What is Toolkitty?

Toolkitty is a coordination app for collectives, organisers and venues. You can organise events, share resources and spaces in a collaborative calendar.


Who is Toolkitty for?

Toolkitty's collaborative feature supports informal and formal groups to self-organise1. Toolkitty has been trialled with a wide range of users in the arts sector including festivals, music venues and artists' studios, as well as a mental health charity.
Approaches to Toolkitty may depend on the users' needs. For example:

  • A venue can use the app to minimise booking admin with regular promoters and collaborators able to autonomously add their own events.
  • A network of housing coops can use the app to share resources and offer spaces to each other for their gatherings.
  • An artist can use the resource section of the app to list locations of found objects which can then be collected by others for use in a collaborative artwork.
  • A mental health charity can use the calendar to organise internal events, spaces and resources for their users.

What technology?

Toolkitty is built on a Peer-to-Peer (P2P)2 network designed by p2panda. This means the network data is stored on the phones of all the members. This makes it very secure and cheap to operate as it requires no external server. P2P incentivises resource sharing and cooperation. This suggests an alternate online model to using centralised servers which own and store your data. The app is Local First3. Reducing internet dependencies makes the app faster, more robust and usable anywhere in the world.


The functionality of the app has been inspired by models of non-hierarchical4 organising. Horizontal methods of organising in digital space are an effective way for groups to run a calendar and organise resources while minimising the workload of administrators.


Notes on design

Accessibility concerns have greatly informed the design process. The typeface in use across most of the app is Atkinson Hyperlegible, designed for visually impaired readers. We've user tested Toolkitty on a diverse cross section of people to ensure that the app is as simple as possible for everyone to use. Further feedback will help shape future edits to the interface.


Context + people

Toolkitty is an offshoot project of p2panda. P2panda received funding from Innovate UK to build this prototype of Toolkitty.

The Toolkitty team:
footsteps Sam Andreae → back-end development
footsteps Andreas Dzialocha → back-end development
footsteps Andrew Reid → back-end development
footsteps Jack Murray-Brown → front-end development
footsteps Charlotte Roe → front-end development
footsteps Anna Corfa Isehayek → design
footsteps David Birchall → user testing

The seeds of Toolkitty can be found in activites around a collaborative publication called Blatt3000 and a collective festival building platform called Hoffnung3000. Hoffnung3000 was used to make the groups own festivals in Berlin. Further adoptions of the platform include a project with Documenta15 zukunftsdorf22.org in Kassel in 2022 and for the Antiuniversity Festivals in the UK. The idea behind Hoffnung3000 was to represent the non-hierarchical nature of communities in the structure of the platform and this is now being realised with Toolkitty using P2P network architecture.


Get in touch

Send the team an e-mail. Here's the source code.

  1. Self-organisation is the ability of people to organise themselves without a central authority↩
  2. A Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network is a decentralised network where participants (called peers) share resources and communicate directly with each other without a central server or intermediary↩
  3. Local First describes a mobile app that can perform most, or all, of its key functionality without having to be online.↩
  4. A form of organising that emphasises autonomy, collaboration and shared decision making.↩