.

Agaric builds tools for medical and scientific communities to advance their work, enhance collaboration, and improve outcomes.  And we've been doing this—helping healthy discussion about science and medicine flourish online—since 2008.

Reusable platforms for advanced online collaboration

Therapy Fidelity App

Agaric is developing the Therapy Fidelity app: an all-in-one, inexpensive mobile web application to help therapists do the work of counseling. The app automates surveys, handles multiple CBT protocols, tracks fidelity, monitors outcomes, and more. This application is being developed for Scheeringa Mind Company with initial funding by Tulane University.  It is built in JavaScript (React and Typescript) and Golang and makes extensive use of Truevault and AWS APIs.

The Collaboratory

The National Institute for Children's Health Quality partnered with Agaric to build the Collaboratory—a platform designed specifically to help healthcare improvement teams collaborate, innovate, and make change. During this partnership, begun in 2015, Agaric built a collaborative analytics tool that allows healthcare quality teams to visualize, compare, and benchmark data, identify opportunities for improvement, and celebrate their successes. We were proud to be NICHQ's 2020 partners in making the most of the digital health revolution.

Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE)

In 2015, we began contributing to PECE, an open source digital platform that supports multi-sited, cross-scale ethnographic and historical research.  PECE is built as a Drupal distribution that can be improved and extended like any other Drupal project.  Agaric's contributions include building an API integration between PECE's bibliographic citation capabilities and Zotero's open source reference management and collaborative bibliography tools.

We have been brought back for a larger role to realize the full upgrade of this distribution and platform to Drupal 10.

Partners In Health Drug Resistant Tuberculosis Network and EndTB.org

Beginning in 2010, Agaric took over the development of the DRTB Network platform for Partners In Health, the famed international nonprofit public health organization, and the TB Care II initiative.  The core of this work was connecting practitioners in the field with experts through a natural yet structured response process complete with careful editorial review.  This crucial work lives on with endTB.org, a partnership between Partners In Health, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Interactive Research & Development.  All of this work for PIH is in Drupal.

Science Collaboration Framework

Agaric was the lead developer for the Science Collaboration Framework, a project of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative Computing. Working with researchers from Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, we built a reusable platform for collaboration and communication in biomedical research, enriching the contributions of scientists and the biomedical online community with semantic data, highlighting advanced, structured relationships between contributed resources, and facilitating structured community discourse around biomedical research. We even earned a writeup in a scientific journal for our work!

As part of SCF, 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.

Ask Agaric for help building your world-bettering community today!

We have a number of processes and tools we use as we develop:

• Local development: we all develop locally on our own computers and push each change to a common code repository which we maintain.

• Each task including new features, bugs or changes are kept track of as an issue ticket. These tickets will be accessible to Urban Edge staff as well as ourselves. Here is where we can track progress in code changes, elaborate on details and generally where we keep track of the hundreds of small issues that will come up.

• Resources allowing, we use automated tests which emulate a human's interaction with a browser to make sure new work we does not unknowingly break site functionality. This ensures a solidly functioning site even as major changes take place.

• We have experience managing a wide range of servers, server environments, or specialized hosting environments, and related technologies:

  • We have written our own battle-tested server deployment code, which securely pushes changes in code to any target location.
  • Deployments can run manually or to a desired level of automation, such as always deploying to a staging website automatically on a successful build, and then manually progressing to live after review.
  • Our existing deployment tools can handle configuring a virtual (or physical) server from the ground up, or else function within a variety of PHP-based website hosting providers.
  • Additionally, we can support container-based environments by providing docker container configurations for running the required services.
  • Dependent upon the hosting platform, we also manage additional security and reliability features, such as sites having automated system updates, virus scans of uploaded files, custom backup schedules, additional firewall protections, monitoring services, or other customized needs.
  • We can also work alongside existing IT service providers with recommendations regarding things you may already manage, such as CDN (content delivery networks), email, or DNS (domain name) changes that may be needed.

Read more about our tools for environment management and development.

Welcome to Drutopia! We hope you are enjoying the features we have built. Everything you are using is open-source and free for good people like yourself to use.

We invite you to give your input on the project and contribute where you can by becoming a member of Drutopia. For as little as $10 a year you can become a member who votes for our leadership team, suggests features for our roadmap and is part of a community building tools for the grassroots.

