Repro Uncensored: Bridging Online and Offline Community Organizing for Stronger Movements

By Lucien Langton, Open Source Civic Tech activist

During the past 15 years, many grassroots movements have shifted how they organize. What once happened mainly through social media increasingly takes place in dedicated digital spaces where communities can meet, deliberate, vote, write together, care for one another, and hold each other accountable. This shift accelerated during Covid-19, when the need for remote collaboration pushed movements to adopt tools that could support more structured forms of collective work.

Voca is one organizing digital solution used by communities in such ways. One notable aspect of Voca is that it’s powered by Decidim, the most widely used open source, nonprofit framework for citizen-led participatory democracy. Initially developed in Barcelona by activists, it was designed for communities to create secure and configurable spaces for deliberation, documentation and collective decision making, whether fully private, transparent, or public, depending on the needs of each movement.

How Online Community Organizing Can Strengthen Movements

Historically, grassroots organizations have been rooted in specific places: struggles have always emerged from particular cities, communities, or regions. This grounding is essential for mobilization and for understanding the lived conditions shaping each struggle. However, we have unfortunately witnessed the most brutal drawback from movements organizing in person: police repression, surveillance, and arrests are now escalating as never before and deter more and more people from voicing their rights. In parallel, movements have increasingly expanded their work online. Some now operate partially or entirely digitally, reacting to political events with a speed and reach that local organizing alone can’t always match.

But when organizing happens only on mainstream and hazardous platforms like Twitter and Instagram, communities face structural obstacles: opaque algorithms, nonexistent governance features, and environments engineered to polarize, censor, and surveil. In some cases, even custom mobile apps like Eyes Up, used to crowdsource and map ICE raid locations, were removed by Google, a recent report from 404 media says.

Over the past years, many movements have experimented with digital tools designed specifically for participatory democracy. One of the most striking examples is the community behind the Decidim project itself. These tools allow communities to maintain the clarity of assembly-based organizing while also accommodating the realities of dispersed members, multilingual communication, and political urgency.

In reproductive justice spaces, where safety, confidentiality, and mutual care are essential, the ability to create private or open online safe spaces matters. Dedicated platforms can allow communities to protect sensitive conversations, coordinate campaigns, and articulate political priorities without relying on spaces that extract data or amplify hostile narratives.

Here, decisions can be debated, documented, revisited, and revised collectively, without assuming you have to be there in person to be part of the community and take part in decision-making.

What Grassroots Organizations Can Learn From Online Communities

Online communities have spent decades developing practices that help groups coordinate across distance: asynchronous collaboration, collective drafting, shared governance, and transparent archives of debates. Grassroots movements can draw on these practices to strengthen their internal processes.

Voca platforms, grounded in open source governance principles, support this shift. They provide a configurable space where communities can structure their work. Depending on the context, an organization might use such online community space to bring clarity to decision-making, onboard new members or sustain cross-regional networks.

Examples of features commonly used include:

• organizing working groups

• configuring different levels of privacy

• drafting texts collaboratively

• crowdsourced mapping

• organizing meetings (in person or virtual)

• organizing citizen assemblies

• submitting, amending, and selecting proposals

• crowdsourcing votes or comments

• running surveys and polls

• managing participatory budgets

• following project implementation

• posting articles and newsletters

• bridging across multiple social networks

Additionally, Voca can be configured with automatic translation into many languages, making communication and participation easier across communities that are often siloed. This all-in-one set of features geared towards community organizing is a game-changer for movements.

These features do not replace in-person activism, but they reinforce it by allowing participants who cannot attend in person because of childcare, distance, safety concerns, or disability to still take part in shaping the direction of the movement. And when governance is transparent, and participation steps are clear, onboarding new members and thus growing the community becomes much more accessible.

Why Reproductive Justice Organizing Must Rely on Open Source Platforms

In the current political context, most digital tools are used for massive online surveillance and as platforms to spread misinformation and create division across communities. Not only are users of these platforms locked into toxic interactions, they are also locked into their own networks and communities. This, in turn, enables platforms such as Twitter/X and Meta to instrumentalize communities against one another. Mainstream platforms are essentially engineered against community organizing.

In contrast, here’s an example coming from the Amazon, where the collective Plantaformas uses Voca to host decolonial, feminist Indigenous assemblies led by Indigenous women. These assemblies focus on mutual aid, inter-community solidarity, political defense of the forest, and protection against extractivist and state violence. The choice of an open platform is essential: it protects autonomy and keeps deliberation spaces safe from outside pressure.

In the US, the need for online spaces by Womxn for Womxn is just as urgent. In sexual health and reproductive rights work, having autonomous digital spaces where Womxn can organize, deliberate, and support one another is essential, especially as growing far-right and white supremacist movements, both online and offline, openly declare that men should control Womxn’s bodies (howdy, Nick Fuentes). This surveillance and policing of Womxn’s autonomy is a stark symptom of our time, intensified by the spread of misogynistic, transphobic, racist, xenophobic, and ableist discourse.

In this context, community organizing around sexual health, reproductive rights, and care becomes mutual aid at its core when it is built upon open and accessible infrastructures. Moving away from big tech companies toward open source systems ensures that no single vendor controls the community data or technological future: hosting providers can be changed at any time, and the community remains free to adapt its digital environment as needed. More importantly, community members and skilled programmers within and around the collective can contribute directly to the development of features, plugins or add-ons, thus fostering a wealth of collective solutions for other grassroots organizations using open-source platforms.

Therefore, it is not only a technical choice but a political one. By reinforcing autonomy and deepening solidarity with other communities, we are reminded that we are the critical infrastructure.

Lucien is a civic tech activist and active member of the Decidim community. He co-founded Voca to provide community organizers with a sovereign and safe online space to build movements.