on the street · at the loom · the cloth half woven · the next thread on the shuttle
A shopfront on the street, with a loom in the window
Volunteers
Load-sharing, one thread at a time: volunteering with Stimpunks, and the way in.
This room is a cloth on the loom, half woven. The warp runs up from it to the beam, all one undyed thread: that is what has to fit. Across it, band by band, is the weft, a colour for every person and every thing they brought. Above the newest row the warp is bare and the window shows between the threads, and the shuttle is lying on the cloth with the next thread on it.
We exist as friction. The work that I do; it’s wildly painful.
We exist as friction, and it’s exhausting. Allies, load-share our burden of existing as friction against structural ableism.
A woven cloth holds because every thread grips the ones it crosses. No single thread carries the cloth, and none of them is holding it alone. Load-sharing is what weaving is.
Its channel on the CB is for volunteering with Stimpunks: asking what needs doing, offering what you can, and finding the people doing the same thing. Sign on and tune the radio to This room while you are in here, or open Volunteers on the chat page, under Community. If you are not on the CB yet, the Community Center says how to get an invite.
The warp: what has to fit
The warp goes on the loom first and stays the same from one end of the cloth to the other. Before you volunteer, get to know who we are and what we hold to, and ask yourself whether it fits:
We want a values fit, not a culture fit. We want cultural diversity instead of cultural conformity, such as a brogrammer atmosphere.
A values fit and not a culture fit. The weft can be any colour at all; it is the warp that has to be shared. And everybody on the CB, volunteering or not, keeps our covenant, which is a floor and not a ceiling:
Civil, non-discriminatory, and professional behavior should be a baseline and shared value held by people of all ideologies, regardless of political affiliation (with the obvious exception of hate groups).
The weft: what we need help with
These are the things our Volunteer page says we need help with, each a band in the cloth. Pick up whichever thread you like, as much or as little of it as you have.
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Reframing
Yourself and the people round you, out of deficit and into structure. It is the work under all the other work. Start with our rules of thumb.
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Advocating for access
At school, at work and in your community, and being a threat to inequity wherever you have a say.
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Spreading the word
Sharing our website, following us and subscribing to our newsletter, from our contact page.
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Alt text
Writing alt text for the pictures on our website.
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Plain words and other languages
Making plain language and easy read versions of our pages, and translating them.
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Pages, research and data
Gathering research, writing pages, and keeping the lists we hold up to date, like the organisations we are aligned with and what they offer.
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Flow patrol
Flow patrolling our website and our systems, and helping us use technology to run this thing.
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Art and print
Making art for our website, designing for vertical storytelling, and designing what we print.
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Fundraising
Raising money so our community can keep going, finding grants and writing the applications.
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Workshops and courses
Making workshops, courses and programmes for our learning space.
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Mentoring
Mentoring people in our community in whatever you know well.
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Telling our stories
Helping us tell them in words, science and art, and helping us find our people.
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In Austin, Texas
Care work, getting people places, running our learning space on site, and putting on accessible events, punk shows included.
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Wherever you are
Celebrating our interdependence, and elevating care as infrastructure, in your everyday life.
We could use some help from abled and neurotypical allies working with us and alongside us instead of for us.
An ecology of care
Nobody here is a cog in somebody else’s machine. What we are building is an ecology of care: people with different gifts, joined by trust, each doing the part that suits them and leaning on the others for the rest. Our Volunteer page leans on the Autistic Collaboration Trust for this, and so does this room.
You can think of it as the gifts that people bring to life by relating to each other.
Collaborative niche construction allows organisations and people to participate in the evolution of a living system and results in resilient social ecosystems.
Our evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human.
It is time to celebrate our interdependence!
Roles in social change
The Social Change Ecosystem Map is a framework that can help individuals, networks, and organizations align with social change values, individual roles, and the broader ecosystem.
Our Volunteer page asks you to think about which of its roles you relate to, or would like to: Weavers, Experimenters, Frontline Responders, Visionaries, Builders, Caregivers, Disruptors, Healers, Storytellers and Guides. Each is defined in the map itself, in the words of the people who made it. This is the one that names what a loom is for:
I see the through-lines of connectivity between people, places, organizations, ideas, and movements.
The playbooks
As a shorthand for the ways there are to help, our Volunteer page borrows four playbooks from Human Restoration Project. Most people are in more than one, and you do not have to choose.
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Joymakers
Design, art, music and the other things that get made.
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Empaths
Partnerships, hosting events, and the campaigns on social media.
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Envoys
Reaching out to schools, fundraising, and bringing what is out there back into our work.
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Operators
Transcribing and translating, copy-editing, data entry, and the rest of the running.
