Workshop Curriculum for starting your organizational move away from Big Tech

Prepared by: Dirk Slater, FabRiders

Date: September 2nd 2025

Objective

This session will help your team share ownership of both the decision and process of leaving big tech platforms.

Materials

  • In person: Post-it notes, flipchart paper, markers

  • Online: Etherpad or a suitable collaborative doc

Session

Starting the session

Begin with a ‘go-round’. Get everyone to respond to a prompt.  One that might be appropriate: “When did you first use a computer?”

Then explain the goal of the session “we’re going to explore whether we should become less dependent on big tech platforms and how we might do that”. Then run through the agenda and also any relevant guidelines.

First Breakouts on Why

Ask people to find one other or two other people that they work with the least. This should create groups of 2 or 3 people.  Once the groups have been formed, distribute the post-it notes and ask them to discuss the questions: Why should we stop using big tech platforms?  How might it have an impact on our ability to achieve our mission or accomplish our work? Ask them to capture the responses on the post-it notes. Tell them they have 10 minutes to discuss their answers.

Prepare two spaces on the wall. One that has “why” and the other that has “impact”. 

When the groups have generated their responses, have them put their post-it notes on the appropriate wall.

Large Group Discussion on impacts

Give everyone an opportunity to read the post-it notes on the wall and then ask for take-aways and aha’s

Then ask “What might we lose in leaving the big tech platforms”? Popcorn responses and capture them on a piece of flip chart paper.

You will likely want to assure people that if you were to leave ‘big tech’ you wouldn’t do it overnight – that it would be part of an intentional process that would happen over time to mitigate any harmful impact

Break

Large Group

When people come back from break, ask people to ‘popcorn’ names of services we have heard of that are not run by Big Tech companies and what those services do. Examples you could use:  Signal for exchanging messages, Mastodon for social media, Etherpad for collaborative editing of documents,  Protonmail for email, LibreOffice for word processing.

Second Breakouts on Starting Points

Ask people to form groups no bigger than four.  You might want to ask people to find ‘three other people you work with the most’. It might also be appropriate to group people by team. Once they have formed breakout groups, ask them to consider: “Where should we start migrating from big tech? What might be ‘low-hanging’ fruit.” Again, remind people that this should be done in small steps and that the purpose of this breakout is to identify starting points, not the whole journey.  Again ask people to write their answers on post-it notes.

Large Group Discussion on External Help

Ask everyone to put their post-it notes on a wall at the front of the room and then ask, “Where is the low hanging fruit” and then “Where might we need to get external help?” This might come in the form of training, developers, etc.

Where from here

Distribute post-it notes and ask everyone to identify three things they will do next to start the process of migrating away from big tech. Finish with a go-round asking everyone to share their three things.

 

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