Updated 2025-11-14: NEDcamp2025 slides markdown source

You've built sites with Drupal and know that with a few dozen modules (and a ton of configuring), you can do nearly everything in modern Drupal.

But what do you do when there's not a module for that? When the modules that exist don't meet your needs, and cannot be made to by contributing changes?

You make your own.

This blog post accompanies the New England Drupal Camp session and helps you take that step. All you need to do is write two text files. The first file tells Drupal about the module; it is not code so much as information about your code. The second file can have as little as three lines of code in it. Making a module is something that anyone can do. Every person developing a module is still learning.

Slides source code: https://gitlab.com/agaric/presentations/when-not-a-module-for-that

(Site with slides coming.)

This is about the simplest module you can make, and—unlike the popular implications of its name—is not growing by adding bits and pieces of other modules as we build a monstrosity (that is what we will do later, as exhuming and incorporating adaptations of other modules' code is our main technique for making new modules).

Frankenstein (example) | Drupal.org

Sharing your module out into the world

Put your module on Drupal.org: drupal.org/node/add/project-module

(I honestly do not know where they hide that link, but remember on any Drupal site you can go to /node/add and see what content you have access to create, and that includes creating projects on Drupal.org!)

It will start its life as a "sandbox" module by default.

Tip: Do not try to choose a part of core under "Ecosystem", and always check that the node ID it references is really one you want— there are a lot of projects with similar or even the same name.

Do not get overwhelmed; you can come back and edit this page later.

Press Save.

Then press the Version control tab to go to a page with Git instructions tailored to your module.

If you have already started your module and made commits in a repository dedicated to only your module, make certain your commits are on a branch named 1.0.x (the instruction included there git checkout -b 1.0.x will be enough to do that) and then follow only the git remote add and git push steps.

Double-checked to make certain the "Frankenstein" example module would not be better an example of when already "There's a module for that" and discovered the sad backstory— it exists in Drupal 7, people wanted it ported to modern Drupal, someone did port it to modern Drupal, but in a private GitHub repository and module maintainers did not take action and now that repo is gone.

Contributing to an existing module

(To do: Make into its own post.)

I apologize, on behalf of all of Drupal, that this is harder than it ought to be.

First, create an issue (if there is not one already) stating the needed feature or bug fix.

Before you start modifying the module's code, go into your project's composer.json and edit the version of the module you are using and want to contribute to and make it the dev version.

If you have gotten the module as ^3.0@RC for example, change that to ^3.0.x-dev@dev.

Run composer update.

Now, so long as you do not have a restriction in your composer.json, composer will get the git repository of that module for you and put it in the usual place for contributed modules, such as web/modules/contrib.

From the command line (terminal), change directory to the module you are modifying and have filed an issue against (for instance, cd web/modules/contrib/example).

Back on your issue, press the light green "Create issue fork" button and follow the instructions it adds to the issue to issue under the "Show commands" link, to the right of the issue fork.

The lines you want to copy paste are under the first "Add & fetch this issue fork’s repository" and the "Check out this branch" copy code sections in that expanded "Show commands" section.

Make your code changes and git add them. You can copy the entire line to git commit from the bottom of the issue. And finally, git push.

Now you need to make a merge request.

In the issue, press the link to your issue fork. If you do not see a blue button "Create merge request" at the top of this page, you need to log in. Pressing "Sign in" is likely to log you in automatically because you are already logged in to Drupal.org, but you have to press it.

Press the blue "Create merge request" button at the bottom of the form pressing the first blue "Create merge request" button took you to.

To keep using the improvements you contributed to the module while waiting for them to be reviewed and, with lots of luck, eventually merged in, make a couple more modifications to your project composer.json file. The information you need is the same as you put into the module's git configuration with the issue fork repository and branch checkout commands you copy and pasted above. We can get that information again most easily by opening up the .git/config file in the module (or theme) you have been contributing to, and use the URL under "origin" in your "repositories" section of your composer.json and the branch name at the bottom of the .git/config in the "require" section, like this:

    "repositories": {
        "drupal/example": {
            "type": "git",
            "url": "https://git.drupalcode.org/issue/example-123456.git"
        }
    },
    "require": {
        "drupal/example": "dev-123456-issue-fork-branch-name",
    },

Very, very helpful to go along with that, add this to a ~/.gitconfig file (or the equivalent on your OS).

