Effektio is now acter.global

Early 2023 Effektio merged into Acter Association, continuing to the build the Future of Organising: the technical base of Effektio has become the next generation of the Acter App enabling Activists all over the world to better organise. Learn more at acter.global.

GET
Members engaged People activated Fellows informed Peers connected Organized!

The one mobile-first, decentralized
community organizing app.

Made for Web5*. 

CASUAL

quick'n'easy browsing to stay up to date

CLEAN

fresh & modern UI/UX

ENGAGING

no-signup, likes, comments

NON-BUSINESS SUITE

CRM, PM, social media integration, public & private groups, help desk

END-2-END ENCRYPTED

full privacy for all communication & tools

DECENTRALIZED

blockchain-less federated backend thanks to matrix.org

Engage your community members like never before

Whether your local club or a nation-wide volunteering organisation, all face the same problem of keeping everyone informed, members connected and coordinated. With Effektio community members can organize easily on their spare time from their smartphone in the palm of their hands.

Get app & register your community

Just download the Effektio App and create your own, totally private community space with just a few taps.

Invite your peers

Invite your club members, family, friends or whoever you’d like to organize with right from the app.

ORGANIZE!

Start organizing your community from within the app with task-lists, discussions and chat messaging.

State-of-the-art Community Features

News Channels

Updates concerning your community

think channels like in Slack or Discord

News Channels

Updates concerning your community

think channels like in Slack or Discord

Social Feed

Watch your social feeds

as Facebook or Twitter feed with your timeline & discussions

Social Feed

Watch your social feeds

as Facebook or Twitter feed with your timeline & discussions

Messaging

Stay in contact

like w/ WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal

Messaging

Stay in contact

like w/ WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal

Decentralized

Our Servers, AWS, Self-hosted...

the protocol is federated giving you full data sovereignty

Dezentralised

Our Servers, AWS, Self-hosted...

the protocol is federated giving you full data sovereignty

Productivity

To dos, polls, calendar, video conferences

... & more tools in 1 app

Productivity

To dos, polls, calendar, video conferences

... & more tools in 1 app

Just scratching the surface

We are re-imaging what community organization in a mobile-first, remote and hyper-local world of the 2020s looks like

Product Planning

Next: Minimum viable App

We expect to have the first minimum viable App, showcasing the basic functionality of messaging and general purpose productivity tools by the end of 2022. The specific tools are yet up for discussion

After: Extending Tools

Ontop of the basic infrastructure provided by the MVA we can built out all the web tools we use and love and would love to use for our families, groups and communities, too: Like Event planning and calendar, keeping an archive of currently important Notes, Todo-Lists and Task-Management, Storing of Password and Secrets, Co-Budgeting and much more…

Further: Service Integration

A vital task for most communities to grow is to reach out and inform others. No one app is a silo, neither is effektio. The integration with other services, from web-site chatterboxes, over posting news to social media up to reacting to social media DMs is at the core of effektio.

Timeline

Hot off the press

ben

Blockchain is dead—Long Life Web5: The EFFEKTIO white paper

With the latest turmoil in the crypto space, some are starting to realize that maybe blockchain isn’t the answer to all the problems out there. A market crash is the time to look around what was just smoke and mirrors and what has actual merit, to take a step back to observe the bigger picture, to look farther than the trend of the day and beyond what promises unbelievable cash in an suspiciously short time and focus on the grander trends and shifts to notice. If you look closely, you might come to the same conclusion as we do: the idea of the internet as “the global village” is no more—all over the globe governments try to control access, censor what is posted, who gets to participate and attempt to suppress any dissent. While at the same time the need for global communication and collaboration is greater than ever before, in the local neighborhood up to international relationships. Unfortunately, the blockchain/web3 space has missed a lot of the developments that occurred at the same time parallel to its ecosystem: mobile devices are responsible for more than half of all internet traffic now; messengers have taken over as the primary “social network” for people; streaming and subscription services are eating the world. A lot has changed. Time for the decentralization space to get back to reality and solving actual issue for actual people. Like Mastodon and Matrix do—both decentralized network are seeing growth like never before. This and other trends, we observe, led us to start building Effektio about a year ago. Right into this crash of the blockchain space, we want offer a new perspective on what is going on and what we might want to build. We’ve outlined all this in our white paper, which is publicly available as off today. We are publishing the white paper as a Google Doc, with public comments enabled, and invite you to leave feedback and input on it, or join our public matrix channel to discuss these ideas with us—of course you can also just read a PDF download of it.

