictions offering strong data-protection laws.
• The movement is better aligned by providing activists with asynchronous communication for in-depth discussion, recommending synchronous chat services for urgent matters, and suggesting collaborative documentation solutions for knowledge management. 
• Specialisation helps solve distinct problems rather than providing a ‘one-stop shop’ for all purposes. Not everything can be solved by a group chat, for example.
• Growth is easier to attain and manage by selecting software known to scale—from small local collectives to regional or global coalitions.

We know that platforms themselves do not generate community interaction, and we’re working on processes and workflows to help bring together and engage our community. We welcome your thoughts and ideas! Here’s some ways to get involved:

• Come to our next OPEN community call
• Send us a note