“Hej, Olivia,” he says, giving her one of his trademark bear-hugs. “One last time for all time, huh?”

“You make it sound like climbing a mountain, Max,” she replies.

“That’s how it looks from where I’m standing.” He smiles. “Why I’ve always been happy to be the tech guy, you know? The tech doesn’t have its own opinions.”

“Thank god for that!” Olivia laughs. “Anyway, I’d much rather wrangle people than data.”

“Well, that’s lucky for all of us.”

Leaving Max to his cables and routers, she goes through to the kitchen, where Simon and a couple of young volunteers are putting the buffet together.

“Need a hand in here?” she asks.

“Nah, we’re good,” says Simon, head-down in the refurbished chest-freezer at the back of the kitchen. “These two are on the case. What else do I need out of here, guys?” Simon’s young assistants start calling out a list from a tablet propped up on the kitchen worksurface, each item prompting a muffled curse and the sound of ice scraping on ice from the depths of the freezer.

“We’re getting a bit low on a few things,” says Simon, “but the inventory seems pretty much correct. Details should all be in the database, ready for the meeting. Good thing summer’s coming, though! Be nice to have more fresh stuff to work with, I’m bored of cooking from frozen.”

“Noted,” says Olivia. “We’ll be looking at plans and projections for the coming year, so keep your ears open and your voting thumb ready, yeah?”

Simon’s arm rises out of the freezer, the thumb of his fist curling up and down like some cartoon worm—that old, jokey gesture from the förening’s first year, six years previously. It was hard for Olivia to believe it had been so long, or that it would soon be over.

# An hour or so later, the meeting-room is fragrant with the smells of spices from all over the world and herbs from a dozen different local kitchen-gardens, and full of people chatting and munching their way through plates of Simon’s food. If he was really running low on ingredients, you couldn’t tell from the buffet on the trestle tables along the side of the room—but then, you never could. Simon had ended up as the community cook the same way most of them had ended up with their roles. You’d volunteer to do a bit of everything, until eventually you found the thing you were really good at, or that you liked best—which was often the same thing.

Not always, though. For all that she preferred wrangling people to wrangling tech, as she’d said to Max, Olivia didn’t exactly enjoy being ordförande; it was hard work, listening to people properly, locating the possibility-space for decisions between what the members wanted and what the data told them would be possible, and then letting them explore the options without pushing for whatever she thought best. She guessed she must be pretty good at it, though: eighteen successive months in the chair, three times longer than the previous occupant.

It helped a lot, of course, to have a rotating group of members trained in conflict resolution. Three would be on duty for every meeting, and more for a big session like this one, where the higher stakes—and, increasingly, the mix of languages—came with extra challenges. Problems could emerge from heated discussions conducted through real-time translation apps in a crowded room, and Olivia had been obliged to call a half-hour time-out at last year’s årsmöte, just to give two rival factions time to cool off. They’d all laughed about it afterwards, not least at the irony of coming close to a fist-fight over the neighbourhood zucchini production quota. But this stuff really mattered to people—mattered enough for them to give up whatever free time they had left after their jobs, mattered enough for them to find someone to look after the kids while they were at the meetings.

It mattered to them, and so it mattered to Olivia: being ordförande was her sacrifice, in recognition of theirs. But it was tiring, and she knew it would be good to lay the burden down.

She looks around the room, seeing all the chairs occupied, a bunch of people standing along the back wall, and a handful clustered around Max, doing the last-minute hand-over of data from their neighbourhood in whatever formats they can manage, from thumb-drives to grubby old ledgers and notebooks stained with soil and rainwater. The room is rammed, and all the windows are open to admit some fresh air, and with it the smells and sounds of Norra Grängesbergsgatan. A brief shower of rain earlier in the afternoon has left that lingering, special smell that Olivia can never remember the name of, and even over the chatter of the crowd, she can hear the squabbling of the seagulls in their eternal war with the crows, and the occasional whoop of an air-wrench from the repair shop on the other side of the street.

The rapid boom of the förening’s early years died off a while back, but they were still adding members at a fairly steady rate... if it keeps on growing like this, they’ll need to look at getting a larger space! She taps a quick note into the meeting agenda to raise the issue during Any Other Business, and waves quickly to her partner Calle, taking a place at the back of the room. He must just have finished his courier shift, bless him, as he’s still in his cycling gear.

