mastodon 4.7.3Start a group, become a community
Karrot is a free and open-source tool for grassroots initiatives and groups of people that want to coordinate face-to-face activities on a local, autonomous and voluntary basis.
It is designed in ways to enable community-building and support a more transparent, democratic and participatory governance of your group.
We're working on our position on AI.
A starting point was asking everyone in our recent meeting for a few immediate words, more of a gut-based starting point.
They were: positive, something to think about, burn it all, I don't know, no GenAI
Have you got some examples of AI positions/policies to share?
We (the Karrot team) are in Gothenburg and have an event on Sunday!
"Community tech: meet the people building alternatives"
Sunday, March 22, 2026 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
https://organisera.org/events/4e496999-00b5-4c03-bdd6-0e872311f6c4
We are steadily building a tool that has many of the things needed for community organising built right in:
And it has a plugin/extension system to further extending functionality (still a bit new...).
Excited to continuing developing it further!
✨ We have a new and improved guide for self-hosting Karrot! 🥕
It now has 3 approaches documented:
- Co-op Cloud - @coopcloud@social.coop / https://coopcloud.tech
- Docker Compose
- Without docker
(And a description of how we host https://karrot.world - none of the above!)
Fun fact about Karrot - with every deployment we include the JavaScript bundlesize visualization to show all the piles of js we're making the users download...
See it at https://karrot.world/bundlesize.html
I notice that the big blocks are complex features: maps, video calls, collaborative docs.
At least these are only loaded when you're actually using the feature. And should be cached ever after.
Still, nearly 11mb of JavaScript... (although that includes the translation files too).
FOSS works better when designed together with its users! Especially in the case of Karrot, which strives to be a community-led project to help people organize and make decisions collectively on a voluntary and autonomous basis.
That is why we started a community design process in order to design new governance features!
This is the first iteration of this design process, an adaptation of a design sprint. Any project out there with similar experience?
https://community.foodsaving.world/t/we-are-designing-governance-features-and-we-need-your-input/529
How to organize and distribute tasks in a community/grassroots project when the number of people and locations are more than just a few?
On Karrot, people who pick up food waste at supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants, can self-assign to do these pickups and everybody in their group can see clearly who's participating, when and where it's taking place.
Here is a screenshot of how we use this feature in our food saving and sharing project in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Toot by social.coop/@bruno
A nice article about one of the groups that use Karrot:
"How one Swedish city grew the commons by foodsharing during the pandemic"
https://www.shareable.net/foodsharing-during-the-pandemic-in-swedish-city/
/toot by @nicksellen@social.coop