Learn more about membership at drutopia.org

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).

You can define your own permissions for the Drupal permissions page (/admin/people/permissions in modern Drupal, Drupal 8, 9, 10, and beyond) and then add conditional options to your code to do different things based on the role of the user and the permissions configured by a site administrator.

Here's how.

Create a modulename.permissions.yml file

This simple file has the permission machine name (lower case with spaces) and a title (Sentence case) with an optional description.

For our module, which has a particularly long name, that file is drutopia_findit_site_management.permissions.yml and its contents are like so:

access meta tab:
  title: 'Access meta tab'
  description: 'Access meta information (author, creation date, boost information) in Meta vertical tab.'

You can repeat lines like these in the same file for as many permissions as you wish to define.

Check for that permission in your code

The process for checking permissions is simply to use a user object if that's handed into your code, or to load the current user if it's not, and use the hasPermission() method which returns TRUE if that user has permission and FALSE if not.

For example, in a form alter in our drutopia_findit_site_management.module file:

/**
 * Implements hook_form_BASE_FORM_ID_alter() for node_form.
 *
 * Completely hide the Meta vertical tab (field group) from people without permission.
 *
 */
function drutopia_findit_site_management_form_node_form_alter(&$form, FormStateInterface $form_state, $form_id) {
  // If the current user has the permission, do not hide the Meta vertical tab.
  if (\Drupal::currentUser()->hasPermission('access meta tab')) {
    return;
  }
  // Code to hide the meta tab goes here, and is only reached if the user lacks the permission. 
  // ...
}

See all this code in context in the Find It Site Management module.

To learn more about defining permissions in modern Drupal, including dynamic permissions, you can see the change record for when the new approach replaced hook_permission().

On November 13^th and 14^th in New York City, several hundred people gathered to talk about the problems of an online economy reliant on monopoly, extraction, and surveillance—and discuss how to build a "cooperative Internet, built of platforms owned and governed by the people who rely on them."

My experience at the Platform Cooperativism summit was Wow, everyone here really gets it and so many are doing awesome things; and then Hmm, there are still some really important differences to be worked out; and then We'll have to continue for months to figure out strategy for building fair platforms and we also need to restructure the whole economy.

Some definitions

In the sense technologists use it a platform is, like a physical platform, a technology that holds a lot of people up. It convenes people and gives them a chance to do something they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Platforms can often be natural monopolies due to capturing the benefits of network effects (one person with a telephone is pointless, having nearly everyone available by telephone is incredibly valuable). Amazon and eBay are both platforms for sellers and buyers, Uber and Lyft for drivers and riders, Mechanical Turk and TaskRabbit for piece-workers and buyers of their work.

A cooperative is a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise formed by people voluntarily uniting to meet their common needs and aspirations. Agaric is a small worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon is a very large group of integrated worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives are businesses owned by their customers, credit unions are financial institutions owned by their members (with a one person, one vote governance), and producer cooperatives like CROPP Cooperative are formed by member businesses (which are not necessarily cooperatives themselves).

A platform cooperative, then, is a platform owned and controlled by the people directly affected by it. A company must be accountable, and as Omar Freilla put it, accountable means those impacted make the decisions.

The power to do harm

This summit was a follow-up to the Digital Labor summit held one year before which detailed myriad ways centralized online platforms extract value from dispersed workers who have few options or bargaining power. Control of online platforms by the representatives of capital has or will have negative effects on workers, similar to exploitation in global manufacturing (think electronic devices and clothing), and negative effects on customers (think the massive money grab by oligopolies of fossil fuel and telecommunications corporations).

Agaric's Michele Metts told the Digital Labor summit organizers every chance she got that cooperatives and Free Software were the answer to exploited labor in the Internet economy, but something even more powerful than Micky's advocacy must have been at work: nearly every participant at Platform Cooperativism spoke of the need for workers to own the platforms that control their work, and people presenting on technology took for granted that source code and algorithms have to be open for democratic control to be meaningful. As Micky said on her panel, "You cannot build a platform for freedom on someone else's slavery."

The opening presentations made the case that platforms will exploit us unless we take control, and we moved on to discussing strategies for building platform businesses that are cooperatives of the people using the platforms. We also celebrated those already starting, like Loconomics, Fairmondo (in Germany), and Member's Media.