Everyone can contribute.
How to volunteer
Volunteering starts with the volunteer form on our Volunteer page, on stimpunks.org. It asks how to reach you, your social media if you would like to share it, what you are interested in and how you could help, and it shows you what you wrote before you send it. Nothing in this room takes your details: the form is the way in, and the channel is for talking.
What you send comes to our office as a volunteer application, sealed where it is kept, and only our directors, board members and administrators can open it. They are a tiny team, they cannot move at the speed of emergencies, and sometimes they take a week or two off. If you have not heard from us in a week, ask again.
What is not on this loom
- Nobody counts. No hours logged, no tally of who did what, no volunteer of the month, nothing ranked. A cloth does not keep a list of which thread did the most.
- Nobody owes time. Joining the channel commits you to nothing. You can say no, put a thread down half way, step back for as long as you need and pick it up again, and nobody asks why.
- Rest is not quitting. We exist as friction and it is exhausting, and that is true of the people helping too. When you are running on empty, Dead Tired Society and the Healing Checkpoint are on the street.
- Nobody is a hero, and nobody is a cause. We work with each other and alongside each other, not for anybody. Nobody here is selfless, and nobody we work with is anybody's good deed.
- Nothing here takes your details. The volunteer form is on stimpunks.org. This room has no form, no box and no sign-up sheet.
Who reads the channel, and for how long
- Everybody signed on to the CB can read this room’s channel, so say only what you would say in a room with all of them in it. It keeps the house norms, like every channel.
- Unless our administrators set this channel otherwise, every message on it goes two weeks after it was sent, and the radio says what it keeps, first under In this channel. For a piece of work that needs longer, Operations and Editorial in the forums are where the meetings’ work is kept.
- Nothing about you goes on it unless you put it there. Your address, your phone and the rest of what the form asks go on the form, never the channel.
Next door
- The Operations Room, at Cavendish Coworking, where the weekly Operations meeting gets the work of running Stimpunks done, open to anybody.
- The Editorial Room, next to it, where the weekly Editorial meeting writes, edits and designs what we publish, open to anybody.
- Show Your Work, up the street, for the work of folks in our community, out in the daylight before it is finished.
- Community Care, next door, the room for asking for mutual aid, peer support and any other help.
- Dead Tired Society, for when the helping has worn you out: peer support by and for people who are burnt out.
Whose this is
- The loom is ours, after the rainbow woven cloth our Volunteer page uses for our diversity and interdependence. It was drawn as code by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to Ryan’s brief, and nothing on this page calls an AI while you read it. The dyes are named for what they are made from; no cloth anybody wove is pictured.
- Every quotation belongs to whoever said it and is credited to them where it stands: UX Cake, GitLab, Contributor Covenant, the Autistic Collaboration Trust, Autistic Collaboration, NeuroClastic and Building Movement Project. Our page names the UX Cake episode and not who is speaking in it, and neither does this room. The words around the quotations are ours, written for this room.
- The roles in social change are the Building Movement Project’s, from their Social Change Ecosystem Map, and only their names are here; the four playbooks are borrowed from Human Restoration Project, as our Volunteer page says, and described here in our words.
- Every quotation in this room is 35 words or fewer and was read on one of our own pages, Volunteer, We exist as friction, Everyone can contribute, on 2026-10-27.
tools/make-volunteers.pychecks each one against those pages word for word whenever our copy of stimpunks.org is on the machine, and stops when our Volunteer page stops asking for what this room says it asks for. - The type is Sigmar One, by Vernon Adams, for the room’s name and its headings, under the SIL Open Font License, and Rasa, by Rosetta, Anna Giedryś, David Březina, for everything you read, under the SIL Open Font License, both read off their own records. More in the liner notes.
Job marker — a bobbin of madder-red thread that has rolled off the loom onto the floor
You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.
The job: What holds the cloth
Before the code: A woven cloth holds because every thread grips the ones it crosses. What is that grip, which our Volunteer page says we exist as?
Hint 1
It is in the first quotation on the page, and the second.
Hint 2
It is what stops two surfaces sliding past each other.
Last hint
Friction.
Give me the answer
The answer is Friction. Our Volunteer page and our We exist as friction page both say we exist as friction, and that it is exhausting. In a weave the friction between threads is what holds the cloth together, and no single thread carries it.
Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.
Quest code: BOBBIN
That is the one.
Our Volunteer page and our We exist as friction page both say we exist as friction, and that it is exhausting. In a weave the friction between threads is what holds the cloth together, and no single thread carries it.
Quest code: BOBBIN
HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?
Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so — and on this loom nothing moves at any setting, MAX GLITTER included, because the shuttle is lying where somebody put it down.