Tech futures:
what's next?

For years, digital inclusion meant getting people online. Devices, connections, basic skills. That work still matters. But the problem has moved, and that response is no longer enough.

The people with the least power over the technologies shaping their lives are not, by and large, people who lack devices or internet connections. Ofcom reports that 94% of UK adults have home internet access, and 97% of children own a smartphone by age 12. The headline access problem has largely been solved. What has not been solved is what people can do with that access and who gets to do more than use it passively. Many people have never had meaningful access to learning that teaches you how technology works, how to question it, or how to make something with it. That is a different problem and it requires a different response.

Computing has been on the national curriculum since 2014 but, as the Royal Society's research has consistently found, it has never been consistently well taught, with significant gaps in specialist teachers and wide variation in what children actually experience. Design and technology once offered a complementary practical route in, through play, making, design, and hands-on problem-solving. It has been cut back sharply in state schools, particularly in areas of high poverty, while continuing to thrive in private schools. And the devices most commonly available to children in lower-income households are tablets and smartphones, closed systems optimised for consuming content, not for coding, designing, or making things.

Into that gap has come the most powerful and least understood technology most people have yet encountered. Generative AI is moving into schools, workplaces, and public services faster than most people have had time to think about it. The opportunities are real - for learning, making, problem-solving, and building things that would previously have required specialist skills. But accessing those opportunities well requires knowledge, support, and in many cases money. The most capable AI tools sit behind subscription paywalls. Using them critically and creatively requires guidance that most young people in lower-income communities are not getting. Community organisations are already seeing what the gap looks like in practice - young people turning to AI companions because human support is not available, misinformation eroding trust in local institutions, algorithms making decisions about work that nobody can see or challenge, platforms designed around engagement rather than wellbeing pulling harder on the people least able to resist them. These are not abstract technology problems. They are showing up in youth clubs and community centres every day.

These are not separate problems. They are the same problem in different forms - a concentration of power and decision-making in systems that most people had no hand in building and have very little ability to influence. Large platforms have made things more convenient and created real opportunities - finding work, starting a business on eBay, connecting with community groups on Facebook, accessing services online. But the same platforms that make those things possible also take a cut, own the customer relationship, set the terms, and capture the data. They pull spending away from local shops and local economies. Work is increasingly mediated by systems that workers cannot see or challenge. The platforms keep more of the value, and most of the power.

Community organisations are not technology organisations. But many already want to help the people they work with navigate these changes - not just around AI, but around the broader question of who gets to understand, shape, and benefit from the technologies increasingly running everyday life. They are looking for ways to do that which fit their values around sustainability, data ethics, and community benefit. The challenge is finding the right approach, and avoiding tools and platforms that create new dependencies or compromise the principles that make community organisations trusted in the first place.

This is not starting from scratch. Organisations such as KWMC and Watershed, and community technology practices such as the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and Mother Cyborg's work, have already shown how creativity, shared learning, and community-led technology can help people move from access towards understanding, participation, and agency.

This document explores what a more useful response might look like and the role of the Community Creative Technologist in making it possible.

The digital divide is no longer only about who has a device or internet connection. Increasingly, it is about who has the knowledge, confidence, and opportunity to do more than consume technology.

Device ownership is now close to universal. Ofcom's 2024 research found that 97% of children in the UK own a smartphone by age 12, rising to 99% by age 17. Among younger children, around three quarters use a tablet at home, while older children rely increasingly on smartphones.

But the kind of device matters as much as whether children have one - and the picture there is moving in a worrying direction. The same report found that among 8-11 year olds, the proportion using a laptop or computer to go online dropped from 50% in 2022 to 36% in 2023. Among 12-15 year olds it dropped from 65% to 54% over the same period. Smartphones and tablets are filling the space that laptops and computers used to occupy. This matters because computers - laptops, desktops, Macs - are designed as open environments that invite experimentation. They have keyboards, file systems, and interfaces built around making and creating. Tablets and smartphones can do some of these things, but they are primarily designed around consuming content made by others - browsing, watching, playing. The default is use, not make.

The ICILS 2023 International Report found that around 43% of 14 year olds in participating EU countries did not reach a basic level of digital competence, with many struggling to evaluate online information, manage digital content, or use tools critically and effectively. This matters because it shows that access is not the same as understanding. Many young people can use platforms fluently, but fluency in use is not the same as knowing how digital systems work or how to move from using technology to making with it.