Building for shared power and uplift

The biggest unsolved, but acknowledged, problem is getting the resources to build platforms that can compete with venture capital-funded platforms. Dmytri Kleiner made the claim that profit requires centralization, and, moreover, that centralization requires organizing along the lines of a profit-taking venture. How can people get the resources to build without both having to give up control and having to exploit people using the platform? Robin Chase reminded us that it costs millions of dollars, at least, to build a viable platform. Her solution is to continue to seek venture capital and work for some environmental or community goals while compromising on control.

A more popular possible solution is to replace centralized systems with decentralized ones, even to the point of replacing specific software with protocols, so the cost of building and operating platforms can be more widely shared, along with the benefits. However, as Astra Taylor summed up the widely felt point, decentralization does not always mean distributed power. Therefore control of technology decisions, and so democratic control of platforms, is more important than technology itself.

The potential positive role for government regulation was often mentioned, as Sarah Ann Lewis summarized the sentiment in a tweet: Platforms are not special snowflakes that must be exempt from regulation. If you can only succeed by exploitation you deserve to melt. Indeed, the centralized and surveillance nature of most platforms would make it much easier to ensure non-discrimination and fair wages.

More excitement came from the mention that local government has long played a role and can play a stronger part in democratic ownership of physical spaces. Several speakers urged people to get involved in local government, where harmful policies may be more the result of a lack of knowledge than of embedded corruption. Government can also get involved in mandating an open API for ride hailing services, which would remove the monopoly power from centralizing companies.

On ownership and control

Hundreds of possible solutions faced lively questioning and debate, yet in all of this the titular solution, cooperative ownership, did not get the scrutiny it merits. Jessica Gordon Nembhard's Collective Courage has made me see that the connections and overlaps between worker cooperatives and other types of cooperatives are much more significant than I'd thought, but there are still differences. These differences, and the need to decide who exactly is democratically controlling a platform, were often not made clear by presenters, including some who are building platform cooperatives.

If Stocksy, for example, is owned by its photographers, can the workers who build the platform technology (rather than use it) play a part in democratic control? Co-founder and CEO Brianna Wettlaufer refers to it as a multi-stakeholder cooperative and it has been around since 2012 so they've surely worked it out, but this question is at the heart of how platform cooperatives must operate and it was hardly addressed at all.

The answer can be simple. The Black Star Coop brewery and restaurant in Austin, Texas, is owned by its customer-members while the workers manage it. The workers are internally a democracy, but there's no question they work for a businesses which is managed democratically by the customers. This makes even more sense for a quasi-monopoly platform: It's more important for, say, millions of people relying on a platform for livelihood or transportation or communication to own it than for the relatively small number of people who built it to own it.

This brings up another question that went largely unasked at the conference: does ownership mean anything when it's spread out among thousands or millions of people? Federated structures can mitigate this, but in general whoever controls communication among members effectively controls decisions. It may be possible to have horizontal mass communication by way of democratic moderation. At a small workshop I held at the conference, participants discussed ways collective control can be made real as democratic platforms scale—but that's a topic for another discussion.

The sense that displacing an app or website is easier than reconstructing global supply chains fueled a lot of the excitement at the conference. Notwithstanding, the need to restructure the rest of the economy so that it works to serve the needs of people, rather than sacrificing people's needs to the dictates of the economy, was never far from people's minds. Videos of most sessions are online and will certainly make you think about the opportunities for cooperative ownership of services and structures that define our lives, online and off.

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

Learning online has become a necessity for schools and independent teachers and tutors. Agaric can provide a Learning Management System (LMS) to support your teaching skills and knowledge integrated with video chat and whiteboard features. Every component of our platform is 100% Free/Libre Software because we believe in protecting the privacy of our students!

Let us know what you need and we can set up a time to discuss your unique situation.

Here you will find the details of our online learning tools.

Learning Management System

The Canvas learning management platform allows you or your organization to build the digital learning environment that meets the unique challenges faced by your institution. Canvas LMS allows teachers to create courses and grade students. Developed in 2011, Canvas was designed to better engage people in teaching and learning processes. 

