Common Knowledge 2026 Strategy

Who are we

Common Knowledge is a not-for-profit worker cooperative. We design and build tools for progressive movements, and we do the training and convening that turn those tools into organising power. Our flagship product is Mapped, a platform that helps campaigners and funders see where people, power and resources are found, and decide where to act.

We work through three connected work streams:

• Infrastructure: software and design, including Mapped, Join Flow, community archives and the Movement Data Library.
• Training: teaching at the meeting point of digital technology and grassroots organising, from security training to action learning groups.
• Convening: cohorts, events and meet-ups that connect organisations and build trust across the movement.

This document is our 2026 strategy, adopted in January 2026.

It follows the pattern proposed in Richard Rumelt's seminal Good Strategy/Bad Strategy. From a diagnosis of the situation follows a guiding policy, which is followed by actions that are coherent with this guiding policy.

Diagnosis

In 2025, Common Knowledge focused heavily on building our Mapped platform. While this work strengthened our product offering and clarified what we are able to make, it did not translate into equivalent gains in collective power or movement outcomes. The central weakness was not the quality of what we built, but the limited extent to which these tools were deployed, embedded, and used as instruments of organising.

This weakness unfolded within a conjuncture that is unusually dynamic. The political situation contains real openings for transformative social and economic change, as economic orthodoxy weakens and material crises sharpen political conflict. At the same time, risks are acute: rapid technological change, particularly around AI, and the credible prospect of another recession create volatility that rewards coordinated actors and penalises fragmented ones. These conditions demand us to work in closer collaboration with our allies. We must think ecologically and be responsive enough to convert instability into our strategic advantage.

Across the movements we work with, a core constraint is the absence of shared infrastructure and durable coordination. Organising capacity exists but is dispersed, under-resourced, and often trapped within single issues or isolated organisations. Knowledge, data, and lessons are repeatedly lost rather than accumulated. As a result, much of the movement’s power remains unrealised — present as latent or virtual capacity rather than organised force. The strategic problem for Common Knowledge in 2026 is therefore not to generate more activity, but to connect the activities that are already happening and build upon what already exists.

Guiding Policy

In 2026, Common Knowledge will bias decisively toward loud, external, collaborative action that realises our movements’ latent potential, improves coordination, and compounds power over time. We will work closely with organisers on the ground in tight feedback loops where tools, strategy, and organising practice evolve together, particularly in moments of heightened political activity such as local elections. This orientation prioritises real-world deployment over abstract development and treats collaboration as the primary site of learning.

Our tools will continue to be developed, but they will be made live by tending the wider system around them. Technical work will be inseparable from training, facilitation, and upskilling, ensuring that products are used strategically rather than episodically. Our political focus will be anchored in material struggles of the working class, and concentrated in defined battlegrounds: tenant organising, migrant solidarity, and the solidarity economy, where material demands can unify people and build durable power. Grounding in the reality of daily material struggle, and having pragmatic solutions is to the distinct advantage of radical movements.

Organisationally, this strategy requires a decisive shift away from the agency model as our primary driver toward a propositional stance that demonstrates movement leadership. This is not an assertion of authority, but a clear articulation of perspective: based on our position across dozens of organisations, this is what we believe the movement needs, and this is where we are focusing. The shift is also economic: time-based software work is rapidly losing value as automation accelerates, necessitating experimentation with new revenue models. To ensure coherence and impact, Common Knowledge will work through defined battlegrounds and workstreams.

Coherent actions

• Organise all 2026 work around three defined battlegrounds: tenant organising, migrant solidarity, and the solidarity economy, and deliver this work exclusively through the infrastructure, training, and convening workstreams.
• Embed Common Knowledge tools directly into live organising contexts within these battlegrounds, working in close partnership with organisers to ensure rapid feedback between political needs, product development, and on-the-ground practice.
• Prioritise deployment over development by measuring success through active use, coordination effects, and organising outcomes, rather than outputs delivered or features shipped.
• Wrap all tools in structured training, facilitation, and cohort-based support, including onboarding, action-learning groups, and shared case studies that demonstrate concrete political impact.
• Since we know that concerns about privacy and security prevent movements from acting, we will focus attention on providing security training and community building. This too is an example of movement leadership, addressing what we can only observe due to our connections.
• Use moments of heightened mobilisation, particularly local elections, as strategic laboratories for testing tools, training organisers, and converting short-term participation into long-term organising capacity.
• Capture, document, and reuse learning across projects to reduce fragmentation, retain movement memory, and prevent repeated reinvention of methods and infrastructure.
• Explore a shift away from time-based agency work as the primary revenue model, prioritising propositional projects aligned with battlegrounds and workstreams that is funded through our grant income.
• Experiment with non-hourly revenue models linked to training programmes, shared infrastructure, and long-term partnerships that compound movement capacity over time.
• Deprioritise work that does not contribute to cumulative and compounding strategic effect, including low-trust, low-budget, or one-off projects outside defined priorities.
• Strengthen internal planning, financial tracking, feedback, and care practices to sustain organisational capacity, recognising co-op health as a form of movement infrastructure.