# Git push helper via https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/03/20/git-rewrite-url-https-ssh/
[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
	pushInsteadOf = https://github.com/
[url "ssh://git@gitlab.com/"]
	pushInsteadOf = https://gitlab.com/
[url "ssh://git@git.drupal.org/"]

Resources

• How to become project owner, maintainer, or co-maintainer | Offering to become a project owner, maintainer, or co-maintainer | Drupal Wiki guide on Drupal.org

Drupal Slack channels

First, join Drupal Slack if you need to; more info on that at drupal.org/slack.

• #support
• #general
• #contribute
• #maintainers

Drupal Hooks

Old-style hooks take the hook name ("hook_something_cool") and replace hook with the module machine name ("example") and so having a function example_something_cool— this was the old way of doing namespaces with a sort of honor system. You do not have to worry about that anymore except insofar as you can recognize this style of hook in existing code to use as examples when you are writing new, cool hooks that use actual PHP namespaces.

The Drupal API's listing of all hooks (at api.drupal.org/api/drupal/core!core.api.php/group/hooks) opens with examples of implementing and changing the order of hooks.

The main thing it leaves out is where you actually put the hook implementations: In your module's folder inside a src/Hook subdirectory. Each set of hooks that will be called at the same time or that . At the top of this file goes a namespace declaration:

namespace Drupal\example\Hook;

Not changing example (or whatever it is in the example you copy) to match your module's machine name, or forgetting or making a typo in this line, is the first thing to check for if your hook does not seem to be having any effect.

The listing of hooks to see ways you can, well, hook into Drupal is a bit lower down on that page.

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Blog posts can be a valuable way for a variety of authors to post reflections, experiences and opinions.

At a minimum every blog post should have an image (which will be associated with the blog and display in different sizes in different displays), a summary field and a text paragraph in the body field.

All Drutopia content types are built using the Paragraphs module which lets you add a variety of types of content and arrange them in the order you wish. When creating a blog post you can add standard text paragraphs in the body paragraph field, but also add images or files (such as a PDF).

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.

Learning objectives

• When it makes sense to make a module (the hierarchy of code usage).
• Options for extending and overriding functionality provided by Drupal core and other modules.
• How to write a module that plays well with Drupal core and other modules.
• How to build a contrib-worthy module.
• Working with version control and Drupal's GitLab instance.
• The steps to opting in to Drupal security coverage and collaborating with the security team.
• Ways to contribute to or even maintain an existing module (avoiding making one!).
• And how to continue learning on your own.
• After this training you will be able to make Drupal modules, and contribute and maintain them on Drupal.org!

Prerequisites

The only prerequsite is having done some site building with Drupal, and so having familiarity with Drupal configuration and its limits. Information gained will be equally relevant to any version of modern Drupal, including 10, 11 and the coming Drupal 12.

This training is targeted to beginners, but as it is chock full of tips we expect people at intermediate and even advanced levels with Drupal to get significant benefit.

Making a module is something that anyone can do.  A useful one may be only two files with a few lines each.  There are many (mostly simple) rules to follow and tons of tools to use—and lots of exploration to do. Every person developing a module is still learning!

Setup instructions

A working Drupal 11 installation using DDEV will be provided.

This training will be provided over Zoom. You can ask questions via text chat or audio. Sharing your screen is optional, but you might want to do it to get assistance on a specific issue. Sharing your camera is optional.

What to expect

Prior to the training

Attendees will receive detailed instructions on how to setup their development environment. In addition, they will be able to join a support video call days before the training event to make the the local development environment is ready. This prevents losing time fixing problems with environment set up during the training.

On the days of the training

• The training totals 7 hours of instruction, which we usually split into 2 sessions
• A team of developers available to answer questions and help with training-related issues

After the training

• Attendees will receive a copy of the training recording.
• Attendees will receive a certificate of completion.

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.

Thank you for requesting that Micky Metts speak at your event. She will respond as soon as she can and let you know if she is available, or if she has any questions.

Agaric Team

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!

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.

• If you need to leak a zoom video without being identified, you need to be very careful!
• Zoom censorship of Palestine seminars sparks fight over academic freedom
• Zoom encryption is not suited for secrets
• Zoom is unclear about whether or not the app is actually end-to-end encrypted, which it isn't.
• And, yes - the wikipedia page has a good summary of some issues
• Stallman provides resources on what is bad about Zoom also

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!

• The Hated One
• Rob Braxman Tech
• Safe Services

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

Special thanks to Keegan Rankin for edits!

I've always had a passion for good design and healthy coding, even back in the days of owning a web site cart in downtown Natick. Back then, my business partner and I made all natural HTML roll-up web sites and, as an incentive for customers to wait in line, we baked Drupal into different flavored designs.

The Drupal became remarkably popular and before we knew it, the Agaric collective was born.

