The Good Ideas of Solidarity Tech

September 18, 2026

Ivan Pardo’s Solidarity Tech has an important idea for organizing tools: communication between organizers and workers should route through the tool. Organizers don’t need to log that they had a call, since making the call creates the record of the call.

The purpose of organizing tools is mainly to facilitate the management of an organizing campaign in two senses. First, as a tool to gather information about the readiness of a group of workers to take collective action–win a union election, demonstrate strength for a contract campaign, go on strike. Second, to facilitate the personnel management of organizers–are organizing staff doing what they were assigned to do.

The data, for both purposes, has typically been created through organizers doing data entry: logging contact attempts, conversations, assessments, event participation, and demonstrations of support. Some indicators of workers’s readiness have been automated or pushed down to the workers themselves, as with engagement tracking on digital communication or self checkin-in to events, but data entry remains a big part of the work of organizers.

In Solidarity Tech, organizers call or text workers through the native apps that Ivan has built for Android and iPhone. This technical decision means the consequence that the fact that a organizer called or texted a workers can be automatically logged.

The organizer still does have to do data entry–make notes about the call, adjust assesments record commitments to events, but since the communicatation happend through the app, Solidarity Tech is able to present a focused interface for recording the information about the communication that just happened or is ongoing.

The information that the organizer still has to record is now mainly the information the campaign needs to understand the state of the campaign. The information that is automatically created is what an organizing lead needs to manage personnel, at least at a basic level.

Now, this system worked really well for Rideshare Drivers United, when most organzing conversations were happening on the phone and text. If the conversation happened in-person. then an organizer has to log the whole interaction manually. But, even in campaigns when there are lots of face-to-face conversations, there are usally lots of conversations over phone and text too. Might as well make those easier.

Tools and Campaigns

The other important idea that I take from Solidarity Tech is that its strengths are due to its specificity. Ivan started developing the tool for a particular campaign, and its strongest ideas–integrated communications, first-class support for peer-to-peer organizing–can be traced directly to needs of of the workers building Rideshare Drivers United over many years.

We should do this more.

Every campaign and union does not need to build its own organizing tool, but maybe a lot of them should. If we had more particular tools, that would make our general tools better, but it would also help us explore new models in campaign structure and model.