We applied for this one: https://weavingliberation.org/digital-justice-fund/ and are waiting to hear back.
Submitted: Sustaining and Further Developing Karrot.world
1. Background of your group:These questions help us assess your eligibility for the fund
1. What is your name? *
@Vasilis_Ntouros for the Karrot team
2. What is the title of your application? (50 words) *
Sustaining and Further Developing Karrot.world
3. What email address should we use to contact you? *
(…)
4. When and how did your group start? (300 words) *
In 2015, a group of activists from across Europe, some of them involved in the food saving movement in Germany, came together for the first time in Italy, with the aim to develop a digital tool that could support community-led sharing of all kinds of resources. Between 2015 and 2017, 14 -15 in-person gatherings attended by 15-20 individuals, took place in different places across Europe, bringing people together to imagine, discuss, design and develop such a digital tool. Living and cooking together, often by turning food waste into food surplus, became an important part of these gatherings.
Over time, the aspiration to develop an all-encompassing tool met the realities of limited resources, and some of the people involved began to focus more specifically on the context of international food saving and food sharing communities. Out of that, the Karrot software was developed with its first instance [1, 2].
Today, Karrot continues to host several groups engaged in food saving and food sharing practices and through the years it has also been used by a number of other self-organised communities whose activities are not necessarily centred on food saving, but which share similar values of collective organising, mutual aid, and community-led resource sharing.
5a. What is your average annual budget? (averaged over the last 2-3 years) *
26.000 + 6800 + 1080
around 11500 per year
5b. If you would like to add any addition context around your budget, please do so here. (50 words)
Karrot receives monthly donations from some groups and occasional funding**.** Like many Community Tech projects we operate under financial precarity. Nonetheless, Karrot has proven resilient, continuing to operate, evolve, and support communities even during periods with no available funds.
6. How many paid staff do you have? *
4
7. What is the mission and vision of the group? (300 words) *
The vision is to contribute to a world where self-organised communities have access to open, resilient, tailorable, democratically and collectively governed digital tools and becoming less dependent on commercial ‘black-box’ platforms.
The mission is
- maintaining and further developing an open-source digital tool to support communities, initiatives and grassroots projects in their organising and daily activities so it is functional and efficient.
- providing an alternative to mainstream social media and organising platforms for community organising that is transparent, participatory, and tailorable
- developing ways for bridging the ‘gap’ between users and designers/developers while experimenting with and developing ways that experts and non-experts collaboration can be regular and efficient
- contributing to the Community Tech ecosystem more broadly, with regards to processes employed, organisational models, designs and code.
The Karrot team is responsible for stewarding the development of Karrot, coordinating, conducting and delegating tasks, creating community engagement and promoting participation in the project. It keeps the project alive, intentional and aligned with its visions and values.
8. How are the people directly affected by the issues you work on represented in the group’s leadership or decision‑making and implementation of activities? (300 words) *
We, the Karrot team, currently hold responsibility for maintaining the software, coordinating development, submitting funding applications, onboarding new contributors and making decisions about technical priorities. However, these decisions are not made in a top-down way as we have developed several channels through which Karrot groups can shape the direction of the tool.
These include online Community Cafes, which are informal gatherings to connect different Karrot groups with each other and with the development team. We also organise Karrot Days, an online event where contributors and Karrot groups come together through presentations/talks and workshops and discussions about the future of the project.
In addition, our public forum [1] enhances transparency and participation. All Karrot team meeting minutes are posted weekly, users can open discussion threads, and we share publicly the design processes we have run, funding applications and their outcomes. Over the years, we developed a Community Design Process where users are invited to participate directly in shaping new features and improvements.
Karrot itself also hosts a ‘Karrot Team and Feedback’ group, which provides a direct and very accessible way for users to communicate with the Karrot team.
Moreover, in the last two years we have been supporting communities to develop their own independent Karrot instances. This allows groups to better adapt the tool to their own needs, gain sovereignty over their data, and develop their own plugins. So far, two communities have moved from the main Karrot platform to independent, self-hosted, instances. Finally, we are developing an organisational model that we call Community-Supported Software, drawing inspiration from Community-Supported Agriculture. This model inspired by the Commons, aims to further support collaboration and co-governance between regular Karrot contributors and Karrot groups.