Today, you can enjoy Agaric's many great flavors. They are baked, all natural and totally delicious. So treat yourself well, and treat yourself often.

Visit http://www.agaric.com to find more about our other sites, discover great recipes, and stay in touch.

Dan Hakimzadeh
Co-Founder

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.

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.

Articles and talks that engage in broad themes from Micky's talk

• There is no halfway in the fight against injustice
• GNU Philosophy
• Love and Money by Audrey Eschright
• Free Software and the shifting landscape of online cooperation by Benjamin Mako Hill
• How Drupal as a Service can save us all by Benjamin Melançon
• Platform Cooperativism by Trebor Scholz

Whole books:

• Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice by Jessica Gordon Nembhard
• Ours to Hack and to Own
• Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
• Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff

We are Agaric Technology Collective, a worker-owned cooperative. We build websites and online tools that respect your freedom. We provide training and consultation to meet your goals.

We build websites that matter

From digital collaboration spaces for health and science communities to publishing platforms to opportunity finders for city residents, we love to do the hard work that supports people doing the harder work of making the world better.  Some of our best work is done when we just ensure that the world can see the great work done by an organization.

We go deep

From our founding in 2006, our approach has been to deeply engage with the needs of our clients and collaborate with free/libre open source software communities to craft solid, sustainable solutions.

We raise you up

At every opportunity, we provide training and build our clients' capacity to take more control over their web presence. By building on software that belongs to everyone and has large communities, we ensure organizations we work with have options and room to grow. By eagerly and expertly teaching whatever people are willing to learn, from basic organizational security to migrating data to software development to content strategy, we stay true to our purpose of giving people and organizations more power to do good.

Please learn more about our skills and services and contact Agaric!

I had a great time at BioRAFT Drupal Nights, on January 16th, 2014. Originally Chris Wells (cwells) was scheduled to speak, unfortunately he was down with the flu. Michelle Lauer (Miche) put an awesome presentation together on really short notice. With help from Diliny Corlesquet (Dcor) there was plenty to absorb intellectually along with the delicious Middle Eastern food. I love spontaneity, so it was fun to hop over to BioRAFT in Cambridge, MA, to be a member of a panel of Senior Drupal Developers.

I joined Seth Cohn, Patrick Corbett, Michelle Lauer and Erik Peterson to present some viable solutions to performance issues in Drupal.
Several slides covered the topic - Drupal High Performance and a lively discussion ensued. The panel members delved into some of the top issues with Drupal performance under several different conditions. The discussion was based on the book written by Jeff Shelton, Naryan Newton, and Nathaniel Catchpole - High Performance Drupal - O'Reilly - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920012269.do .

The room at BioRAFT was comfortably full with just the right amount of people to have an informal Q and A, and to directly address some concerns that developers were actually working on. Lurking in the back I spotted some of the top developers in the Drupal community (scor, mlncn, kay_v just to name a few) that were not on the panel, but they did had a lot of experience to speak from during Q and A.

The video posted at the bottom is packt with great information and techniques - Miche even shared some code snippets that will get you going if you seek custom performance enhancements.

One of the discussions was around tools that can be used to gauge performance or tweak it.

• Drupals internal syslog
• watchdog - dblog
• Acquia has some tools
• Google Analytics

I also found an online test site: http://drupalsitereview.com

We also talked a lot about caching and the several options that exist to deal with cache on a Drupal site.
There are options to cache content for anonymous users and there are solutions and modules for more robust sites with high traffic.

PHP 5.5 offers a good caching solution with integrated opcode caching. They are a performance enhancement and extension for PHP. Some sites have shown a 3x performance boost by using opcode caching. Opcode caching presents no side-effects beyond extra memory usage and should always be used in production environments. Below are a couple of the suggestions we discussed that are listed in the Modules listed on Drupal.org:

Boost

a good solution for sites that have a lot of content for anonymous users. https://drupal.org/project/boost

Varnish

a good choice for sites with content for members https://drupal.org/project/varnish

Others

• Memcache
• Redis
• File Cache

The panel agreed that there are many things to consider when seeking to improve the sites performance:

• Hosting
• Custom Code
• Cache
• Memory Limits
• Traffic
• Module Compatibility
• CSS and JS Aggregation

A few more are discussed in the video below...

Sending out Be Wells to cwells! We look forward to a future presentation, and we are also pleased that on such short notice it did not seem too hard to gather a panel of several senior Drupal developers to discuss High Performance Drupal. See the whole discussion on YouTube

Anthropologist Kasey Qynn Dolin noted, of our societal moment that COVID-19 has thrown into sharp relief:

We expected going online would lead to mass democratization and access to information that empowers large groups of people.