Canvas is integrated with video chat software called BigBlueButton and it works to seamlessly allow teachers and students, if given the permission, to create live conferences with many features for moderation and engagement for all participants. Both Canvas and BigBlueButton are free open source software because our mission includes  privacy for all and the ability to freely modify the software to suit your needs.

Canvas LMS Features:

• Practice Tests, or Quizzes – These are assignments, groups of questions, that can be used to challenge student understanding and assess comprehension.  Question types include multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blanks, multiple answers, matching, numerical answers, formulas, and long text (freeform/essay).
• Question Banks – Group quiz questions in question banks to create grade, topic, institutional, or departmental question repositories.
• Outcomes – Outcomes (also called standards or competencies) describe what a learner should be able to do and are used to measure knowledge and ability.
• Mastery Paths – This tool allows course content to automatically be released to a learner based on performance, providing differentiation to students.
• Canvas Data – Canvas Data allows instructors to parse Canvas-generated data quickly.
• Canvas Commons – Canvas Commons is a repository that lets users easily share content.
• Integrated Media Recorder – This tool allows users to record audio and video messages for the digital classroom.
• Web conferencing – Set a meeting time for the whole class or one-on-one synchronous online discussions.
• Mastery Gradebook – Helps instructors assess the Outcomes being used in Canvas courses and measure student learning for accreditation or standards-based grading.
• Canvas Parent – Canvas Parent allows parents to engage with their children’s education by reviewing upcoming or past assignments, checking grades and receiving course announcements.
• Canvas Polls – An app (available on iOS and Android) that gauges students’ comprehension of material without “clicker” devices.

Videochat and whiteboard

The BigBlueButton video and whiteboard software is integrated into the Canvas dashboard and allows teachers and students to meet in a live learning environment that brings interactivity to the forefront. BigBlueButton is a free open-source web conferencing system designed for online classes, workshops and lectures. BigBlueButton allows teachers to create breakout rooms for different levels of learning.

Big Blue Button Features:

• Accounts and Profile
  • Sign up / Login
  • Profile
• Conference Rooms
  •  Create New Conference Rooms
  •  Breakout Rooms
  •  Conference Settings
  •  Rename Conference
  •  Manage Access to Conferences
•  Record Conference
  •  View Recordings
  •  Manage Recordings
  •  Modify Recordings
  •  Sort and Search Recordings

Drupal content management platform

You can provide a simple website for your school by building on the Drupal platform, the Canvas learning management platform automatically has access to a large number of features that are built into Drupal.  We describe some important ones here, though there are many more.

Content editing with Drupal

• Build your website with basic pages, landing pages, news postings, and more.
• Create instructional guides and reference links to relevant information.
• Engage the students in making additions to the site and maintaining the content.
• Optionally, use a content moderation workflow in which a content editor can approve draft content.
• Restore deleted content (retrieve from trash), so student exercises involving creating content on the site are not lost.
• Administrators can set permissions on any content and allow access in a granular way.

What will you provide for your students?

Kathleen was an Agaric principal for the year of 2009, working especially on the Science Collaboration Framework project of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, including its use in Parkinson's disease research in partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research.

A great communicator and team organizer, Kathleen is a prodigious learner and powers through any technical challenges that needs to be overcome. With a background in architecture, visual arts, and the history of art and architecture, her embrace of web technology polymath.

Six years before Drupal 8's configuration management, Kathleen developed the database scripts project to separate configuration settings in the database from content, and allow configuration from a development environment to be brought to production. These scripts, operating as they did primarily by sheer force of will, always worked best with Kathleen at the helm.

She loves web development and photography, both fusions of art and technology. Presently unable to work for sustained periods on a computer, she is plotting an epic science fiction novel and trying to increase the ways people with disabilities can be economically active.

Benjamin Melançon of Agaric helped with a patch for the Drupal 7 version of Insert module.