Schools have followed the same pattern. During the pandemic, the UK government delivered over one million devices to disadvantaged pupils as part of a £400 million investment. It was a significant and well-intentioned effort. But the scheme counted laptops and tablets as equivalent. The official statistics do not distinguish between them. Schools serving lower-income communities, including those in Knowle West, often chose tablets - they are cheaper, easier to manage, simpler to distribute. These are reasonable operational decisions. But the long-term consequence is that children in those schools can spend years on devices that teach them to be users, while children in better-resourced settings have access to devices that allow them to become makers.

A tablet running school apps is built for following instructions and completing tasks. It does not have a keyboard. It does not invite curiosity about what is underneath. It is configured for ed-tech, not for coding, designing, making, or tinkering.

Running an LED coding workshop at KWMC, two eight year old boys told me this was the first time they had ever used a laptop. They had been using tablets and smartphones at home and for schoolwork. But they had never used a proper keyboard. The whole session - designed around coding LED animations - had to start somewhere quite different from where I had planned. That moment is what the new digital divide looks like in practice. Not the absence of technology. The presence of the wrong kind.

What builds genuine digital confidence is something different - tinkering. Making something happen that wasn't there before, breaking something and figuring out why, understanding that digital systems are built by people and can be built by you.

Class shapes digital experience too. The Common Sense Census 2025 found that, in the United States, children from households earning less than $50,000 a year spent nearly twice as much time with screen media as children from households earning $100,000 or more. Video viewing remained the largest share of overall screen time, and one in five families used mobile devices to help manage bedtime, mealtimes, and emotional regulation.

This divide does not fall evenly. Women and gender-minoritised people face disproportionate online harassment and safety risks. Disabled people encounter systems increasingly designed in ways that resist adaptation, even as assistive technology communities have long practised exactly the kinds of making and modifying this document advocates for. Racialised communities are both over-surveilled by algorithmic systems and under-represented among those who design them. Working class communities - and in areas like Knowle West, white working class communities in particular - face some of the lowest rates of educational attainment and progression into higher education of any group in England, compounding the barriers that already exist. Generative AI risks reproducing and amplifying all of these patterns through the data it is trained on and the assumptions built into its design.

A shift from access to agency has to mean agency for the people most affected by digital systems, not just those already closest to them.

The technology currently changing everyday life most quickly is generative AI.

Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude are moving into school, work, search, administration, and creative practice at speed. Ofcom reports that four in five (79%) teenagers aged 13-17 in the UK now use generative AI tools, and 40% of children aged 7-12 are using them too.

The opportunity is real and it is huge. These tools lower significant barriers - helping people draft, summarise, learn, prototype, and get started on tasks that previously felt specialist or out of reach. For people historically excluded from working with technology, generative AI for codingcould open doors that have long been closed.

But the opportunity is flowing unevenly. The most capable tools sit behind subscription paywalls. And the people best placed to use these tools well are not simply those with access - they are the ones with the technical confidence, design literacy, and critical grounding to direct AI purposefully, question its outputs, and build with it rather than just consume it. That kind of grounding comes from exactly the education this document has been describing as disappearing - computing taught well, design and technology, arts and hands-on making. The people most likely to use AI passively, or to become dependent on it, are those positioned as users rather than makers from the start.

This is also the clearest example of the closed systems problem this document has been describing. The outputs are visible. The workings are not. Most people cannot see how a response was produced, what data it was trained on, or whose knowledge is being centred and whose is missing. These systems are owned and controlled by a small number of companies whose interests are commercial. They reproduce racial, gendered, and cultural biases without making those biases visible.

Used uncritically, generative AI does not build understanding. It replaces it.

Community organisations are also beginning to see the mental health dimension directly - young people and isolated adults turning to AI companions for emotional support because other support is not available.

For community organisations, the question is not simply whether to adopt generative AI. It is how to engage with it honestly - helping people access its possibilities while being clear about what it is, who built it, and what it costs.

AI Disco Tech

Inspired by Detroit Digital Justice Coalition's Disco Tech model, these events would bring communities together to explore, question, and play with AI. No expertise required and no experts either - just curiosity and peer learning. Nobody has this figured out yet, and that is the point. By learning together we can start to understand these tools on our own terms - and help KWMC develop some shared principles about how generative AI could be used responsibly and usefully in community settings.

Read about Detroit Digital Justice Coalition How to Disco Tech Zine

For a long time, digital platforms were described as operating through an attention economy. They competed to keep people clicking, scrolling, and watching for as long as possible. That still matters. But something deeper is now happening.

