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Each month we host an event at Industry Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss cooperative work and culture. Our events are usually an informal pot luck gathering.
We meet to help one another explore, form, join, or improve businesses without bosses. Members of worker cooperatives and collectives frequently share our experiences, our challenges, and the processes that are working for us. Sometimes we have guest speakers from successful cooperatives who share stories of how they started their business and how they organize and structure the business. The meetup also engages people that are not yet a part of a worker owned cooperative, but have interest and questions.
At our first meetup we were lucky to have Gonzalo Chomón of Evovelo, a company creating solar powered vehicles, visiting from Spain. He gave detailed information on cooperative law and the cooperative movement in his country. Spain is the home of Mondragon, the world's largest cooperative organization.
Another evening gathering featured A Yard & A Half Landscaping, a successful local cooperative of more than 30 members created by a transition from a single-owner business. Member Carolyn Edsell-Vetter related A Yard & A Half's impressive history and current challenges as its worker-owners grow the cooperative.
At the end of 2014 we were honored to host a holiday party for WORC'N. For our first meetup of 2015, Yochai Gal and Matt Gabrenya from the Boston TechCollective gave an in-depth look into their cooperative beginnings (a still-going San Francisco TechCollective) and how they have attained excellence in the computer repair business. People were actively engaged in a discussion about the roles and duties that exist in a thriving cooperative, and how we can best go about integrating new members.
Our meetups are held at the Industry Lab at 288 Norfolk Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The venue is an eclectic environment with a mix of product based companies, inventors, artists and us, the only web developers to date. The Boston/Cambridge Worker Cooperative group on meetup.com has 60 members after just a few months of existence, and each gathering usually has at least a dozen people coming. We invite you to join us at a meetup: sign up at the Meetup group or contact us to be alerted to the next event!
In 2018, workers rediscovered the power of the strike with nearly 500,000 people walking off the job, compared to just 25,000 in 2017. This year has proven even more of the same, with 442,700 stopping work through September.
Portside is an independent news outlet of labor activists who volunteer their time to scour the web for thoughtful, authentic coverage and analysis of worker power. In June they won the "Labor Communicator of the Year" as a result of their efforts.
Getting meaningful information on strikes is difficult. Just six corporations own 90% of media in the US. Executives like Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch have a vested interest in downplaying worker power. That coupled with sophisticated misinformation campaigns and obscure social media algorithms, it's hard to cut to what's happening on the ground.
We work with Portside to help them reach as many people as possible. In 2018 we upgraded the site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, optimizing the website for mobile devices and adding moderation tools to make editors' lives easier.
This year we sent out a survey to readers to learn what else would be helpful to provide the coverage so many are seeking in these politically charged moments.
Nearly 500 people responded, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. That said, there's always room for improvement.
In 2019, we hope to roll out the following features to help us all follow and support the labor movement and left in general.
* Improved "Related News" functionality - Right now the articles suggested are a bit hit or miss. We need time to adjust and improve our algorithm for this.
* Create "Issue" pages - the Bolivia coup, the Rojava Revolution, the Chicago Teachers' Strike... the number of progressive, transformative, and often revolutionary movements gaining traction is dizzying. Portside provides excellent coverage, but not in a long-term, coherent way. Issue pages will help us follow breaking news, with the broader context we need to be in meaningful solidarity. Editors are already hard at work cleaning up the tagging system for articles. We just need the time to design and build out these issue pages to better serve readers.
Just these two improvements will make a real difference to how well we can stay informed of what our fellow workers are up to and how we can support them.
Update: Ticket taken. But if you want to come, please read below the fold.
We have an extra ticket to DrupalCon and it should probably be yours.
One ticket transfer is supposed to be in process. Might as well make it two. contact me and leave your phone number, as the coordination may be interesting. I'm at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers now.
I'd love to know your story and why attending sounds like a good idea (and signing up for news of the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 completion might give bonus points!)
