Need for simple, usable, and reliable automation tools for communities and campaigns by Jan Baykara

hey guys um how's it going hey i recognize some of you um yeah so what can i say um we've uh maybe i'll intro myself in common knowledge real quick and then we'll talk about the kind of work that we've been doing and how and it end has very nicely fitted into our kind of entire workflow with our collaborators so um common knowledge is a worker cooperative we've been going for about two years um we're a collection of uh researchers engineers designers and political activists and organizers and uh we work with community groups um especially non-unfunded community groups or kind of uh charitably funded groups to um basically address what their you know whatever they're dealing with uh specifically around campaigns or with um dealing with like large groups of volunteers and things like that so um the work that characterizes um their kind of mission it is around kind of like big database operations syncing lots of different tools that are easily accessible to volunteers or part-time staff and um and kind of making the best of what they can to kind of basically bring people together and get stuff done so they're not big they're not normally big operations they don't normally have much funding or particularly long-term well-trained staff either and um and we do what we can to kind of make sure that they're doing the best that they can with the full gamma of digital technologies um and then the course of this work um since where we fit in is that we're startup engineers uh historically um or researchers who worked in agencies as well and um we noticed that all these all these folk had lots of kind of problems to solve and were doing the best they had but had very little really awareness of what they could be using to solve these problems a lot of these issues were always ended up with one technical guy who in their spare time fiddles around with a bunch of scripts uh maybe we've seen horrible like really terrifying examples of like google apps scripts um with like lost passwords or uh zapier account that ends up with like half the organization's like budget or something like that and um and everything in between a lot of like kind of haps the wheeling as well lots of like manual stuff uh for you know that could take days of someone's time for things that could take a couple of minutes with you know with a well-designed little um pipeline or a workflow um so we stepped into that we've been looking at products but we've also been basically trying to help them wire up their organizational processes and we've learned a lot for it um so i'll quickly share my soon because it's boring to see my face um i'll just share my whole screen hopefully you can see uh see that um yeah so it's a bit of us and some of the people we worked at um if you want to have a look afterwards and um what we were doing recently was looking at specifically the issue of automations and pipelines and uh because through that we ended up finding nam we've looked at loads of different uh pipeline tools um very kind of high-tech uh you know kind of engineer-oriented ones like uh stack storm or whatever it's called uh you know zapier comes to mind uh but we ended up uh landing on nine for a couple of specific reasons that we put into a blog and um and the nn team are very kindly reposted to their blog um the things that really drew us where it's it doesn't cost much it's always competitive compared to savior but more importantly um you can build your own stuff on top of it fairly easily and it's still quite usable um crucially you can kind of host your own kind of version of it and that was a really important thing for us while um while we were dealing with quite a security conscious group um called uh united voices of the world um which is a labor union in london it deals with um it deals with uh well with workers who work in the kind of care or cleaning sector um they often work in like big newspapers and stuff like that or you know one case of royal parks and they were dealing with like a particularly um uh kind of security conscious project that required them to think about um where how their data was being piped around the internet so we suggested that they set up an nan instance this is the first time we were able to suggest anything like this uh because of course you can't run your own zapier you can't um easily kind of onboard people onto a lot of the other technical tools for this kind of job that you can self-host and um i can't show you the pipelines that they've run but basically we found that when we showed people a screenshot of like or a screen share of like a workflow and i kind of like worked them through it we could even like design stuff with them uh the idea of like kind of just having

stuff in a diagram kind of workflow kind of clicked in people's minds but like this is oh yeah this is like a thing that i can see how this works compared to what they previously had which was as i said some guy who uh every once in a while from four time zones away um might update uh a google sheet um or of a script that corresponds to it so that's been really helpful to us and um even though we've not had integrations up until recently for other tools that accesses like uh action network or nation builder these kind of crm tools the http request nodes and we've also built our own customer nodes have been really helpful um one thing we've noticed from sapir is um that you really have to have a certain kind of threshold of kind of you know relevance to kind of the wider worlds to kind of have your tools integrate with a tool like this whereas we've been able to take quite a niche relatively niche kind of problem area and um develop a few kind of develop a few best practices or a few kind of like common like nodes for those kind of for the tools that work in that ecosystem and we've begun to um get people together who are also enthusiastic about it so that they can set up these systems for their own so a couple of unions are trialing it at the moment a couple of political organizations in the uk are trialing it and we've been able to um in the process uh move away from some of the more like custom tech that we um would have always have to use and basically take some off the self stuff like a air table for example um and just use some like simple um simple end scripts um to kind of almost like uh to almost like mimic what we would otherwise be probably building as a silly heroku app or something with like uh some endpoints and that's been really exciting um uh in the process like it's kind of helped us think about the of the rest of the open source stack um so we we're kind of putting together a little wiki of like all these different options you can pick for different kinds of systems so things like help desk systems or forums or leaks and stuff and we're particularly looking at stuff that has like a good clean uh api interface that we could then uh articulate through nine and um being able to kind of say it the integrations part of that whole kind of you know stack is also part of the open source system you could do the same thing as you do with all these other things run out on your own uh you know vps have some governance around it some rules has been a real kind of like revolution for us um that's really cool um yeah i don't know i mean maybe i can stop i can talk more into particular details but um that's a tiny bit about uh common knowledge for co-op um we're really into open source um uh the fact that it's a kind of code-free uh free code um tool is awesome for us it means that we have a bit of confidence in pointing uh the kind of progressive community um to this uh progressive activist community to this kind of tool because there is no fear that is going to disappear um or that all their hard work is going to suddenly uh not be possible to kind of extend so yeah i mean thank you to the team for building a great uh great platform and for being very accessible and very friendly