[1] https://community.karrot.world/
2. Your work:These questions help us understand how you work on the issue of digital justice organising, how your group operates and what you plan to do with the grant
9. Please describe the work you are applying to be funded for. (500 words) *
We are applying to be funded for our work to sustain and further develop Karrot as a community-led digital infrastructure. With this application we intend to
1) Connect with our community and lift up voices
We’ve been holding online community events in the past, like our Karrot cafes or an all-weekend event: ‘Karrot days’ [1] and want to build up on this work to deepen our connection with the Karrot groups and Karrot instances. The funding will be used to organise a series of online workshops on “queering and decolonising Karrot”. Collectively we want to create space to deepen our solidarity and understand better the systems we operate in. We want to reflect on our group practices, but also identify change areas for the software itself.
2) Improve onboarding and documentation
As for now the onboarding and continuous learning happens mostly contained within one Karrot group. We’d love to complement the self-study and journey of each group by offering online sessions on technical (e.g. how to set up a Karrot group, what can I do as an editor, how to self-host) and governance topics (how to deal with conflicts, what is consent-based decision making).
Additionally, we’ll further improve our documentation (https://docs.karrot.world/). We’ve been adding documentation for new features developed, but are missing a few core articles on basic functionality and first steps. Whereas the software is fully translatable and available in different languages, the documentation is available in English only. We’ll work on making translations available.
3) Move Karrot beyond food saving
While we are moving our project beyond the scope of food saving, we encounter how deeply embedded this idea is within the project. Over the past years we changed a lot of the language and every new feature is designed with a broader perspective in mind. In order to make our software welcoming to different communities we will move all food saving related branding into a theme and offer custom choices for other commons oriented and self-organised communities (neighbourhood organising, community gardens, housing projects, makerspaces). We are seeking to do this work in collaboration with communities that are looking for a digital tool to explore their needs and shape Karrot in ways that makes it useful for their context.
4) Meet in-person
Last, the funding will enable us to plan another in-person gathering, potentially in Greece. As a project we work a lot in the abstract, trying to balance the different group’s needs while designing improvements. Our workplace is remote. Team meetings are not only grounding for the members, but rooted in local community activities. The recent gatherings took place in Bristol/ Bath (UK, November 2024), through a connection with the University Bristol, and Göteborg (Sweden, March 2026), connecting with the local Karrot group Solikyl Göteborg. Solikyl now moved to its own instance and is the seed of founding a ‘foodsharing Sweden‘ platform based on the Karrot software [2]. Both cities are also the home towns of two of our members.
Links
[1] Karrot Days 2022 - July 16th & 17th!
10. What is the geographic scope of the work? *
All our team members are based in Europe (UK, Greece, Luxembourg, Sweden, Germany) and we anticipate to work with groups within Europe in the scope of this work.
11. How does your work relate to the issue of digital justice? (300 words) *
The Karrot project supports liberatory forms of digital justice to power autonomy and community control. By offering an open-source software that communities can self-host (run it on their own server), it provides an alternative to commercial and big tech platforms. Groups gain control over their digital infrastructure or enter a relational way collaborating with the Karrot team, when they are using Karrot’s main instance karrot.world.
Karrot promotes community organising in an equitable way, sharing and building collective power within each group. On the one hand, Karrot is a communication tool, where group members can interact. On the other hand, it is an organisational tool for their activities and governance. Governance features include writing and storing group agreements, setting custom roles and having a guided way how to apply sanctions involving a mediator. Karrot is unique for not having admin roles, using instead a trust-based system. Group members can give each other ‘trust’ which gives them editing rights once a certain threshold is reached. What guides the project is the idea that we want self-organising and power sharing principles to manifest in the software and design itself.
With the proposed work areas, we want Karrot to be easier to use, more accessible and more inclusive. That includes both working with existing communities using Karrot and new groups. Whereas our project promotes shared power and works towards relating as equals, we can do more to frame our work as anti-oppressive and let our design be guided by that. What it needs is to acknowledge the deep ways in which systems of oppression play into our communities and take the journey to expand beyond what we know well (be it food saving or a western perspective) to move towards emancipation and liberation.