As platforms become more personalised, more conversational, and more integrated with AI, they are not just competing for moments of attention. They are becoming woven into routines, habits, learning, work, relationships, and self-expression.

A platform may become the place where someone gets advice, drafts messages, searches for information, makes images, finds companionship, or manages emotions. These systems are not just seeking attention. They are seeking dependency, trust, and habitual attachment. The harms can go beyond distraction: reduced autonomy, narrowed discovery, stronger dependency on opaque systems, and a blurring of the line between participation and manipulation.

It also has particular weight for mental health. A growing body of research points to relationships between heavy social media use and adolescent wellbeing, though the evidence on causation remains debated. What is clearer is that community organisations, schools, and families are increasingly dealing with the consequences of platforms designed around engagement rather than wellbeing.

For community organisations, this is especially important when thinking about young people, learning, and online safety. The issue is not only how much time people spend online. It is also how digital systems shape habits, emotions, relationships, confidence, and decision-making over time. People who understand how platforms work, who can make things with digital tools rather than just consume them, tend to have more agency over their own digital lives. The shift from users to producers matters here as much as anywhere.

Chatbot Design, storytelling & creative writing

Based on the Women Reclaiming AI project, this workshop idea would invite participants to design and write their own chatbot using AI tools. The process of deciding what your chatbot says, how it sounds, and what it values turns out to be a surprisingly powerful way into questions about voice, authorship, and what we want from AI. Making something together is the starting point - the conversations that come out of it are the point.

Find out more about the Women Reclaiming AI project

Photographer Ibi Feyer

Much of today's most widely used technology is designed at global scale, for global markets, by a small number of companies. It is convenient and powerful. It is also largely outside community control.

Big Tech platforms are shaped by the priorities of the companies behind them - growth, market dominance, data extraction, and ongoing dependence on subscription or platform models. These priorities are not designed around local trust, local governance, or local need. Communities experience technology differently. What works for a global platform does not necessarily work for a neighbourhood, a youth group, a local organisation, or a community centre.

Disillusionment with Big Tech and the need for data sovereignty is driving growing interest in alternatives across the technology community. That includes open-source tools, self-hosting, the Fediverse (a network of independently run social platforms that can communicate with each other, such as Mastodon), local-first software, and forms of community-managed digital infrastructure. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, has been developing Solid - a project that aims to give people genuine control over their own data by separating it from the applications that use it.

Part of this interest is practical. As mainstream platforms become more unstable, more commercial, or more hostile to grassroots organising, many people and organisations feel digitally displaced. Part of it is about values. In 2004, writer and Professor Clay Shirky described the idea of situated software - small, purposeful tools built for specific communities rather than for scale. His argument was that the most useful digital tools are often the ones designed for dozens of people who know each other and share a context, not millions of anonymous users. A community noticeboard. A local directory. A tool for coordinating volunteers or sharing local knowledge. These do not need to scale globally. They need to work well for the people who use them. That idea never quite arrived - until now.

Local alternatives have real potential. They can create more room for community control, transparency, and collective decision-making. They can support spaces shaped by community norms rather than platform incentives. They can help keep more value - data, knowledge, economic activity - within the community rather than extracting it outward.

The barrier has always been technical knowledge. Building and maintaining local digital infrastructure requires skills and confidence that are unevenly distributed. Open and decentralised systems may be better in principle - but if only technically confident people can access and sustain them, they deepen the divide rather than closing it. This is why support, facilitation, and local intermediaries matter so much. The challenge is not just whether alternatives exist. It is who can access, understand, and sustain them.

That barrier is lower than it has ever been. Generative AI for coding is making it genuinely possible to build small, purposeful, local digital tools without deep technical expertise. A community organisation could build a tool to manage a local directory, coordinate volunteers, or share neighbourhood knowledge - in ways that would have required specialist developers not long ago. This is not about replacing technical skill. It is about making building accessible to more people, in more places, for more specific local purposes.

But lower barriers are not the same as no barriers. Without the right support, it is easy to reach for tools that look open but still extract data, create new dependencies, or lock communities into platforms they cannot control. It is easy to build something technically functional that does not fit how a community actually works. And it is easy to create something that only one person understands - so when they leave, the knowledge leaves with them. The technical questions are the easier ones. The harder questions are about values, governance, and sustainability. Who owns the data? Who maintains it? What happens when the tool needs to change?