Instead, we got outsourced.

Online connectivity gave people who own means of production the ability to outsource work in a way that offloads expenses— the cost of the things which generate the conditions for the wealthy and powerful to profit in the first place. Some of this, like shifting the expenses of maintaining fleets of vehicles off of a corporation's balance sheet, have been celebrated as technology-enabled innovations in business models. This is usually a big charade, a technological gloss on what is just another, relatively minor, attempt to concentrate wealth and power. Meanwhile, the biggest return on capital and the biggest harmful effects on people come from practices that business media don't focus on.

The world going online has helped the owning class shift the costs of workers simply living (health care, child care, retirement, sustenance or more-than-sustenance wages) onto people, communities, and whole nations less able to hold global corporations to account.

There are a couple big reasons this happened.

First, technology is not neutral, and it tends to serve the needs of those who shape it.

Even with the incredible historical happenstance of US military money flowing to academic researchers who developed and incubated an Internet that was computer-to-computer rather than hierarchical…

…and even with the impressive tradition of technologists making decisions openly and favoring adopting standards by rough consensus that allow unaffiliated parts to work with one another…

…the services built on the Web and other Internet-based protocols and standards reflect the desire for control (for wealth and for power) held by corporations, governments, and venture capitalists— because these are the entities that have been spending the money and increasingly calling the shots for the past twenty years.

Second, the same reason a miracle was required to make the Internet distributed in the first place has worked against many of the technologies built on the Internet being peer-to-peer— it is hard to come to agreement on protocols and hard to make them easy to use. It is easier to build software and services which are ultimately within one organization's control, and the organizations with the resources to do even this have tended to be the same ones centralizing power (with notable exceptions such as Wikipedia and the Internet Archive).

Similarly to networked computers, in the world of organized humans it is very hard to develop ways to build shared power. It is much easier to use communications technology to move work and consequences farther from those who already hold centralized power.

However, these facts working against us don't mean we have to take our struggle for our human rights and for justice entirely offline. And struggle we must, because the people who hold wealth and power now are seeing, in this health and economic crisis, just how much can be denied us without threatening their wealth and power.

A lot of the technology developed for business as usual, even the proprietary stuff we don't actually control like Slack and Google Docs, can be put to use by movements for justice and liberty. There are a lot of similarities in tools people need in order to work together, whether in companies or in community groups. That is not to say that the movement to build truly free as in freedom alternatives to these is not good and important. Indeed, the development of free libre open source software is downright great and vital when led by or done in direct collaboration with groups marginalized by capitalism that do have different needs, such as a threat model that must take into account government repression and fascist threats.

But we need to concentrate our finite time on building technology corporate and political masters would never want built.

We need to focus on that which builds shared power. We need to build ways to share power.

Power is organization. People organized in large groups can hold even global corporations to account. We can replace existing structures, as proves needed, to gain the sustenance needed for life; to gain the justice of a common share of all that nature has given and all that humanity has worked for; and to gain the freedom to do what we choose with it all.

Any group with that level of power is unlikely to keep true to universal human rights and and all the rest unless power stays distributed within it— ideally throughout all society.

Formal democracy, however flawed or perfected, has never been enough and will never be enough.

We need ways of communicating and making decisions that work well and keep power distributed.

Sharing the power which is inherent in controlling communication and in making decisions requires sharing the work of both.

There's endless creativity required in getting people to see a better world is possible, and infinite strategy needed to achieve it. Thinking about how to share power while building power is necessary, but it is too much to have to figure out from scratch while doing everything else. It is as unrealistic to expect every group of people who give a damn to craft tech for mass democracy and distributed power as it is to expect every group of people to make their own word processing and web publishing software.

Which is why we need to build online tools for sharing the power that we achieve by organizing.

One indispensable piece, unsolved in practice but in theory solvable technically, is distributing the power of coordinated messaging. Coordinated messaging, in turn, is the root of both collective decision-making and coordinating action.

We need to build up this power to coordinate and communicate while being confident we will be able to use this power collectively. Here is a way that could work:

A person who is part of a movement has a piece of information they think every person in the movement should know, or that they think should be spread as widely as possible to the public. They have to go through some process that is the same for everybody, such as getting any two people in the movement to approve the content and crafting of the message. Then the proposed communication goes not to a standing committee but to a small group of people randomly drawn from the movement and asked to decide if it's something everybody should see now, or not.

That's the technology I want to build to make us all going online finally lead to mass democratization and power for all people over their own lives.

Join me.

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