12. Why do you want to do this work? What are your aims with this work? (300 words) *
The aim of Karrot is to build and provide towards a collectively owned digital infrastructure. Having support and infrastructure available will help communities and groups to be more efficient, work together peacefully and reach their aims.
Working towards a future that is build on trust, collaboration and care, we are aiming to build change already in a prefigurative way. With the software we support groups that work in the field of community organising, solidary and commoning (sharing resources, tools, food, etc.). Still, we have found that often communities lack the resources and knowledge on how to self-organise without reproducing stereotypes and ‘power over’ dynamics. That is were the importance of governance comes in, to build a group on participatory and democratic basis where each voice is heard.
Furthermore, Karrot seeks to find ways to see the digital as helpful and useful, something groups can shape and use, and that is speaking their language as opposed to using tools that are not designed for community-use, and groups often bend to make them useful. We are not advocating to stop using the tools that proved useful, but consider alternatives when mainstream tools reach their limit of what they support.
The German foodsharing movement is an example where a designated platform was built (foodsharing.de) and became core to the movement’s organising and growth. We see the potential of having a digital representation for a community without having to build it themselves from scratch. Karrot already is more versatile and adaptable than a platform build only for one community, and bridging our work from food saving to other related areas is what we long aspire.
13. Who will do the work? (200 words) *
Vasilis is a Human-Computer Interaction researcher. His research centres around the design of digital technologies for collaborative economies. He is the coordinator of a rural community makerspace in NW Greece.
Nick is a full stack software developer focusing on grassroots community projects, exploring the potential for technology to improve co-ordination and governance. He was previously involved in development for foodsharing.de and trustroots.org.
Nathalie holds an academic background in engineering and dedicated her energy to grassroots movements and social change. She is a sociocracy facilitator and trainer with the aim to support governance of self-organised groups.
Bruno is a co-founder of a foodsharing initiative based in Gothenburg, Sweden and local community organiser. He is now starting the Foodsharing Sweden project in order to spread this concept to other locations.
Jay is a Data Scientist with a full-time job and a Karrot developer in her free time, passionate about hiking and her life in a small van.
Philip is a Human-Computer Interaction, action-oriented researcher on sustainable food practices with a focus on grassroots movements and technology.
14. How does your group practice care? (200 words) *
We are a small team and value personal connections and regular check-ins on each other. This is all the more present when we meet in person, as that time is filled with conversations, discussions, joy and often singing.
Our meetings follow a sociocratic structure, thus we have a check-in and check-out round framing the agenda points. This allows the participants to show up fully, allow transitioning from where everyone came from and reveal where a person is at emotionally. Recently we’ve been experimenting with grounding exercises, too.
In our meetings we reflect on how we work together within a culture of productivity. We all balance several aspects of life with Karrot work being one of it. We try to allow a slowness within the project, so it can unfold within capacity even though we also want to get things done, be accountable to our community and need to work within deadlines. Team members receive money monthly, when funds are available, following a “basic income” rationale, even when working less.
There is also care in how we approach the project itself, wanting to build a product that is usable in a good quality and can be well maintained in the future.
3. Your budget
Please attach a full budget for the planned activities. *
Amount: 14.130 EUR
- Staff costs: 5.280 EUR - Team member contribution payments
- Project Activities : 2.000 EUR - Workshop activities and community events, stipends for participants, speakers/ practicioners
- Care & Wellbeing: 1.000 EUR - Wellbeing support, community care practices and childcare support for travels
- Accessibility Costs: 2.000 EUR - Onboarding and documentation work
- Digital & Technical Costs: 500 EUR - Hosting and Maintenance
- Communications (Outreach): 500 EUR - Outreach
- Travel & Accommodation: 1.720 EUR (=5*(283+60) rounded up) - International travel costs
- Overheads: 1.130 EUR - 8% payment for fiscal host
[working pad for internal reference: Karrot]