https://pursuanceproject.org/

From the website:

"Our free, open source, and secure Pursuance System software enables participants to: create action-oriented groups called “pursuances”, discuss how best to achieve their mission, rapidly record exciting strategies and ideas in an actionable form (namely as tasks), divvy up those tasks among one other, share files and documents, get summoned when relevant events occur (e.g., when they are assigned a task, or when mentioned), request help from others, receive social recognition for their contributions, and to delegate tasks to other pursuances in this ecosystem in order to harness its collective intelligence, passion, and expertise.

Fundamentally, we aim to confront and correct, via an energetic, global network of forward-thinking individuals, the injustices imposed on society by criminalized institutions the world over."

To put it quite roughly, they’re trying to build a kind of hierarchical task management system specifically engineered to suit crowdsourced activism that is both private and secure, and that will provide anyone with an internet connection the ability to go to a website, browse a list of projects happening, and say ‘I could provide an hour of grunt work a week to this project and help it move forward, making phonecalls, poring through boring court documents, translating, whatever, instead of just liking comments on facebook that I agree with’. Hehe.

One thing I love about it is the idea that after someone starts a ‘pursuance’ to try bring about let’s say prison reform, they have the option of adding their specific pursuance structure (pursuances can have various voting structures, different ways of moving documents up the chain, different ways of making decisions, etc) into a pursuance library, leaving notes on what worked well and what didn’t work well, that can then be perused and used by others.

I could ramble on more about its huge potential to focus a group of people onto a very specific, small problem, and to just attack it in as creative and inventive a way as possible, but I’ll leave that to your imaginations.

Two things I don’t like about it: it isn’t being specifically designed for the Safe Network, so for the average user, even if the software itself is very secure and whatnot, the usual dangers of servers and being on the legacynet will be there. The more anonymous and secure the app is, the more people can get involved in projects without fear of being targeted by malicious actors, and the more projects can be started in places where internet access is usually monitored/restricted. Safe Network would really help make pursuances much more resilient. I mean, this is of course a failing of all legacynet apps and services, but in the case of the pursuance project it could really make a huge difference for someone in say China, or the U.S., to be able to start a pursuance without fear of persecution.

Second thing I worry about is the choice the pursuance team have made to roll out the app on an invitation basis, focusing first on specific issues they have chosen. They say this is just towards the start to get a good strong beating heart going for the whole thing before opening it up, and there is certainly a chance that this is a good practical decision and I’m being overly idealistic… But I can’t help feeling more like they should just throw the app out into the wild in a way that they have no idea who starts/joins/leaves a pursuance, and simply say: do what you will with this software, and may the best ideas win.

So yes, in summary, I am starting this topic basically in the hope that someone reads it and then says to themselves ‘Amazing! I’m going to make this for the Safe Network and have it ready to launch on day one!’, because unfortunately I have no programming knowledge. I had considered contacting the pursuance team to ask if they had heard of the Safe Network, and still think it could lead to good things to start a dialogue with them, but first wanted to get a conversation going here to see what the other lovely members of this forum think of the idea.

Thanks! First topic I’ve created too, so be gentle with me