We are Rabble Cooperative

Welcome to rabble.coop’s new website!
rabble.coop was founded four years ago in 2021. You’d be forgiven for thinking that a tech cooperative’s first foray into the public sphere would be through a website, but at rabble.coop we do things a bit differently.
There are three of us in the cooperative and we’re a mixed bunch. None of us have a long standing background in tech. We’re teachers, artists, journalists, trade unionists and community organisers, human rights activists.
But despite our varied back stories, we have a few things in common:
We want to build tech that helps to change (our wee corner of) the world. People make change, not technology. In our experience, good people determined to make change rely on technologies that violate fundamental human rights, create inequalities and support colonialism. They don’t want that, but they don’t know what else to do. We want to help by bridging the worlds of social, economic and environmental justice with technology. We know we won’t change the whole world, but we can help change our wee corner of it.
We don’t like Big Tech. Its grubby need to monetise online human relationships and creativity is just ugly. It has produced the new oligarchs of our age. Big Tech is also unnecessary: for almost every piece of Big Tech software, there is an alternative being built and maintained by an open source community.
We love free software. This is not necessarily software that doesn’t cost anything – after all, we all need to put food on the table. We're talking about software which by design recognises that humanity is one big family that passes on knowledge from person to person, community to community and generation to generation. We should be able to use, inspect, change and develop further any software we depend on. Software copyright which prohibits this is an enemy of human progress, preventing the spread of valuable knowledge.
Part of the reason we didn't have a website before now is that the last three years have been very busy at rabble.coop.
We’ve supported trade unions, human rights organisations, Irish language movements, a Mutual Bank initiative and Palestine solidarity groups to embrace the world of free software and add a real punch to their campaigns. We’ve helped them to change how they do their activism.
We want to build a network of organisations and movements interested in how technology can be used to create the change we all want to see.
We’ve been able to do this precisely because of our varied experience. We know the worlds activism and social justice – the language, the tactics and strategies, the internal pressures, the external relationships and the need to be agile and responsive as campaigns evolve. We build and deploy technology with organisations and movements that help them navigate these waters more effectively. More than this, we pro-actively bring our clients together to learn from each other; we want to build a network of organisations and movements interested in how technology can be used to create the change we all want to see.
Ultimately we would like to create an infrastructure to support this network of movements. But we'll not get ahead of ourselves. One step at a time.
Our new website will provide information on our products and services. It will showcase how we have worked with clients to build tech and what the outcomes have been. We will also provide blogs on all things tech-related: news, tutorials and guides, opinion pieces and the odd venting when the situation demands it. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in sign up to our newsletter. If your organisation would like to hire rabble.coop, or discuss potential projects, get in touch.
Finally, there are a couple organisations we have to thank for their support in bringing this website to life: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the School for Social Entrepreneurs. Both of them saw the potential of our cooperative and gave us funds, resources, expertise and support just when we needed it. Go raibh míle maith agaibh!