“All ready to go at my end,” calls Max from behind the screen of his refurbished laptop, at the far end of the board’s table at the front of the room.

“Time to get this show on the road,” agrees Adeline, who has played board secretary—and, when necessary, the tough cop to Olivia’s nice cop—for nearly a year now. She turns to Olivia, raises one eyebrow. “What say you, madam chairperson?”

Olivia’s going to miss all this, she realises: Olivia’s deadpan eyebrow, Simon’s wriggling thumb, Max’s blunt assessments. She lifts the little hammer, which an old guy from Rosengård had carved from the leg of a broken, fly-tipped table a few years back, and then given to the community. So many memories, so many gifts.

“Let’s do it,” she says quietly, and then raises her voice along with the hammer. “Dear members, we are ready to call this meeting to order!”

A respectful hush descends on the meeting-room, punctuated by the burbles of a few nursing babies. The meeting has begun.

#

They moved quickly through the early items on the agenda, as always. Signing off on the previous month’s meeting minutes was easy, because everyone had access to them in the digital community space, and could either pre-sign their approval or raise their points in advance of the meeting, if they had any. Max’s mics and machines made light work of recording and transcribing everything clearly, so there were rarely any big problems. You might get one or two of the usual suspects chasing their pet issues, particularly at a big årsmöte like this one—but this time round, it seems everyone is keen to get straight to the main event. It’s the last week of April, and spring is making itself felt all over Malmö in its usual fits-and-starts fashion; it’s time to plan the growing season.

First up is the stores report, and Simon is as good as his word: the inventory’s all updated, and Max conjures up visual representations of quantities of ingredients remaining and amounts consumed at each community dinner on the projector. They’ve found this move really helps to engage their members who aren’t so strong on maths and numbers: complex, sprawling spreadsheets become moving charts and graphs, and the förening’s activities—its daily pay-what-you-want dinners, its youth-clubs and craft circles and maker-meetups—come to life on the back wall behind the board table. Their provisions have held out through the hard months of winter, thanks in no small part to Simon’s inventive knack for preserving ingredients and combining them in unexpected but tasty ways. But last summer was also a bumper year for production, Olivia reminds the room; it would be best not to assume they’ll get the same amount this year, especially as the förening keeps growing.

Alv* stood up to deliver the farming forecast, their short-cropped hair mussed, as always, as if by a giant hand from the sky.

“We’ve added nearly half an acre of raised beds for the coming season,” they announce, “thanks to members old and new along Lönngatan.” On the wall behind them, Max’s magic maps the neighbourhood with coloured patches indicating growing space under community control.

“That’s the good news,” Alv* continues. “The less-great news is that there’s a lot more competition for compost and soil this year. Our fellow community up in Kirseberg managed to buy themselves a little bit of farmland outside the ring-road, so they’re going to need a whole bunch more compost than last year, and that may drive up prices.”

At the back of the room, someone boos this news. Olivia’s pretty sure it’s meant to be light-hearted, but decides to interject anyway, just to keep the vibes on track.

“I would like to remind this meeting that we have a strong relationship of mutual support with our siblings in Kirseberg; their success is our success. Max?”

At Max’s command, the map projection zooms out to cover the whole city, with coloured blocks and lines indicating production and trade of foodstuffs not just in Sofielund and Kirseberg, but in the half-dozen other smaller community föreningar around the city.

“The constitution of this community is very clear,” Olivia continues. “We aim to look after the people of Sofielund, but we recognise that the best way to do that is by building an economy of mutual support that connects Sofielund to other neighbourhoods in a similar situation. Kirseberg has already been in touch with us about arranging a collective bid for soil and compost this year; Alv* and Kirseberg’s agriculture lead have been looking all over Skåne for the best deals. When things are difficult, we share the burden!” She flashes her best chairperson grin. “And when things are easy, we share that too.”

“You might say,” drawls Adeline, “that we’re victims of the success of our own ideas. The big agricultural producers out in Skåne are engaging a lot harder with circular economics this year. Difference is, they’re looking for a profit margin, while we’re not.”

