Our platform can be used by partner movements for building an internal knowledge base. In this article, we explain why we make all our guides available to everyone for free, and why your movement should do the same.

Want to learn more about how we can collaborate? Find out more about why your movement should partner up with Activist Handbook.

Our open approach #

Before going into why we take an open approach, lets first briefly look at what it means to us to be an ‘open platform’:

• 🤑 Free: We make all our knowledge (articles, trainings, etc) available at no charge. Any costs involved are covered through donations and funds, ensuring that those who can afford it contribute most.
• 🔓 Accessible: Our platform is publicly available to the public and we do our very best to make all our content as accessible as possible through the language and non-formal education methods we use.
• 🔄 Reusable: All our content may be redistributed and adapted, as long as we are given credit as authors, it is for non-commercial purposes and the content is shared under the same Creative Commons licence.
• 📝 Editable: Anyone who agrees with our principles can contribute to our shared knowledge base. And we make it as easy for people to put their experiences in words, by writing elaborate guides on how to create good guides.

Gatekeeping is bad #

Some organisations have the tendency to keep their internal guides internal, only sharing it with a select group of people who are to be ‘trusted’. They are afraid the opposition may use their knowledge against them. We fundamentally disagree with this approach. Here is why:

• Gatekeeping only keeps out marginalised communities: The rich, the privileged, the powerful, are able to hire professional campaigners and marketeers anyway. Really, the only people affected by a gatekeeping approach are marginalised communities, who do not have the resources to bring in this expertise.
• Withholding information is anti-democratic: Information is power. Organisations that keep their knowledge to themselves should ask themselves: Do they not trust the general public to use knowledge on effective campaigning responsibly? What makes them think that they are able to make that judgement? Are they not abusing your privileged position in making that decision to withhold knowledge & power from the general public?
• If strategies can do harm, the strategies are wrong: If the campaigning strategies that an organisation uses would do harm if they were to fall into the wrong hands, it is time for them to start questioning their strategies. If they want to bring about positive change, their organisational structure needs to reflect that change. It is about giving a voice to the voiceless, instead of speaking for them. If a movement’s strategies are top-down, enabling a small number of organisers to decide the direction of their entire ‘movement’, they are merely replacing existing institutions with one that brands itself as ‘grassroots’, but is in reality no better than what was there before.
• Excluding people means excluding experiences: If a movement only allows a small privileged group of campaigners to contribute to their guides, they inevitably leave out and invalidate the experiences and knowledge of millions of activists around the world. With fewer people contributing, they are missing out on valuable insights that could help their movement work more effectively. In addition, if they base their guides only on the experiences of a small privileged group, these will only reflect the needs of that group.

Join our open platform #

Every movement needs some internal guides to help their members work effectively. We want to help you in building an open knowledge base. Our platform can be used by your movement to host and organise your own guides.

• Use a platform optimised for knowledge exchange: To host our website, make use of Wiki.js, an open source software suite specifically developed for knowledge-sharing.
• Help activists around the globe: By opening up your movement’s knowledge base, you will help millions of activists around the world work more effectively together.
• Be part of something bigger: Your knowledge base will become part of the most comprehensive collection of manuals for change-makers. Your members will be able to learn about the experiences from thousands of activists that have contributed to our collaborative handbook.
• Diversify your knowledge base: Rebels from all sorts of backgrounds will be able to suggest improvements to your knowledge base, allowing it to grow organically over time.

Convinced? Learn more about how we can work together.