There are plenty of ways—all right, too many ways—to create links when using modern Drupal (Drupal 8 and above, so including so far Drupal 9, Drupal 10, and Drupal 11).  We will share some of those ways in this regularly-updated post.  (Latest update: 2025 September 22)

The easiest way to create internal links is using Link::createFromRoute

And it is used like this:

use Drupal\Core\Link;
  $link = Link::createFromRoute(t('This is a link'), 'entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]);

Using the Url object gives you more flexibility to create links, for instance, we can do the same as Link::createFromRoute method using the Url object like this:

  use Drupal\Core\Link;
  use Drupal\Core\Url;
  $link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]));

And actually Link::fromTextAndUrl is what Drupal recommends instead of using the deprecated l() method.  Note that as before, the text portion of the link should already be translated, so wrap it in t() or, for object-oriented code, $this->t().  Passing the Url object to the link object gives you great flexibility to create links, here are some examples:

Internal links which have no routes:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('base:robots.txt'));

External links:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('http://www.google.com'));

links with only the fragment (without url) :

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('internal:#fragment'));

Using the data provided by a user:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUserInput('/node/1');

The param passed to fromUserInput must start with /,#,? or it will throw an exception.

Linking entities.

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromUri('entity:node/1'));

Entities are a special case, and there are more ways to link them:

$node = Node::load(1);
$link = $node->toLink();
$link->setText(t('This is a link'));

And even using the route:

$link = Link::fromTextAndUrl(t('This is a link'), Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]));

Drupal usually expects a render array if you are going to print the link, so the Link object has a method for that:

$link->toRenderable();

which will return an array.

To get the absolute URL (that is, the one that likely starts with "https" and your domain name) for a piece of content (node) or other entity, you can do:

$absolute_url = $node->toUrl('canonical', ['absolute' => TRUE]);

Linking files.

Files are entities also in Drupal but a special kind.  You usually do not want to link to the entity but directly to the uploaded file.  To do that, do not use $file->getFileUri() but rather instead use createFileUrl() which will directly give you a complete string version of the URI:

$url = $file->createFileUrl();

This URL can then be used in making a link with regular HTML or the External links approach covered above.

Credit to godotislate in Drupal Slack support channel for this tip.

Final tips:

Searching a route using Drupal Console

The easiest way to find the route of a specific path is using Drupal Console, with the following command.

$ drupal router:debug | grep -i "\/node"

That will return something like:

entity.node.canonical                                 /node/{node}
 entity.node.delete_form                               /node/{node}/delete
 entity.node.edit_form                                 /node/{node}/edit
 entity.node.preview                                   /node/preview/{node_preview}/{view_mode_id}
 entity.node.revision                                  /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/view
 entity.node.version_history                           /node/{node}/revisions
 node.add                                              /node/add/{node_type}
 node.add_page                                         /node/add
 node.multiple_delete_confirm                          /admin/content/node/delete
 node.revision_delete_confirm                          /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/delete
 node.revision_revert_confirm                          /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/revert
 node.revision_revert_translation_confirm              /node/{node}/revisions/{node_revision}/revert/{langcode}
 search.help_node_search                               /search/node/help
 search.view_node_search                               /search/node
 view.frontpage.page_1                                 /node

Listing all the possible routes with that word, we can choose one and do:

drupal router:debug entity.node.canonical

And that will display more information about a specific route:

 Route             entity.node.canonical
 Path              /node/{node}
 Defaults
  _controller      \Drupal\node\Controller\NodeViewController::view
  _title_callback  \Drupal\node\Controller\NodeViewController::title
 Requirements
  node             \d+
  _entity_access   node.view
  _method          GET|POST
 Options
  compiler_class   \Drupal\Core\Routing\RouteCompiler
  parameters       node:
                     type: 'entity:node'
                     converter: paramconverter.entity

  _route_filters   method_filter
                   content_type_header_matcher

  _route_enhancers route_enhancer.param_conversion

  _access_checks   access_check.entity

So in this way we can search the route without the needing to search in all the *.routing.yml files and in this example the route is entity.node.canonical and the param expected is node.

Print links directly within a twig template

It is also possible to print links directly on the twig template with the following syntax:

<a href="{{url('entity.node.canonical', {'node': node.id( ) }}"> {{ 'This is a link'|t }} </a>

Add links inside a t() method.

If you want to add a link inside the t() you can do what Drupal suggests on Dynamic or static links and HTML in translatable strings:

use Drupal\Core\Url;
$url = Url::fromRoute('entity.node.canonical', ['node' => 1]);
$this->t('You can click this <a href=":link">Link</a>', [':link' => $url->toString()]);

Or, from a node object:

$markup = $this->t('You found this node: <a href=":url">@title</a>', [
  ':url' => $node->toUrl('canonical'),
  '@title' => $node->label(),
]);