We applied for another round of funding, here is the application text!
Abstract
Karrot is a community-led, open-source project supported by a team of regular contributors, the Karrot-team. It’s currently used by around 30 groups who between them organise nearly 5000 activities each month. Beyond helping communities organise the logistics of resource-sharing on a local level, Karrot also supports communities’ self-organisation, governance and community building. It also supports communities on developing their own independent Karrot instances.
With support from the NGI Zero Commons Fund, we will make independently hosted Karrot instances more adaptable, giving communities the agency to better reflect their needs and identity (Task 1). We will also design and develop public sign-ups for Activities, enabling groups using Karrot to engage more easily with people outside their membership (i.e., the so-called broader community) without relying on external platforms (e.g., Facebook) (Task 2). Finally, drawing on feedback from the communities already using Karrot, we will rework the platform’s interface to improve its usability (Task 3).
Experience
All four of us contributing to this application are regular Karrot contributors. We come from different backgrounds, forming an interdisciplinary group committed to sustaining and shaping Karrot’s development. We work together to make the platform more accessible and efficient in supporting local communities and grassroots initiatives engaged with commoning practices.
Vasilis is an independent HCI. His research centres around the design of digital technologies for collaborative economies. He is the coordinator of a rural community makerspace Tzoumakers in a nutshell – Τζουμέικερς located 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 where he expanded his skills beyond software development to the many other aspects of open source community tech.
Nathalie holds an academic background in biochemical engineering, dedicated her energy to grassroots movements and social change working with Karrot and the Sociocracy for All Network. Her topics are sociocracy, food systems, commons, open-source software development and personal growth. She is a sociocracy facilitator certified by Sociocracy for All.
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.
Amount : € 20000
Use
The requested budget will be used to compensate the work time of Karrot’s contributors. Our rate is €40 per hour. The budget will cover the time we dedicate to research, design, development, user-testing (when applicable), and documentation.
Previous funding:
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2019: approximately €8,000 from the City of Gothenburg
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2021: €20,000 from the NLnet NGI Zero Discovery fund
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2023: €26 000 from NLnet Entrust in 2023
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other: we also receive occasional one-time donations from user groups, and one community contributes regularly with a monthly donation of around €30
(full budget and milestones list attached)
- Enhance self-hosting of instances 5500 EUR
Building upon our previous work that made self-hosting easier, we want to continue the process of making it more adaptable and configurable. We have identified a concrete need of creating public pages, like the home page, to make a self-hosted instance have its own identity, detached from the software identity (i.e, Karrot). Besides our main instance on karrot.world we have one active self-hosted instance (Foodsharing Luxembourg) and another upcoming one (Foodsharing Sweden). There are some other less official self-hosted instances out there, as experiments for different use cases that we would like to support with such features.
Milestones 5500 EUR
- Design and research ways to build custom pages 1500 EUR
- Implementation of custom pages 3000 EUR
- Documentation for custom pages 1000 EUR
- Continue “breaking the silo” 5500 EUR
Karrot supports public activities already, which can be discovered by a URL or on the group’s page (example Robin Foods). However, there is no possibility for people outside of a group or with no account on Karrot to sign-up for these activities. That is what this feature is about. We have identified from different communities and use cases that this would be very useful for them to interact with the wider public in their local community. This reduces their dependency on setting up events on big social media like Facebook.
Milestones 5500 EUR
- Design mechanism for public sign-ups 1500 EUR
- Implementation of public sign-ups 3000 EUR
- Documentation for public sign-ups 1000 EUR
- Increase usability and interface refinements 9000 EUR
We want to reduce the complexity in user experience and improve overall usability for all groups facing the complexity of self-governance. Also, Karrot still has some legacy interface and navigation design based on food saving type of groups. As new types of groups start using and experiment with Karrot, we started to identify different needs that do not necessarily require a new set of features, but that could be satisfied by making some tweaks and improvements to existing ones.
Milestones 9000 EUR
- Improved message navigation (interface focus) 2500 EUR
- Improved design of sidebar and menus (interface focus) 2500 EUR
- Tweaks to make Activities-feature more useful for events (usability) 1500 EUR
- Add calendar view to Activities (usability) 1500 EUR
- Usability and interface refinements documentation 1000 EUR
Comparison
Currently, many communities and initiatives use platforms like Wix or WordPress to create their public websites, yet these remain separate from the tools they rely on for logistics, organising, and governance. By expanding support for self-hosting Karrot and enabling custom public pages, communities will be able to bring everything into one place, their landing page and the tools needed to run their community. This integration can reduce the number of different tools they depend on and minimise the effort required to coordinate and manage multiple systems.
At the same time, we recognise that many groups rely on mainstream off-the-shelf digital tools to reach people beyond their core membership. By developing features that allow communities to use Karrot itself instead of other mainstream tools to connect with the wider public—without the latter requiring to join Karrot- we aim to support a transition away from closed-source platforms and similar to the above minimise the tools that a community needs to use simultaneously. Now it is often the case that communities use tools such as meetup.com to reach out to the wider community. With the proposed task such a need will be reduced.
Challenges
There are no especially notable technical challenges beyond what is normally encountered during development. It will be important to ensure the implementation of custom pages is sufficiently easy to use to be familiar to users, but we already have integrated TipTap editor into Karrot, so we can re-use that easily. For public activity signups, we’ll need to ensure we can protect against spam, especially AI-powered spam.
Ecosystem
The groups using Karrot and the Karrot-team are the core of Karrot’s ecosystem. This project specifically takes an iterative route. We reached out to groups previously, we are designing a series of features based on this, then we’ll get the feedback on the designs from the groups and finally implement them whilst getting further feedback during development and provide adequate instructions and dialogue on how they can be used by existing and new communities. Our Community Design process, which is an adaption of the 1-week Design Sprint at Google, reflects this approach. The tasks in this application are a continuation of previous work, being developed in close cooperation with specific groups.
Today there are 6 regular contributors who participate in the Karrot-team and 30 groups using the platform. Groups’ size varies. Smaller groups have 5-10 members while some big ones have more than 200. In the periphery of Karrot there are other projects pursuing similar and complementary aims, place-based communities and software-based ones, and institutions (universities, research collectives, other community tech projects) that work on digital commons and digital sovereignty. In particular we established close connections to the HCI department of University of Siegen, Germany and the Centre for Sociodigital Futures of the University of Bristol, UK.