Building SMARTER communities of resistance and solidarity

The Cyber-Racism and Community Resilience (CRaCR) project included an examination into features of online communities of resistance and solidarity. This work formed a key part of the project’s focus on resilience and produced a deeper understanding of a range of types of actors working in this space and how they might individually contribute effectively to creating resilience. The need for new synergies between different types of stakeholders and approaches was highlighted as an area for future work. This paper explores a design for that future work that builds and supports online communities of resistance and solidarity by drawing on and extending the lessons from the CRaCR research. This new work both presents a model for cooperation and explains how different stakeholders can positively engage under the model in a SMARTER way. That is, through a system which facilitates Solidarity in Moving Against Racism Together while Enabling Resilience. This new approach draws on the strengths of individuals actors, but also seeks to turn points of weakness for one actor into opportunities for cooperation that strengthen the system as a whole.