Small things, properly supported.

A WobbleFly community programme would be something WobbleFly runs, funds or supports, that helps a person build a real community and gives that community tools and reach it would not have on its own.

The test we intend to apply to anything we put on this page:

1. 01Does it help people build something that outlasts the programme itself?
2. 02Would the same thing work on another platform? If it only works because it is on WobbleFly, it is a product feature, not a programme, and it belongs there.
3. 03Does it put WobbleFly's weight behind someone, or only extract their attention?
4. 04Can it be described honestly, including what it costs and who it excludes?

That last one is why this page is short and mostly conditional. A programmes page that lists things which do not exist is worse than no page at all.

These are the five areas we intend to build in, in the order we expect to. None is running.

1. 01Community events — small, local, in-person gatherings run by the people who already hold a community together, with WobbleFly covering the practical cost. The intent is small gatherings in a real room, not a broadcast. A community is easier to hold when the people in it have met.
2. 02Creator and organiser initiatives — for people doing the work of running a space: grants for time and materials, early access to tools, and a direct line to the team. The people keeping a group alive are rarely the people with the largest following, and they are usually paying for it personally.
3. 03Educational initiatives — sessions and material on digital safety, online reputation, consent and privacy, made with teachers, youth workers and parents rather than for them. The content would be usable in a classroom, not only on the platform.
4. 04Digital safety initiatives — collaboration with people who work on online harm: shared research into how abuse actually works on small platforms, better signals for coordinated targeting, and improvements driven by what safety reports tell us.
5. 05Local and community projects — helping a specific place build something specific, funded rather than advised. Small, bounded, with the outcome defined by the community rather than by us.

Stated as intentions, because committing to a process before there is anything to apply to would be theatre.

• Eligibility would vary by programme. Some would be open to anyone. Some would be by application, judged on the quality of the community rather than on follower counts.
• We intend that no programme require a WobbleFly following to enter. That would just be a popularity contest with a grant at the end.
• We intend that participation not depend on disclosing private information, and that we would not ask a community to hand over its membership.
• Money would come with conditions attached — what it is for, what it is not for — rather than as an unrestricted gift that becomes a dependency.
• Anything we fund would be described publicly afterwards, including how much it cost and what came of it.
• We intend to publish what did not work as well as what did.

Support is a relationship, and a relationship has conditions. If a WobbleFly programme ran, we would expect:

• the Community Guidelines, as everywhere else on WobbleFly — with a lower tolerance for anything involving minors
• transparency about who is running it, who funds it, and who to contact
• that participants know they are in a programme, and that they can leave it without losing their account
• that nobody is recruited, pressured or contacted in a way that is not obviously a programme
• consent from anyone whose story, image or data is used
• a way for participants to raise a problem with us directly, not only through the person running the programme

A programme that made itself hard to leave would be the opposite of what we are describing here.

Running programmes for real communities means handling real people's information, which is exactly the situation where a social platform can do harm by being careless. The constraints we intend to hold ourselves to:

• no more personal data collected for a programme than the programme genuinely needs
• no requirement to hand over a community's member list as a condition of joining
• no sharing of participant information with other participants
• no use of programme participation to target advertising — there is no advertising, and that is not going to change quietly
• clear notice before any data is collected, and deletion when the programme ends
• the same protections for participants as for any other user, described in the Privacy Policy

Data collected for a programme would be governed by the Privacy Policy, and the retention periods are [Retention periods by data type]

There is nothing to apply to, because nothing is running. What is genuinely useful in the meantime:

1. 01Build the community first. The programmes are supposed to support something that exists, not substitute for one. Anyone can start a community on WobbleFly today.
2. 02Tell us what would help. If you are running something and the barrier is a specific, nameable thing — a room, a printer, an afternoon of your time — that is exactly the kind of thing a small grant programme is for, and knowing it is useful before we design one.
3. 03Work in safety or education. If your day job is youth work, teaching, safeguarding, or online harm, we would rather hear a specific problem you keep seeing than a general interest.
4. 04Tell us what to avoid. A programme that would help nobody is worth knowing about in advance, and being told to drop an idea is useful.

Get in touch at [Programmes contact email] You will get a reply from a person, and 'not right now' is a normal answer to hear.