This is where the Community Creative Technologist plays a specific and practical role. Not just as someone who understands the technology, but as someone embedded in the community - asking those harder questions before anything gets built, building with people rather than for them, and bringing others along in the process. Communities do not need a fully qualified specialist for every technical challenge. They need someone with enough knowledge, present and trusted, who can do the most important work locally and know when to bring in more expertise. With generative AI now making it possible to build purposeful local tools without specialist developers, communities themselves can start to design, adapt, and maintain digital infrastructure that fits their actual needs - with the CCT as the person who helps them get there and keeps the knowledge local. That is the bigger opportunity. As more people in the community learn to build and adapt digital tools themselves, the role multiplies. One CCT becomes two. Two become five. The barriers to making get lower. Local knowledge compounds. The tools get more useful because the people building them are the people who need them - using AI critically, on their own terms, in service of their own community's values.

The Community Cloud

What would it look like to redesign the internet for a neighbourhood? Not the global internet - something smaller, more local, and genuinely under community control.

This project is in its early stages. Working with young people at KWMC, we have begun to explore what a locally hosted, community-governed digital infrastructure could look like - running on recycled hardware, powered by renewable energy, and shaped by local needs rather than commercial priorities.

At the heart of this is data sovereignty - the idea that communities should have genuine control over the data they generate, rather than having it extracted by commercial platforms. A community cloud keeps data local and puts decisions about how it is used in community hands.

It would also reconnect people with network engineering skills that have largely disappeared as cloud services have taken over. It could run local AI tools for coding and creative work, reducing dependence on energy-hungry commercial platforms. And it could be a training ground for more Community Creative Technologists, building the local technical capacity that makes self-reliance possible.

Knowle West has always been a place where people make things.

Railway workers. Tattoo artists. Furniture makers. People who retrofit houses, grow food, map their neighbourhood, and find ways to do more with less. The ingenuity and practical skill in this community is deep and well documented. And as the KWMC archive shows, the connection between that culture and digital tools has been made - repeatedly, creatively, and over the last 30 years. The question now is how to build on that foundation at the scale and continuity the moment requires. The Community Creative Technologist role is part of that answer.

Central to that tradition is tinkering - the practical curiosity that comes from taking things apart, fixing things, building things, playing with how systems work. This is not a middle class hobby. It is a working class survival skill, passed down through trades, workshops, and the everyday resourcefulness of communities that could not afford to replace what they could repair. It has been eroded from two directions - from work, as traditional manufacturing roles have declined, and from education, as practical subjects like design and technology have been cut from the schools serving these communities. Community spaces are one of the few places where that culture can be kept alive - and connected to the digital tools of the present.

As part of this fellowship I spent time in the KWMC archive - a record of over 30 years of creative and community technology practice in Knowle West and South Bristol. What it shows is a consistent thread of community-led making, adapting, and building that runs from the earliest projects to the present day. The University of Local Knowledge, which ran from 2008 to 2018, captured over 500 short films of community know-how and expertise - the practical, embodied knowledge that exists in a community but rarely gets recognised as such. Its founding premise was that "there is knowledge and valuable experience within the community to be nurtured, revealed and valued." Eagle House Furniture Factory transformed a disused youth centre into a pop-up digital factory. We Can Make asked what would happen if the power and resources to create good homes were in the hands of communities themselves. Retrofit Reimagined is showing how change can happen from the bottom up.

The archive is evidence that the making culture this document argues for is not something that needs to be brought into communities like Knowle West from the outside. It is already there. What the Community Creative Technologist role offers is the sustained, embedded presence that can build on it - connecting existing practical intelligence to digital tools, infrastructure, and pathways in ways that last beyond individual projects.

This is what the shift from users to producers actually means in practice. Not importing digital skills as if the knowledge and capability weren't already there.

It is worth being honest about whose making traditions get recognised in this framing and whose do not. Working class making and repair cultures, women's craft and textile traditions, disabled people's history of adapting tools out of necessity, the technical ingenuity of migrant and diasporic communities - these have existed for generations and are rarely treated as relevant to digital pathways. A genuine shift from users to producers has to make those connections visible rather than starting from a blank slate.

This is not about everyone becoming highly technical. It is about recognising that the capability to make, adapt, and build is already present in communities - and creating the conditions for that capability to extend into the digital world on community terms.

Knowle West Media Centre Blog

The Knowle West Media Centre is a community-led initiative that supports local digital creativity and innovation. Their blog features stories and insights from the community, highlighting the intersection of technology and social change. Read the blog for inspiration and guidance on community technology projects.

