A live demo of Changemaker Lite — Canada's only sovereign, self-hosted campaign infrastructure from The Bunker Operations, co-presented with Public Interest Alberta. Explore it, break it, borrow from it.
A thousand neighbourhood lists will out-organize any single national list.
80 minutes. No installs, no signups, a browser tab is enough. Reed will walk you through how to escape the corporate, expensive, extractive, anti-social platforms of today — and get you started organizing your communities on free, open-source, self-hosted, and sovereign software of tomorrow.
Hands-on, in the room. Groups of four pick a corporate tool their org actually pays for, research FOSS replacements together in a shared CryptPad, and watch their words get pulled into a real public site — live, in front of the room, on PIA's own server. At the end, we freeze it: mkdocs build, refresh, the site you helped write is now permanent at pia2026.publicinterestalberta.org.
All are welcome. Bring a laptop or smartphone. You'll leave with three URLs: the site we built together, a forkable starter-stack repo you can clone and run on your own hardware tonight, and a handout listing every tool we touched, with a Canadian-context section.
n3-pia server
Public Interest Alberta has spent two decades building the province's advocacy infrastructure. The Bunker Operations is a Canadian worker co-op building sovereign, open-source infrastructure for grassroots organizations.
Changemaker Lite is the stack from Reed's session, packaged. For orgs that want the sovereignty without the maintenance burden. The starter stack you'll fork on Saturday is the foundation; everything you see below is what it grows into when an org needs more than a docs site and a newsletter.
Every feature is free software. Every byte lives on infrastructure you control. Every line of code is readable, forkable, and replaceable. We'd rather build infrastructure with you than sell to you.
Run it on your own server. Your members, your donors, your campaign data — on hardware you control, under law you choose.
AGPL-licensed. Read the code. Fork the code. Never get locked in by a vendor pricing hike or a sudden feature removal.
Built in Edmonton by a worker co-op. Data stays on your continent, under your privacy law, out of reach of extractive platforms.
Start with one tool. Add the others as you need them. No seat pricing, no feature walls, no quarterly contract renegotiation.
Saturday's starter stack is one docker-compose.yml — MkDocs, Listmonk, CryptPad, and a Pangolin tunnel — runnable on a $149 used Lenovo. This is what it grows into. Real features, end-to-end against seeded Edmonton data. Click anything; nothing breaks.
Public-facing pages your supporters and members would actually use. Real campaigns, real petitions, real events — all populated with Edmonton mock data.
Write-to-rep campaigns generating real emails to MLAs and councillors, with a public response wall.
Browse the live campaigns →Public petitions with verified signatures, postal-code capture, comments, and progress bars.
Open the petition wall →Town halls, rallies, fundraisers and online forums — with multi-tier ticketing and check-in built in.
See upcoming events →Single-choice and yes/no/abstain polls with live results, comments, and shareable links.
Vote in a poll →Doodle-style group scheduling for canvasses, town halls and trainings — anonymous voting supported.
Find a time →Goal-tracking donation pages with suggested amounts, monthly options, and Stripe checkout.
View donation pages →Public heatmap of organizing activity across all 12 Edmonton wards, with real ward boundaries.
Open the map →Open canvasses, phone banks, and event shifts with self-serve signup and capacity tracking.
Find a shift →Volunteer spotlights honouring the people who showed up — featured monthly.
Meet the volunteers →The operations side: how staff and admins run the show. These pages live in the docs because the features themselves are admin-only.
Door-knocking turfs, canvasser routing, GPS tracking, and live response logging.
See the guide →Newsletters, SMS, and segmented email blasts without Mailchimp or Constant Contact.
See the guide →Landing pages, homepage control, nav, and docs — all editable in-browser by your team.
See the guide →Member lists, role-based access, volunteer portal, and a full audit trail.
See the guide →Dive into the broader feature network — scheduling, commerce, wall of fame, and more.
Full tour →Reed Larsen is an Edmonton-based communications generalist and co-founder of The Bunker Operations, a Canadian worker co-op building sovereign, open-source digital infrastructure for grassroots organizations. After four years as external communications lead for Edmonton City Councillor Michael Janz, Reed now supports advocacy groups including AB for Abortion, Pride Corner, and Public Interest Alberta — running self-hosted servers, custom databases, and AI systems that free community organizers from extractive corporate platforms. A political scientist by training and a stubborn generalist by practice.
Started their career at 21 teaching English to 120 elementary kids in Shenzhen, China. Claims this is where their tolerance for controlled chaos was first forged.
This demo is a joint effort between Public Interest Alberta and The Bunker Operations, built to show conference attendees what campaign infrastructure looks like when it belongs to the movement. Fork the starter stack, run it tonight on a $149 used Lenovo, and take this home.