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We are experts in Drupal migrations. We can move content from your old site to your Drupal 8, 9, or 10 site so that you can keep working with all of your old content, all while gaining access to the flexibility, functionality, and forward-compatibility of modern Drupal.

Perhaps most important, while helping improve your content architecture and moving everything to your upgraded site, we will preserve your old site's SEO, which may have been years in the making. Agaric migrations keeps crucial paths on your site—which have been indexed by search engines, linked to from around the web, and bookmarked by your visitors—working or redirected to equivalent content.

Whether you are merging seven types of content containers (that were all basically blog posts) into one—or splitting a ninety field complex posting form into different content types with appropriate functionality for different purposes—we make your old content work the way you want to work now. By improving your old content, not only improving your website around it, you gain the flexibility to repurpose the old content for the lengthening tail of new ways of using old content. Devices and channels are continually changing, and it's not just about displaying content any more. Audio formats are increasingly popular, and providing access to your content as data, to be remixed or related to other content can make your website content much more than an archive. We bring your old content into new environments where its value can be unlocked.

The professionals come to us

Other (excellent!) web development shops often contract out to us for help with the content migration portion of site rebuilds and rebrands that they are working on, especially the hardest parts.

Similarly, clients will hire us for capacity building for migrations specifically. Agaric can provide a combination of services to give you the ability to get your website upgrade done well and efficiently. For example, we can train internal staff to be able to take on more migration and development work, without needing us. And we can also, at the same time, take on the most complex parts of the migration that do not seem likely to need repeating, or we can help where you get stuck.

(We'll never e-mail you more than once every six months or so, nor will we ever sell your e-mail address.)

And let us know if you'd like help migrating your site or data.

Or get ahead on getting ready to learn to migrate content by checking out the migration training resources.

Or check out our other trainings and our other fine services, including doing migrations for you and building the whole site, too.

Upcoming Trainings

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Find It makes it easier for a small team in government to make sure that there are resources available for a variety of residents' needs.

BigBlueButton screenshot of Agaric's Show and Tell

We can look at the recent popularity of some widely used platforms like Zoom and ask ourselves some questions as to why we still use them when we know a lot of terrible things about them. Agaric prefers to use a free/libre video chat software called BigBlueButton for many reasons, the first one being the licensing, but there are many reasons.

Zoom has had some major technology failures, which the corporation is not liable to disclose. At one point, a vulnerability was discovered in the desktop Zoom client for MacOS that allowed hackers to start your webcam remotely and launch you into a meeting without your permission. The company posted a note saying that they fixed the issue. Unfortunately, the Zoom source code is proprietary and we are not even allowed to look at it. There is no way for the community to see how the code works or to verify that the fix was comprehensive.

The Zoom Corporation stated early on that the software was encrypted end-to-end (E2EE) from your device to the recipient's device. This was untrue at the time, but the company states that it has been corrected for users on their client app. While it is no longer true that E2EE is unsupported, it does require that you use the proprietary Zoom client for E2EE to work. Without E2EE, any data that is retrieved on its way from your computer to a server can be accessed! The only real security is knowing the operators of your server. This is why Agaric uses trusted sources like MayFirst.org for most of our projects and we have a relationship with our BigBlueButton host. The Intercept also revealed that Zoom users that dial in on their phone are NOT encrypted at all

BigBlueButton does not have a client app and works in your browser, so there is no E2EE. The idea for E2EE is that with it,  you "do not have to trust the server operator and you can rely on E2EE" because the model implies that every client has keys that are protecting the transferred data. However: you MUST still use a proprietary client in order to get the benefits of E2EE support, so once again you MUST trust Zoom as you have no permission to examine the app to determine that the keys are not being shared with Zoom.

Of course there is always the fact that hackers work day and night to corrupt E2EE and a Corporation is not obligated to tell you the customer every time there has been a security breach, and this information is usually buried in the terms of service they post - sometimes with a note saying the terms are subject to change and updates. A Corporation is not obligated to tell you, the customer when there has been a security breach" unless any personal information is exposed. There are now mandatory timely disclosure requirements for all states: https://www.ncsl.org/research/telecommunications-and-information-technology/security-breach-notification-laws.aspx ...Can Zoom really be trusted? As with some laws, the fine that is applied is low and affordable and subject to the interpretation of the courts and the status of knowledge your lawyer is privvy to - meaning most Corporations normally have a battery of lawyers to interpret the law and drag the case out until you are... broke.

In the case of BigBlueButton encryption, E2EE would only make sense if there are separate clients using an API to connect to the BBB server so a user does not have to trust the BBB server operator. If the user trusts the server operator, then there would be no need for E2EE." Lesson learned: It is always best practice to know and trust your server hosts as they are the ones that have the keys to your kingdom. 