• → Visit the Knowle West Media Centre blog to explore their work

Mother Cyborg: Teaching Community Technology

Mother Cyborg (Diana J. Nucera) founded the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition and has been one of the most influential voices in community technology practice. Her work - rooted in the DiscoTech tradition of open, hands-on learning - shows how people can understand digital systems together, on their own terms, and use that knowledge to shape technology for community benefit rather than corporate gain.

The Teaching Community Technology Handbook is a practical, generous guide for anyone running workshops, study groups, or learning spaces around technology. It offers facilitation methods, activity ideas, and a clear political framing: that technology education should build collective agency, not just individual skills.

• → Visit mothercyborg.com to explore her work and order the handbook

The gap between people who use technology and people who understand, question, and make with it is widening. It shows up in schools, where practical and creative routes into digital making have been cut back. It shows up in workplaces, where algorithmic systems manage people who have no way to challenge them. It shows up in community spaces, where people of all ages encounter technologies that are powerful, opaque, and designed around someone else's interests. And it shows up in the growing number of people, young and old, who feel that technology is not for them, or not theirs to shape.

This is showing up every day in the spaces community organisations already run - in youth clubs, learning spaces, and community centres, in the young people who can use technology fluently but have no framework for understanding it, questioning it, or imagining anything different.

This is where the Community Creative Technologist comes in.

Not a digital inclusion officer running a basic skills course. Not a project worker delivering a funded activity and moving on. A Creative Technologist embedded in a community - building relationships, creating practical entry points into making and understanding, and helping people move from passive use of technology towards genuine confidence and curiosity.

In practice that might mean helping young people understand how networks, platforms, and AI systems actually work. Running sessions where people experiment with coding, electronics, or physical computing. Supporting communities to explore and build local digital alternatives. Helping people make things - tools, projects, resources - that they and their communities can actually use and benefit from. Or simply creating spaces where people feel able to ask questions, take things apart, and learn together without feeling that technology is someone else's territory.

The role calls for a particular combination of attributes and knowledge. Curiosity matters more than expertise - a genuine interest in how things work, comfort with not having all the answers, and the ability to learn alongside people rather than in front of them. So does the capacity to build trust over time, to work with communities rather than for them, and to stay rooted in the values of the organisation they are part of. On the technical side, a CCT might draw on any combination of coding and physical computing, web development, generative AI tools, data literacy, digital fabrication, audio and video production, or game design - not as a specialist in all of these, but as someone with enough range to open doors and enough honesty to know when to bring in more expertise. What matters most is not the specific tools but the instinct to make, the willingness to share that instinct with others, and the understanding that technology is always a means rather than an end.

Creative activity is the entry point. A young person comes because they want to make music, build a game, design something, or experiment with AI. Through that process they begin to encounter code, systems, hardware, data, and the wider structures shaping digital life.

The questions that matter are not technical ones. They are:

• How does this work?
• Who designed it?
• What assumptions are built into it?
• What alternatives are possible?
• What could we make ourselves?

The Community Creative Technologist helps communities feel entitled to ask those questions - and capable of acting on the answers.

Technical skills brought into community settings through short-term projects create exciting work but not lasting change. Knowledge leaves when the project ends. The same work starts again from scratch. The same people who gained confidence lose the thread. The Community Creative Technologist is not a project. It is a sustained, embedded presence - the kind that builds local knowledge, keeps it local, and passes it on.

And the role can multiply. A Community Creative Technologist who is genuinely embedded - who builds with people rather than for them, who uses tools like generative AI for coding to lower barriers to making, who brings people along rather than delivering to them - creates the conditions for more people in the community to take on that role themselves. Local knowledge compounds. The barriers to making get lower. What starts as one person becomes a practice, and a practice becomes a culture.

Community organisations are already trusted. Already embedded. Already doing the relational work that makes this possible. They are not starting from scratch. They are the right home for this role.

Games are often treated only as entertainment. But they are one of the clearest routes into digital making - and one of the most underused.

The numbers are significant. Ofcom's 2023 research found that 83% of children aged 12-15 in the UK play online games. Research by the Nuffield Foundation and Ada Lovelace Institute highlights gaming as a central part of young people's digital lives across all backgrounds. This matters because games are already a familiar digital language - one that many young people are fluent in before they arrive at any community space.

That familiarity is a starting point, not an end point. Many young people already understand game spaces through play. Some will have experience of building, customising, or socialising in platforms like Roblox - moving from player to maker without necessarily thinking of it in those terms. That existing engagement is a practical entry point for deeper skills: design, logic, storytelling, systems thinking, interaction design, testing, collaboration, and creative problem-solving.

