Toolkitty is a coordination app for collectives, organisers and venues. You can organise events, share resources and spaces in a collaborative calendar.
Who is Toolkitty for?
Toolkitty's collaborative feature supports informal and formal groups to self-organise. Toolkitty has been trialled with a wide range of users in the arts sector including festivals, music venues and artists' studios, as well as a mental health charity.
Approaches to Toolkitty may depend on the users' needs. For example:
- A venue can use the app to minimise booking admin with regular promoters and collaborators able to autonomously add their own events.
- A network of housing coops can use the app to share resources and offer spaces to each other for their gatherings.
- An artist can use the resource section of the app to list locations of found objects which can then be collected by others for use in a collaborative artwork.
- A mental health charity can use the calendar to organise internal events, spaces and resources for their users.
What technology?
Toolkitty is built on a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network designed by p2panda. This means the network data is stored on the phones of all the members. This makes it very secure and cheap to operate as it requires no external server. P2P incentivises resource sharing and cooperation. This suggests an alternate online model to using centralised servers which own and store your data. The app is Local First. Reducing internet dependencies makes the app faster, more robust and usable anywhere in the world.
The functionality of the app has been inspired by models of non-hierarchical organising. Horizontal methods of organising in digital space are an effective way for groups to run a calendar and organise resources while minimising the workload of administrators.
Context + people
Toolkitty is an offshoot project of p2panda. P2panda received funding from Innovate UK to build this prototype of Toolkitty.
The Toolkitty team:
- Sam Andreae → back-end development
- Andreas Dzialocha → back-end development
- Andrew Reid → back-end development
- Jack Murray-Brown → front-end development
- Charlotte Roe → front-end development
- Anna Corfa Isehayek → design
- David Birchall → user testing
The seeds of Toolkitty can be found in activites around a collaborative publication called Blatt3000 and a collective festival building platform called Hoffnung3000. Hoffnung3000 was used to make the groups own festivals in Berlin. Further adoptions of the platform include a project with Documenta15 zukunftsdorf22.org in Kassel in 2022 and for the Antiuniversity Festivals in the UK. The idea behind Hoffnung3000 was to represent the non-hierarchical nature of communities in the structure of the platform and this is now being realised with Toolkitty using P2P network architecture.