Some technology analysts consider Zoom software to be malware. Within companies that use Zoom, employers are even able to monitor whether or not you are focusing on the computer screen during meetings which seems excessively intrusive. Speaking of intrusive, the Zoom Corporation also shares your data with FaceBook, even if you do not have a FB account - that could be a whole blog in itself, but just being aware of some of the vulnerabilities is a good thing to pass on. Some of the bad stuff remains even if you uninstall the Zoom app from your device! Even though a class action suit was filed over privacy issues, the company stock still continued to rise.

Those are many reasons why we do not support Zoom. But there are also many reasons why we prefer BBB over Zoom. Besides, BBB has many great features that Zoom lacks:

1. Easily see who is speaking when their name appears above the presentation.

2. Chat messages will remain if you lose your connection or reload and rejoin the room.

3. Video is HD quality and you can easily focus on a persons webcam image.

4. Collaborative document writing on a shared Etherpad.

5. Easily share the presenter/admin role with others in the room.

6. Write closed captions in many languages, as well as change the language of the interface.

7. An interactive whiteboard for collaborative art with friends!

Collaborative artwork on BBB whiteboard.

One huge advantage of free software, like BBB, is that you can usually find their issue queue where you can engage with the actual developers to report bugs and request feature enhancements. Here is a link to the BigBlueButton issue queue.

So, why do people keep using a platform like Zoom, even though there are many features in BigBlueButton that are much better? 

There is very little publicity for free software and not many know it exists and that there are alternative solutions. You can find some great suggestions of software and switch to it by using this site called switching.software. The marketing budget for Zoom is large and leads you to believe it has everything you will need. Sadly their budget grows larger everyday with the money people pay for subscriptions to the platform. As a result, many people go with it as it is already used by their friends and colleagues, even though there are reports of irresponsible behavior by the Zoom Corporation. This is why the New York school system does not use Zoom and many organizations are following suit. The company gives people a false sense of security as it is widely used and very popular.

Of course, there are reasons to avoid other proprietary chat platforms too...

Agaric offers BigBlueButton for events and meetings. Check out our fun BBB website at CommunityBridge and test drive the video chat yourself!

If this discussion interests you, please share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Looking to learn more about problems with Zoom? There are a lot of articles about Zoom scandals.

Looking to learn more about protecting your privacy online? These links have some helpful information and videos for tech-savvy people and organic folks alike!

2021 could be the year we all begin to STOP supporting the Corporations that oppress us. 

Special thanks to Keegan Rankin for edits!

 

Agaric is excited to announce that we will be facilitating a training at Drupal Europe. This will happen on Monday, September 10 and registration is open now.

Buy tickets or ask Agaric about other payment options and scholarship opportunities!

This training has past but please let us know that you're interested in future training opportunities:

When you think of training, perhaps you remember an event that you were sent to where you had to learn something boring for your job. The word training does not usually make people smile and jump for joy, that is unless you are talking about Drupal training. These gatherings spread the Drupal knowledge and increase diversity in the community of Drupal developers.

Join us for the next Drupal Global Training Day with our online full day session on getting started with Drupal on November 29th 2017. It will be held online from 9 AM to 4 PM EST.

Sign up now.

A link to the live workshop on Zoom will be provided when you sign up!

The Drupal Association coordinates four dates each year as Global Training Days, designed to offer free and low-cost training events to new-to-Drupal developers and to create more Drupal talent around the world. The community is growing exponentially as more people learn how fun and easy it is to get involved and be productive. Volunteer trainers host these global events in person and online. In 2016, a Global Training Days Working Group was established to run this program. There is a Global Training Days group on Drupal.org that lists trainings around the world.

Mauricio Dinarte will be leading the training online on November 29th. As an introduction to Drupal a person needs to learn certain things that are specific to Drupal and some are not that intuitive. It is important to cover the very basics in terminology and process. An introductory class can include many things, but this list is what Mauricio covers during the day long event:

  • Drupal installation requirements and process
  • Nodes
  • Content types
  • Fields
  • Blocks
  • Theme regions
  • Views
  • User and permissions
  • Menus
  • Taxonomy

The outcome of the day of training is that everyone walks away understanding the main moving parts of Drupal and a bit about what they do. Of course you will not become a developer overnight, but you will have enough information to build a simple site and then explore more of Drupal on your own.

You can follow up with many online tutorials and by joining the Drupal group in your area and attending the meetings. At meetings you will connect with other people at different levels of skill and you will be helped and helpful at the same time! If there is no Drupal group in your area, I suggest you start one. It can start as easily as posting online that you will be at a specific location doing Drupal at a certain time of day - you will be surprised at who may show up. If no one shows up the first time, try again or try a different location. One of the best things about Drupal is the community and how large and connected we are. If you start a group, people will usually help it grow.