Games connect directly to the tinkering tradition this document has been describing. Building a game requires understanding how systems work, how rules create behaviour, how small changes produce unexpected results. It is, at its heart, the same curiosity that takes an engine apart or rewires a circuit - applied to a digital environment. Skills developed through game-making transfer into other kinds of digital work. Games are not just a destination. They can be a gateway.

Games also matter because they are social and expressive. They give people ways to communicate, collaborate, and tell stories that feel meaningful on their own terms. For some young people, building a game world, a mod, or a playable prototype feels more natural and more motivating than any other route into making. That motivation is worth taking seriously.

But games culture has well-documented gatekeeping problems - particularly around gender. A community-led approach to games as a route into making has to be conscious of who feels welcome and who does not. Done well, this work can actively widen who gets to make digital things. Done carelessly, it replicates the same exclusions that already exist in the wider technology industry. The goal is not to reproduce games culture. It is to use games as a way in - to making, to understanding, and to the confidence that comes from building something yourself.

Digital technology is often spoken about as if it is weightless. It is not.

The systems people use every day depend on physical infrastructure - servers, data centres, cooling systems, network cables, energy grids, and supply chains stretching across continents. None of this is invisible. It just has been made to feel that way. The language of the cloud, of streaming, of wireless - it is the language of weightlessness. It obscures the material reality of digital systems and the communities bearing their costs.

AI makes this harder to ignore. The large language models and image generators now entering everyday life and public services require enormous computational power to train and to run. The largest AI data centres consume as much electricity as small cities. That energy has to come from somewhere. That infrastructure has to be built somewhere. And the communities closest to those data centres, power plants, and supply chains are rarely the ones making decisions about them.

These costs fall disproportionately on communities already carrying the sharpest environmental burdens - in the global south, in low-income communities, in the places where the physical infrastructure of the digital economy is sited. This is not separate from the other inequalities this document has been describing. It is the same pattern of extraction seen from a different angle.

This connects directly to the argument for local and open alternatives made in Chapter 6. Smaller, local, more targeted digital tools are not just better for community control and accountability. They are also less resource-intensive. A locally hosted community tool running on modest hardware uses a fraction of the energy of the same function running through a commercial cloud platform. Choosing local infrastructure is not only a political choice. It is an environmental one.

Community organisations do not need to become infrastructure specialists. But they do need to recognise that digital choices are material choices. What tools to use. What platforms to host on. What relationships to build with technology companies. How to talk about technology honestly in communities already navigating inequality and environmental pressure. These are not technical questions. They are values questions.

Looking for the cloud

Looking for the Cloud is a creative technology project that helps young people understand the hidden physical reality of the internet - the energy, land, water, and infrastructure that digital life depends on.

As part of this fellowship I ran two Looking for the Cloud workshops at KWMC with local young people, bringing the project into a community setting in Knowle West for the first time.

The project was originally developed working with schools and communities in Cornwall - a key hub for UK internet infrastructure - engaging over 100 students in participatory workshops and reaching 3,000 visitors at the Eden Project. At its heart is a DIY internet kit: cardboard-housed electronics that let people build their own mini client, router, and server network, run live tasks across it, and see real-time energy use. It also includes a zine that tells the story of the internet while exploring its environmental and social costs.

The project is about reconnecting people with engineering, resource use, and the geography of the internet - through making, discussion, and curiosity rather than instruction.

Six months exploring technology through the lens of community practice has left me with a strong sense of both the problem and the opportunity.

The problem is specific. The education that once gave young people practical routes into understanding how things work has been cut back. The devices filling that gap are built for consumption, not understanding. And the most powerful technologies arriving into communities right now are the most closed and opaque yet built.

But the opportunity is also specific. Generative AI for coding has made it genuinely possible for communities to build local digital tools without specialist developers. The local and open technology movement is growing. Disco Tech events are a practical, proven way to help communities explore and question technology together. And the making culture that all of this needs to connect to - the self-reliance, the practical ingenuity, the tradition of doing more with less - is already there in communities across the country.

The Community Creative Technologist is the role that brings those things together in one place. Not a project. A sustained, embedded presence that builds local knowledge, keeps it local, and passes it on.

This document is for community organisations thinking about what that might look like in their context. It is also for funders, educators, and makers who want to connect their work to communities that would benefit. And it is for the growing network of people already doing this - in Bristol and beyond - whose work shows what is possible.

The conversation is already happening. This is an invitation to join it.