Ticket has found a home
That went fast. Give-away is closed. But if you feel the scholarship process could have been better publicized or otherwise suited to you and you want to pitch ten-to-twenty hours of interning for anything related to Agaric or the Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 ongoing project (including the coordinating of the funding of Drupal projects that benefit the community), we can probably work something out.
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On a cold December night we met at the Industry Lab to celebrate the Worc'n group and our membership in the cooperatives we belong to. The crowd was very energetic and several small groups were conversing on different topics throughout the evening. A holiday party is a time to see old friends and make new friends.
A cooperative is a structure to make new connections and share ideas. What better mix for a party. 2014 ended on a high note as the cooperative movement gains ground in Cambridge, MA. Worc'n (the Worker-Owned and Run Cooperative Network of Greater Boston) has been around for years and has an impressive number of cooperatives and owner-workers among their members. This party was sort of a merging of groups in the sense that Worc'n has been around for a long time, growing a membership and creating value.
The Boston/Cambridge Worker-ownership Meetup just started a few months ago, but through the network of local cooperatives, the word spread quickly and people have been expressing their happiness that there are now some meetngs to attend and new people to network with. The party was a Pot Luck and everyone brought something to share. There were homemade cookies, cakes and pie. We also were fortunate to have Monica Leitner-Laserna of La Sanghita Cafe attend the party with some delicious vegan foods from her newly formed cooperative restaurant in East Boston.
La Sanghita Cafe is Boston's only cooperative restaurant and they have a great vegan menu. Located just outside Maverick Square in East Boston, the restaurant is open daily for lunch and Wednesday through Saturday they offer a dinner menu. The menu is filled with sweet and savory items and the space is so comfortable and cozy. We look forward to having the coop members as guests at our monthly cooperative worker/owner meetup, to share the details on how it works to build a cooperative restaurant. Good food, good conversation and many engaging in discussion on topics involving cooperation, a wonderful evening was had by all. We should do this more often.
Find It websites help residents find all that their communities have to offer.
Cities and towns everywhere offer children and adults myriad programs, events, and places for enriching experiences. These activities and services come from various levels and agencies of government—operating schools, libraries, parks, and more—as well as from not-for-profit organizations, civic groups, private educational institutions, and others. However, any given person—say a single parent with three kids—has no time-efficient way of knowing about all of these opportunities.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, took on this problem. No software or website can solve this by itself, but an easily searchable directory with built-in reminders and tools to help keep it up to date makes finding all available opportunities achievable. Developed based on hundreds of hours of research and interviews led by the Cambridge Kids' Council, Find It Cambridge makes it easier for parents and other care-giving adults to find the amazing array of activities, services, and resources that are available for children, youth, and families in Cambridge.
This year, Agaric gave the site a major upgrade and made Find It capabilities freely available for other cities and towns.
If this is of interest to you for your city or region, especially if you work in an afterschool network or are otherwise in the thick of bringing opportunities to children, please get in touch by e-mail, at 1 508 283 3557, or through our contact form!
Sign up below to get (very) occasional updates.
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.
Saturday, February 2nd, 1:00 - 4 p.m.
Encuentro5 Community Space
9A Hamilton Place, Boston, MA 02108
encuentro5 (e5), DigBoston, UjimaBoston and Agaric Cooperative invite your participation in an important discussion on Technology and Revolution. The event is part of a series of discussions being held nationwide and coordinated by May First/People Link and the Center for Media Justice—leading up to an international convergence in Mexico City later this year.
Notable participants include: Alfredo Lopez, author, Puerto Rican independista, and co-director of May First/People Link; and Rajesh Kasturirangan, mathematician, cognitive scientist, and professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in India.
What is Our Response to the Rise of Tech Giants?
Over the last few decades, technological advances have not only radically changed methods of human communication but have also started to change humanity itself in ways that grassroots organizations on the political left have been slow to address. To the extent we have done so, it has been mostly to advocate for disenfranchised communities’ access to computers and broadband internet service.