Bringing new people to Drupal is not only good for increasing the size of the member base, it also brings diversity and reaches people that may never have had an opportunity or access to a free training. Drupal trainings are usually held at a university in or near a city which attracts people from different backgrounds and cultures. We can also reach people that are not in a city or near a school by sharing online.

Have you ever thought about volunteering at a Global Training Days event? We have a blog about organizing your own Global Training Days workshop that can get you started. This is a great way to get to know the people in the community better, up your skills and perhaps share something you have learned. I learned much about programming by assisting developers at sprints and trainings. This is where the real fun begins. Learning does not have to be stressful, and in the Drupal community people are friendly and welcoming. No question is stupid and even those with no experience have valuable skills. Developers love people without prior experience because they make the perfect testing candidates for UI and UX. The down side is that Drupal is so captivating that you will probably not remain a newbie for very long, so enjoy it while it lasts.

One of the true highlights of Global Training Days is seeing all the people around the world gain valuable skills and share knowledge. We hope you can join us.

 

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This month, the National Institute for Children's Health Quality is celebrating Agaric's support in making the most of the digital health revolution, part of their 20th anniversary campaign.

It got us thinking about how long we've been working in the space. Indeed, Agaric is proud to have been helping medical and scientific communities almost from our founding.

Woman looking at linked documents.In 2008, we started building biomedical web communities enriched by semantic data. Working with researchers Sudeshna Das of Harvard University and Tim Clark of Massachusetts General Hospital, both affiliated with Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing, we were the primary software developers for the Scientific Collaboration Framework, a reusable platform for advanced, structured, online collaboration in biomedical research that leveraged reference ontologies for the biomedical domain. Making use of academic groups actively publishing controlled vocabularies and making data available in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) language, we built on work done by Stéphane Corlosquet, a lead developer in adding RDF to the Drupal content management system, to build the Science Collaboration Framework. SCF supported structured ‘Web 2.0’ style community discourse amongst researchers when that was a new thing, and made heterogeneous data resources available to the collaborating scientist, and captured the semantics of the relationship among the resources giving structure to the discourse around the resources.

Read more about it in Building biomedical web communities using a semantically aware content management system in Briefings in Bioinformatics from Oxford Academic.

Agaric led the work of building the website for an online community of Parkinson's disease researchers and research investors, on the Science Collaboration Framework, for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.

In 2012, we worked with Partners In Health to create a site for people on the front lines of combatting tuberculosis to share and discuss approaches.

In 2015, we began contributing to the Platform for Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography. PECE is "a Free and Open Source (Drupal-based) digital platform that supports multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research. PECE is built as a Drupal distribution to be improved and extended like any other Drupal project." We primarily worked on the integration of PECE's bibliography capabilities with Zotero's online collaborative bibliography services.

Also in 2015, we took on the exciting work of rebuilding the Collaboratory—a platform designed specifically to help improvement teams collaborate, innovate, and make change—for the National Institute for Children's Health Quality.  We're proud to be NICHQ's 2020 partners in making the most of the digital health revolution.

All in all, we're impressed by our twelve years of building sites for the scientific and medical communities, and looking forward to helping shape a healthy future.

Drutopia

Drutopia Platform by Agaric

A libre website builder for liberation, hosted cooperatively

Goal

The most power possible for all people over our own lives.

Building blocks of freedom

Power is coordination

“Knowledge is not power,” said Mariame Kaba (prisonculture), who knows a thing or two about it as a longtime organizer focusing on ending violence, dismantling the prison industrial complex, practicing transformative justice, and supporting youth leadership development.

Power is organization.

Ben tends to fixate on the injustices caused by an organized, unaccountable minority making decisions affecting a much larger but unorganized majority, but there are plenty of problems that have nothing or little to do with the problem of concentrated benefit and distributed cost.  They're just still problems because we, society, hasn't gotten our act together.  Traffic jams affect millions of people who, while mostly not in the 1% of income or wealth, are easily in the top couple quintiles.

Coordination requires not doing everything oneself

Ben notes: I strongly believes that we, people generally, need to have the ultimate say in the things that affect our lives, including our own workplaces, our Internet connection, our home water supply, mediating platforms like Facebook and Google, and our medical care.

That does not mean I or anyone else wants to be micromanaging my coworkers, laying cables and arguing protocols, inspecting plumbing, reviewing commits and moderating posts, and ordering doctors and nurses around.

Even various approaches to direct democracy don't mean people do all the work directly.  But how can we be the ultimate decision-makers in so many aspects of society?

"The market" is attractive here: vote with your money.

A regular systematic redistribution of wealth could make that a feasible answer, but for now it means a certain few dozen people have more decision-making power than a few billion people.

