Northern Action

We are a chapter of Indivisible located in northern MN. We provide tech support and skill sharing to progressive activists and organizations.

We are a loose collaborative of folks that have worked as internet coders, artists, social change activists, and publishers. We collaborate, resonate & help distribute your message through digital & analogue channels. We hold regular skill share gatherings.

In 2025 we started helping organizations that needed tech assistance managing communications for their rapidly growing membership. We saw an opportunity to build relationships between organizations we served and to share resources when there was a common goal. We are strong believers in the power of networks & the revolutionary potential of the humble hyperlink.

Current Projects

• Northern Progressives
• Zenith City Indivisible
• Afton Indivisible
• Writers for Democratic Action Minnesota
• Twin Ports Rapid Response
• Ely Indivisible
• The thought machine

Building Archives

We started archiving the newsletters that often serve as the backbone for group communications.

Donate

We are all volunteers. You can help us offset the cost of web hosting, print and travel to regional meetings by making a tax-deducatble donation.

Guiding principles

• build simple solutions
• demystify tech
• embrace a minimalist aesthetic
• center accessibility
• model & teach reusable, mappable skills
• build tech that supports content and communications
• build multi-threaded channels of communication
• be agile, adaptive and flexible to meet a rapidly changing world
• build affordable solutions
• be multi-modal: embrace channels that span face-to-face, print, web, email
• share skills
• choose to archive rather than erase
• remember that we are writing history ::: resonate & amplify the now but also record history in the making ::: record stories & shape the narrative
• center text-first in written communications. Images are great. Posters are colorful means to promote events but make it a priority to also provide text information outside the frozen image.
• liberate content: apply formattting & styling & platform specifics as a final part of the publishing process. think of content as data : a reusable core resource
• build libraries not advertising brands
• build hypertext, relational, interlinked information environments that encourage traversal ::: that empower exploration and deep dive opportunities
• encourage open source, creative commons, duplication ::: make it easy for others to copy our content
• touching both the surface content and the meta-structure revealed in the underlying code/markup helps us think
• the visible text and the underlying semantic structure of a document both matter ::: be a web writer
• hypertext writing facilitates a clear declaration of the relationships within a text and between texts
• avoid web builders which so often create code bloat and opaque, inaacessible documents
• keep learning together in a rapidly changing technology landscape with all its promise & its perils