But we have largely failed to grapple with issues beyond the rise of the internet and huge corporate social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And we’ve barely scratched the surface of those key changes, let alone put much thought into analyzing the effects of newer technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, big data, and genetic engineering on our communities. This is all the more alarming because rapid technological has aggravated the inequalities about which the left has traditionally cared.
Nonetheless, social-change movements continuously emerge, often in unexpected spaces, but especially in artistic and youth spaces or from insurgent social movements of the oppressed and exploited. They create campaigns to challenge potentially negative technological developments and propose more helpful community-centered technologies in their place.
Questions We're Discussing
In the interest of promoting these movements and their just agendas, this gathering will convene organizers for an afternoon of sharing and thinking together. We will be sharing information and analyses about these topics in short, plain-spoken, manageable conversations. Our thinking together will be strategic, asking and answering straightforward questions:
- What are the most urgent and important challenges connected with technology?
- What are the key areas for intervention?
- Who are our allies?
- What are our resources?
- Before we can talk about joint and/or coordinated campaigns and targeting, what do we need?
More information at https://techandrev.org
Register
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.
Talk about web components has been going for quite some time now: the term was coined in 2011. In this blog post, I will discuss the basics of what they are and what they do, and introduce the primary technological foundations for them. In future articles, I'll dig into the specifics and sample code - as they are currently supported or else poly-filled for today.
Web Components are a group of related standards promising to bring component-based extensibility to HTML documents. The great promise is that once you or someone else builds some component that provides a particular feature, it can easily be included and reused in other projects. For example, if you've created, say, a "treeview" component that displays data in a tree form, you can wrap up the definition of this in a component. Then, it would be possible for anyone to include the component easily wherever they might want to use a treeview. We'll ultimately get to defining our own components in a future article, but for now, let's look at a special sort of "built-in" web component.
Perhaps the most common HTML element that comes up when discussing web components is: the video tag. This is because the video tag offers a simple and very clear browser-native example of precisely what a web component looks like from the point of view of a consumer of a particular of a web component. If we were to include a video tag in a page, we don't end up with a naked auto-paying video display (by default). Instead, we end up with a nice little video player, complete with start/stop/seek and volume controls offered up by our browser:
In our browser (which again, in this case is Chromium), we can select the developer tools option under the General section / Elements titled "Show user agent shadow DOM." Given this option is set, we are able to see how Chromium builds upon the video tag when it is rendered:
As you can see, beneath the video element comes one of the core pieces of the Web Components technologies: the shadow-root. Chromium has treated the video tag as a "shadow host" which is a containing element for a "shadow root", off of which hangs the implementation of the video element's controls. This shadow host/shadow root mechanism is the basis for encapsulation in web components: it separates the details of an element's implementation from the outside document. CSS styles and JavaScript inside the shadow root are scoped to that element. Inside of the shadow root, the implementation of the video tag is a sub-tree of elements which is not directly inline with the the document's top-level DOM. This means, for example, you can neither find nor directly address elements within the shadow root.
There are at least a few libraries that enable building web-components for current browsers, regardless of browser support for the standards-based web components support. The one I'll demonstrate quickly here is pulled directly from polymer's home page. I'm using this because it demonstrates what I believe is about as close to the implementation of the ideal for web components (from a consumer perspective) aside from having to use a polyfill for some browsers today:
<!-- Polyfill Web Components support for older browsers --> <script src="components/webcomponentsjs/webcomponents-lite.min.js"></script> <!-- Import element --> <link rel="import" href="components/google-map/google-map.html"> <!-- Use element --> <google-map latitude="37.790" longitude="-122.390"></google-map>
Again, the polyfill ensures that our browser will handle the subsequent tags. This library aims to support the core web components features in a way that is consistent with the core web-components as the standards evolve. The link tag is another standard web component feature, though Mozilla is not favoring supporting it further, that essentially imports an external definition which in this case is the definition of the
Hopefully this gives you a quick glimpse into how web components might make our web applications grow through a variety of new interface tools we can build on, extend, and easily utilize. In future articles, we'll look at examples of using the various building blocks of web components, and how the technology continues to evolve.
