We intend this as the first in a series of regular and highly sociable workshops. We will test a variety of open source software with the aim of putting together a digital toolkit that small, independent, mobile groups can use to power themselves. Once we have done this we will produce documentation and a set of video tutorials. We have a toolkit like this in mind, except we want to make one that seems both simpler and more general.

We won't just test the software - we will test how we can use it, and what we can get it to do. Then we will ask why we would want it to do that, and what purpose doing that would have for a small, independent, mobile group. A toolkit should consist of ways of doing things as well as the tools to do things with. We will test both.

We will start with Mattermost, because this stands as an open source version of Slack, and Pixelache has used Slack for over a year now. We can spot two immediate differences, in that Mattermost costs nothing and it lives on our own server. The workshop will look at all the other differences we can find.

Please bring a mobile phone, tablet, and/or laptop. You will get an account on our Mattermost server and the exploration will begin. Once we see what it can and cannot do we will decide what to do next.