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Daniel Krüger

Being more public

It’s been a few months since we’ve started to build Effektio. And though our progress is always trackable on Github, we know that there is much more to #buildinpublic than that. As we are getting closer to the MVP of our app, we want to increase the communication about our journey, the progress, our highlights, our ups and downs. We love the concept of building in public and as of today the website – which we are relaunching with publishing this post – is designed to reflect this approach. From now on you will find the latest updates about the work on our purpose and product on the website. If you’re interested in Effektio make sure to come back frequently. In particular we’d like to highlight the revamped product progress page where we explain in detail what we are up to, how things are processing and provide pointers into the code if you want to contribute. Furthermore, we’ve updated the team section, featuring all active team members and a bit more of a journey on how we’ve gotten here. Overall, we are providing a lot more insights on what we are building for whom and why. Next to the progress page we added a structured blog, where we are getting into all kinds of topics concerning community building and organizing in the context of web3. We hope you like our relaunch. Any kind of feedback, requests and hints are always very welcome. 

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Daniel Krüger

The war messenger, pt. 2

2/2 Part 1 of this article can be found here and in German here. Most recently, I wrote about how essential Telegram is to Ukraine’s communications and messaging. Today, among other things, I explore the question of why Messenger has taken on such an essential role. There is no one answer to this, but I am making some assumptions here, which are welcome to be added to. Most importantly, Telegram enables group and broadcasting channels in addition to individual chats, and with unlimited numbers of participants. A decisive advantage over WhatsApp. This has made Telegram the second messenger worldwide for anyone who wants to communicate in large groups (many-to-many) or their own broadcast channels (one-to-many) for business reasons or for their engagement. That leads to point two. Telegram is the most international. The world map of messengers is clearly divided. WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger dominate in the West, Viber is strong in Eastern Europe, and so on. Above all, however, the boundaries between the apps run along national borders. Thus, a German WhatsApp user cannot find a Greek colleague in this app. He would have to install Viber. Or use Telegram, because that is the most established app, especially if he wants to communicate internationally in large groups or broadcasts. Rebel Channel’s reputation. The technical possibilities have also contributed to Telegram becoming the messenger of resistance in autocratic countries. In Belarus, Hong Kong and Iran, for example, protests in recent years have been organized primarily on Telegram. Crucial to this is the ability to create anonymous groups and messages and encrypt them. Security agencies have had and continue to have a difficult time responding to these dynamics. So it seems that the anonymity of the users actually holds. By the way, a very interesting study on Telegram and its role in the 2019 Hong Kong protests can be found here. The Founder. Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, also cultivates a rebel image. Even the founding itself is considered an act of resistance against the Russian authorities. Durov was CEO of vKontakte, the “Russian Facebook,” and was supposed to hand over data on Euromaidan supporters. He refused, had to leave – and founded Telegram. When Russian authorities wanted to block Telegram because of its political permissiveness, Durov managed to get around the blocks. Even more, he managed to get the authorities to partially block their own sites. Not only the tech scene had to smile. Durov also claims that Telegram has never been given even one record to a governmental institution. However, this claim has probably been refuted by very recent research by Der Spiegel. Nevertheless, if you take all this together, Telegram seems to be made for a global second messenger, which serves more and more as a social network and organizing tool and is used less and less as a simple messenger. Let’s stay with the topic of politics for a moment, because Telegram naturally also has downsides that I don’t want to conceal here. The political and thematic tolerance also favors people and channels that one would rather avoid. From porn to drugs to right-wing agitation, you can find just about anything on Telegram. Especially the anti Corona protests and the right-wing scene in the U.S. became real movements with large reaches, not least on Telegram. Another example takes us back to Ukraine. Here, of course, Telegram is not only used by Ukrainian authorities and refugees. The Russians also use the app to spread propaganda. It’s the same here in Germany. Some organize their sports club via the blue messenger, others their Nazi sports groups. Parallels to social networks are also becoming increasingly apparent here. Here, as there, the eternal conflict between free speech and its limits applies. What is needed here is a discourse that seeks and finds compromises. Telegram is also not really up to date when it comes to data protection. Although there is the option to encrypt messages End2End, the user has to actively set this. However, it is not really secure in this case either, since Telegram does not publish any technical details and we thus have to rely on the company’s statements. Nevertheless, I personally think that it is wrong to demonize Telegram, as it so often happens in Germany. Here I too often encounter the statement “I don’t use Telegram, there are too many Nazis.” How about “I don’t drive cars, people die every day as a result”? No, both a messenger and a car are tools, technical aids that make our lives easier and offer many possibilities, and so can be used for good or bad. At the moment, at least, Telegram is helping a lot of people in Ukraine to defend themselves, to stay in touch, or just to survive. That is very human.

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*WTF is Web5

A vision, a joke or the next iteration of the internet?
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