These are the tools for various functions that I know of and would recommend to collectives looking for ways to organize communications and information.
Further below are recommendations specifically for Open source tools as well if that is preferred.
Fundraising
Open Collective: “Open Collective is a legal and financial toolbox for grassroots groups. It’s a fundraising + legal status + money management platform for your community.” Great for budget transparency!
Email newsletter
- Buttondown.email: uncomplicated email newsletters
Find time to meet with a group
- Rallly.co (3 L’s!): Find the best time to meet with your group! (Doodle alternative, hopefully more user friendly/less buggy)
- When2Meet: Share a group’s general availability - good precursor to a Rallly/Doodle poll for specific dates.
Communication Platforms for Groups
- Hylo – community forum with events, projects (a good alternative to Mighty Networks!)
Many online groups struggle with engagement. On Hylo, groups transform into vibrant, self-organized, collaborative networks.
Hylo makes it easy for group members to step into leadership, enabling the group to grow and deepen its impact.
- Courselore: Communication Platform for Education- free open source education-oriented forum
- Loomio: communal decision making tool
- Vito($): Flexible, private, online hubs for groups to share posts and updates, invite people, upload videos, host livestreams and run events.
Organizing tasks & information
- Tweek: weekly planner and todo list app for individuals or groups.
- Trello: track projects and tasks in stages through Trello boards.
- BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
- Notion($): Paid for teams, but great for organizing lots of content, sharing information publically.
- CryptPad.org: Secure collaborative documents
- Open Letter: for starting open letters!
Sharing Resources
My Turn: a platform for asset tracking, rental, and product subscription services. Our unique platform helps you easily tap into the emerging Collaborative and Circular Economies.
Event hosting
- Humanitix: Event ticketing that dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity.
- Lu.ma ($): host events and sell tickets.
- Eventbrite: event management and ticketing platform.
Analog methods
- Zines
- Flyers in a coffee shop, grocery store, or other community bulletin board (I still read these devotedly).
- Post signs outside!
Challenges for meeting efficiency
we don’t currently have a good working system in group conversations (both on and offline) to signal—when we want to speak but before we have begun speaking—whether what we wish to say continues the current thread of conversation or starts a new thread, so that a facilitator or the group might prioritize a thought that continues the thread (as long as that’s helpful) before jumping over to a new thread.
Is there a way this is handled with taking stack?
Open source tools
open source tools for collectives
Loomio is decision-making software and web service designed to assist groups with collaborative, consensus-focused decision-making processes. It is a free software web application, where users can initiate discussions and put up proposals
Signal → organize clubs, teams, affinity groups (no larger community feature like WhatsApp yet, sadly)
- Disappearing messages for activist safety
- Safety number check for journalist & activist safety
BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
Cal.com → meeting booking. free, open source, self hostable.
GoToSocial - self-hosted federated social media
Omnivore: “Save articles, newsletters, and documents and read them later — focused and distraction free. Add notes and highlights. Organize your reading list the way you want and sync it across all your devices.”
Matrix
Known: A collaborative social publishing engine
Known allows any number of users to post to a shared site with blog posts, status updates, photographs, and more.
Flowershow.app: Create websites from Markdown
Dream software tools
- open source version of lu.ma
- Meeting agenda compiler: how to store shared docs with easy access (dashboard/portal) that is not G00gle-owned.
Dashboard / portal for communities
- All in one open source self-hostable community platform, to replace FB:
- message board
- Group video chat (via Jitsi)
- calendar
- profiles
- tickets?
- email list and newsletters
- DM
🔗 Footnotes