Adeline’s interjection raises some laughs, and a few more boos, but the tension is broken. Alv* finishes their report, and Olivia gives the floor to Mahmood—a shy, quiet man who is nonetheless perhaps the förening’s best-known face, due to his always being out and about, whatever the weather, installing and adjusting the hundreds of remote sensors that cover the area. He wastes few words.

“Pollution down on last year, air quality up. Strong rainfall through the start of the year. Biodiversity increased by a factor of one point four. Forecast for pollinators, excellent.” The map shifts again, covered now with little icons of flowers and bees in a range of sizes and colours, and there is applause and cheering from the assembled members.

“Car traffic down nearly twenty percent overall. Better than expected.” A shy smile creeps onto Mahmood’s face as he continues, and clicks for the next map. “Foot traffic to community gardens and play-spaces up by thirty-two percent on this time last year.”

More applause, more cheers. “And the municipality said it couldn’t be done,” called a voice from the back of the room. “That’ll show ‘em!”

Olivia applauds with everyone else, but decides not to remind the meeting that the city administration didn’t so much hand the play-spaces over to the förening as simply stop maintaining them. The community deserves to feel proud at the work they’ve done at making Enskifteshagen safe and fun for kids again, and Mahmood’s figures are the proof of that; indeed, they’ll make it easier to argue for continued community control of those spaces.

But they needed to be careful not to take on too much. Their economy they’d built was based on hours of time gifted instead of money, but there were only so many hours in the day—and people still needed to work in the money economy in order to pay their rent, if they could. Calle’s courier work has kept his and Olivia’s own little household afloat on that side of things, but only just, and paying jobs were still hard to come by. The förening had been meant as a cushion for the community while the city struggled to keep its commitments; it hadn’t been designed to replace it! Olivia hoped that it wouldn’t ever need to. But it was a community principle to focus on the immediate issues affecting members, and to leave the wider political situation alone—a decision which, Olivia suspected, had a lot to do with the förening’s continued growth, in a time when many associations and community groups were struggling with apathy and shrinking memberships.

Mahmood takes his seat, and the applause tails off as the assembled members get their phones and tablets ready: the time for voting on proposals and plans is coming. But first comes the break for performance, another idea that had started as a joke but became a beloved tradition. A short row of poets and musicians forms up at the end of the board table, waiting their turn in front of the crowd. Someone had requested to do a movement piece this time, but the board had been obliged to say no; there was barely space between the members and the board for a guitarist to stand upright while wearing their their instrument, let alone for interpretive dance.

As the last singer starts winding down their song, Olivia takes another quick look at the agenda.

“Forty-two items to be put to a vote?” She glances at Adeline. “That’s got be some kind of record, right?”

“Actually,” says Max, “the record is forty-seven. That was the founding meeting.” He clatters at his keyboard briefly. “Took over three hours to clear them all.”

“I remember,” says Olivia, almost to herself. Fifteen of them, sat in a borrowed basement room in one of those blocks along the north edge of Lönngatan, wondering if their mad idea would last even a season… “But that was before we knew what we were doing,” notes Adeline, who had been among that first fifteen. “How about we see if we can break our record for votes-per-minute?”

“Challenge accepted, madame secretary,” says Olivia with a grin, and she raises the old man’s hammer once more.

#

They didn’t break the record in the end. Some tricky but important issues came up around some votes on a new protocol for mutual support between young families and older folk, and it took a while to agree a trial ratio for the value of hours exchanged across generations. Stuff like this could get tricky, because it relied on people understanding what they were voting on, and that meant that long-term members were at an advantage. Over the last year or so, a bloc of newcomers had taken to tactical voting as a way of critiquing what they saw as an unacknowledged power structure in the förening. This was no longer quite so confrontational as it had been—thanks once again to the horse-whisperers—but the bloc had held together, and was slowly becoming something like the party of opposition. They weren’t anywhere near trying to take over or upend the constitution, but they were gainig strength, introducing motions and pushing them through, often with the support of the more radical end of the old guard. Things were changing, Olivia thought to herself, and that was very much as it should be. But change was difficult. In a roomful of people who want things to change, there’s no guarantee they’re all going to want the same changes.