So we need to try some other way of delegating authority.

On the problem of self-selected leaders

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

Chapter 28, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Solutions to the problem of self-selected leaders

  • Citizens' Assembly: "a representative group of citizens who are selected at random from the population to learn about, deliberate upon, and make recommendations in relation to a particular issue or set of issues. Other similar bodies have operated in parts of Canada – notably British Columbia and Ontario – and there is a citizens’ assembly currently operating in Ireland. This website [citizensassembly.co.uk] draws together experiences of Citizens Assemblies in the UK."

Democracy at scale: Historically possible

almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not.

David Graeber and David Wengrow, "How to change the coures of human history (at least, the part that's already happened)" (2 March 2018) accessed 2018 December.

Tyranny of structurelessness

During the years in which the [open source] movement has been taking shape, a great emphasis has been placed on what are called leaderless, structureless groups as the main -- if not sole -- organizational form of the movement.  The source of this idea was a natural reaction against the over-structured [corporations and universities] in which most of us found ourselves, and the inevitable control this gave others over our lives, and the continual elitism of the Left and similar groups among those who were supposedly fighting this overstructuredness.

The idea of "[openness/structurelessness]," however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right. The idea is as little examined as the term is much used, but it has become an intrinsic and unquestioned part of [open source philosophy]. For the early development of the movement this did not much matter. It early defined its main goal, and its main method, as [writing working code and] consciousness-raising, and the "structureless" [open] group was an excellent means to this end. The looseness and informality of it encouraged participation in discussion, and its often supportive atmosphere elicited personal insight.  If nothing more concrete than personal [itch-scratching and] insight ever resulted from these groups, that did not much matter, because their purpose did not really extend beyond this.

Jo Freeman (aka Joreen) famous essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness (with the references to the women's liberation movement replaced with references to free software).

See also Cathy Levine's response, "The Tyranny of Tyranny".  An excerpt:

Contrary to the belief that lack of up-front structures lead to insidious, invisible structures based on elites, the absence of structures in small, mutual trust groups fights elitism on the basic level — the level of personal dynamics, at which the individual who counters insecurity with aggressive behaviour rules over the person whose insecurity maintains silence. The small personally involved group learns, first to recognise those stylistic differences, and then to appreciate and work with them; rather than trying to either ignore or annihilate differences in personal style, the small group learns to appreciate and utilise them, thus strengthening the personal power of each individual.

Related

Meritocracy

The word meritocracy comes from a political satire. It was never meant to be something we should aspire to. It was the opposite, actually, a warning about how we rationalize what we believe we've "earned". If that sentence doesn't seem to you applicable to the tech industry and our cyclical discussions about sexism, racism, and even occasionally classism,

... then read that blog post, "you keep using that word" (content warning: cuss words).

Rough consensus

Common in technical projects, a particular approach of "rough consensus"—a decision moves forward when all objections have been resolved in a way that everyone can live with or at least have been seriously considered and judged not to be showstoppers, whether or not anyone is still actively making the objection—is probably best described as the Internet Engineering Task Force's ideal in an informational document by Pete Resnick, On Consensus and Humming in the IETF.

Decision-making in Drupal

Drupal is not a democracy

The governance group itself, along with its assignment, is a product of the very power structure it's tasked with reworking. The task force was personally approved by the dictator for life. It reports to the dictator for life. Any decision on its recommendations will be made by the dictator for life.

Nedjo Rogers, Drupal and governance.

Governance group agrees

Having a BDFL model means loyalty, time, and attention is divided. There is often frustration as pressure for change and decisions reach an individual bottleneck. There is a strong feeling that any community change or action requires Dries’ approval before commencing let alone expanding. The project is bigger than one individual; it’s time to recognise that and place a community group at the center.

The Drupal Governance Task Force 2018 Proposal; see the issue posted for this in the Drupal Community Governance project.

Background reading

In addition to the works quoted above, here are some that informed our presentation.

Articles

Books

Other links of interest

Test your Drupal site's functionality in a human-readable format.

Behavior-driven development is a great way to write tests for code because it uses language that real humans can understand. Once you learn about BDD and its benefits, you may want to implement it in your next project. Let's see how to implement BDD in Drupal using Behat with the Mink extension.

To learn more about the cooperative movement, visit the US Federation of Worker Owner Cooperatives.

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A long, mobile version of the CRLA website's financials page.

Just one more thing...

The Talking Drupal Drupal logo - the brand name under a chat bubble containing a water droplet

Mauricio was interviewed on Talking Drupal to discuss his 31 Days of Migrations tutorial blog series on Drupal Migrations.

Agaric Newsletter image.

Agaric is sending out our first Newsletter since we formed 15+ years ago! Get on the list to receive our missives in the future.