Nonetheless, a one-vote-per-minute average was still pretty respectable, even by the association’s usual efficient standards. Now the meeting was winding down into its final phases, and as she called out the final item on the agenda, Olivia found herself dealing with conflicting emotions: pride, tiredness, excitement, regret, fear for the future.

“Finally, this meeting must decide on a new ordförande, with immediate effect.” She looks out at the assembly, blinking away the start of tears. “It’s time for me to go, folks. I hereby nominate Adeline Sonnesson for the role. Do I have a second?”

“Aye!” someone shouts, and Max’s machines bleep to confirm their capture of the decision.

“Seconded, then. All those in favour?”

“Aye!” The real votes are done through their various devices, but the whole audience shouts their approval anyway, even the radicals, and Olivia bangs down the little hammer around a dozen times before giving up any hope of cutting through the noise.

“Meeting adjourned?” she asks Max.

“Meeting adjourned, madame chairperson.”

“Not any more, Max.” Olivia pats Adeline on the back. “This is your main girl from now on.”

“I’ll never be able to do it like you do it, Liv,” says Adeline, uncharacteristically subdued.

“I should hope not!” Olivia kisses her on the forehead. “You’ll do it like you do it, and that will be just right. Now, come on—I think we’ve earned a drink, don’t you?”

#

Later that evening, as the party is winding down, one of the old girls from the tower-block at the end of Uddeholmsgatan—a retired librarian, Olivia recalls, as she sips at a glass of cheap white wine—asks her if she’ll miss it.

“Being the ordförande? No—it’s been fun, and I’m glad to have done my part, but I’m happy to let it pass on to Adeline.”

“I meant the association in general,” says the librarian. “If I heard correctly, you’re moving away?”

“Not immediately,” she replies, “but yeah, we’re moving in a few months. Calle has always wanted to run a cycle shop, and when we heard there was one for sale up in Linköping, we decided to give it a go. We’ve got an apartment in a co-op lined up, but the current resident won’t be gone until the end of June.”

“So until then,” says Calle, coming up from behind her with a fresh glass of wine, “she’ll mostly be doing nothing, at least if I have anything to do with it!”

Olivia turns and hugs her man, who manages not to spill the wine.

“And do they have any föreningar like ours in Linköping, do you know?”

“Oh, she knows all right,” says Calle, rolling his eyes theatrically. “First thing you checked, wasn’t it, Liv? There’s a couple, yeah, but nothing in the neighbourhood we’re moving to.”

“Not yet, at least,” the librarian remarks.

“No, not yet,” says Olivia, thoughtfully.

“No, not yet,” repeats Calle, sliding his arm around Olivia’s waist. “But as soon as one starts up, I can guarantee you I’ll be joining it before Liv does.”

The librarian looks surprised. “Oh, really?”

“Hell yes,” says Calle, with a wink at Olivia. “That way I can at least try to vote against them making her ordförande.”

SCENARIO 4: “GIVE THEM A VOICE”

After years of inflation, high unemployment and institutional failure, we founded a community hub in our neighbourhood of Sofielund a few years ago. The goal was to create a better local connection between human beings across generations, with the assistance of digital solutions AND physical meet ups, in order to enable the individual and the community to create a supportive shared space, take decisions, and make (local) progress for the benefit of the whole community. Our community space also has a supportive function: it provides a space for shared cooking, and connects people so they can support each other in their daily life.

At weekly meetings we share our perspectives and discuss decisions taken; digital systems serve as a tool to transcribe these meetings, and to monitor and evaluate the actions we decide upon, in accordance with the governance model we set up. Besides monitoring our qualitative needs, it also includes data from digital twins about our physical environment including natural environments, air pollution, usage of public spaces etc. Those who cannot attend a meeting can add their concerns through the digital platform.

Among our key concerns is food security, and many meetings feature a review of the current status of the community gardens, fridge and kitchen, as well as decisions regarding the expansion of the gardens and the targets for vegetable production. Through our decisions and actions we hope to create more jobs within the community, a better work/life balance, stronger community bonds, and a better biodiversity within our neighborhood.