Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas tempus, nibh non finibus sollicitudin, ligula magna tempus nibh, ut maximus libero lorem ut sem. Nunc tincidunt sit amet enim in euismod. Fusce dignissim feugiat bibendum. Aliquam erat volutpat. Aliquam eu sem id nulla varius scelerisque et sit amet ipsum. Nulla scelerisque vestibulum felis, a porttitor turpis imperdiet nec. Nam id laoreet nibh. Aenean quis elit cursus, vehicula nibh a, aliquam mauris. Vestibulum facilisis vestibulum cursus. Pellentesque auctor libero id condimentum commodo. Suspendisse potenti. Maecenas diam sem, ornare in ex porttitor, euismod lacinia dolor. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Sed sollicitudin fermentum massa. Sed et ipsum nec massa consequat lobortis sed non quam. Donec rhoncus condimentum quam sed gravida.

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.

So far we have learned how to write basic Drupal migrations and use process plugins to transform data to meet the format expected by the destination. In the previous entry we learned one of many approaches to migrating images. In today’s example, we will change it a bit to introduce two new migration concepts: constants and pseudofields. Both can be used as data placeholders in the migration timeline. Along with other process plugins, they allow you to build dynamic values that can be used as part of the migrate process pipeline.

Setting and using constants

In the Migrate API, a constant is an arbitrary value that can be used later in the process pipeline. They are set as direct children of  the source section. You write a constants key whose value is a list of name-value pairs. Even though they are defined in the source section, they are independent of the particular source plugin in use. The following code snippet shows a generalization for settings and using constants:

source:
  constants:
    MY_STRING: 'http://understanddrupal.com'
    MY_INTEGER: 31
    MY_DECIMAL: 3.1415927
    MY_ARRAY:
      - 'dinarcon'
      - 'dinartecc'
  plugin: source_plugin_name
  source_plugin_config_1: source_config_value_1
  source_plugin_config_2: source_config_value_2
process:
  process_destination_1: constants/MY_INTEGER
  process_destination_2:
    plugin: concat
    source: constants/MY_ARRAY
    delimiter: ' '

You can set as many constants as you need. Although not required by the API, it is a common convention to write the constant names in all uppercase and using underscores (_) to separate words. The value can be set to anything you need to use later. In the example above, there are strings, integers, decimals, and arrays. To use a constant in the process section you type its name, just like any other column provided by the source plugin. Note that you use the constant you need to name the full hierarchy under the source section. That is, the word constant and the name itself separated by a slash (/) symbol. They can be used to copy their value directly to the destination or as part of any process plugin configuration.

Technical note: The word constants for storing the values in the source section is not special. You can use any word you want as long as it does not collide with another configuration key of your particular source plugin. A reason to use a different name is that your source actually contains a column named constants. In that case you could use defaults or something else. The one restriction is that whatever value you use, you have to use it in the process section to refer to any constant. For example:

source:
  defaults:
    MY_VALUE: 'http://understanddrupal.com'
  plugin: source_plugin_name
  source_plugin_config: source_config_value
process:
  process_destination: defaults/MY_VALUE

Setting and using pseudofields

Similar to constants, pseudofields stores arbitrary values for use later in the process pipeline. There are some key differences. Pseudofields are set in the process section. The name is arbitrary as long as it does not conflict with a property name or field name of the destination. The value can be set to a verbatim copy from the source (a column or a constant) or they can use process plugins for data transformations. The following code snippet shows a generalization for settings and using pseudofields:

source:
  constants:
    MY_BASE_URL: 'http://understanddrupal.com'
  plugin: source_plugin_name
  source_plugin_config_1: source_config_value_1
  source_plugin_config_2: source_config_value_2
process:
  title: source_column_title
  my_pseudofield_1:
    plugin: concat
    source:
      - constants/MY_BASE_URL
      - source_column_relative_url
    delimiter: '/'
  my_pseudofield_2:
    plugin: urlencode
    source: '@my_pseudofield_1'
  field_link/uri: '@my_pseudofield_2'
  field_link/title: '@title'

In the above example, my_pseudofield_1 is set to the result of a concat process transformation that joins a constant and a column from the source section. The result value is later used as part of a urlencode process transformation. Note that to use the value from my_pseudofield_1 you have to enclose it in quotes (') and prepend an at sign (@) to the name. The new value obtained from URL encode operation is stored in my_pseudofield_2. This last pseudofield is used to set the value of the URI subfield for field_link. The example could be simplified, for example, by using a single pseudofield and chaining process plugins. It is presented that way to demonstrate that a pseudofield could be used as direct assignments or as part of process plugin configuration values.

Technical note: If the name of the subfield can be arbitrary, how can you prevent name clashes with destination property names and field names? You might have to look at the source for the entity and the configuration of the bundle. In the case of a node migration, look at the baseFieldDefinitions() method of the Node class for a list of property names. Be mindful of class inheritance and method overriding. For a list of fields and their machine names, look at the “Manage fields” section of the content type you are migrating into. The Field API prefixes any field created via the administration interface with the string field_. This reduces the likelihood of name clashes. Other than these two name restrictions, anything else can be used. In this case, the Migrate API will eventually perform an entity save operation which will discard the pseudofields.

Understanding Drupal Migrate API process pipeline

The migrate process pipeline is a mechanism by which the value of any destination property, field, or pseudofield that has been set can be used by anything defined later in the process section. The fact that using a pseudofield requires to enclose its name in quotes and prepend an at sign is actually a requirement of the process pipeline. Let’s see some examples using a node migration:

• To use the title property of the node entity, you would write @title
• To use the field_body field of the Basic page content type, you would write @field_body
• To use the my_temp_value pseudofield, you would write @my_temp_value

In the process pipeline, these values can be used just like constants and columns from the source. The only restriction is that they need to be set before being used. For those familiar with the rewrite results feature of Views, it follows the same idea. You have access to everything defined previously. Anytime you use enclose a name in quotes and prepend it with an at sign, you are telling the migrate API to look for that element in the process section instead of the source section.

Migrating images using the image_import plugin

Let’s practice the concepts of constants, pseudofields, and the migrate process pipeline by modifying the example of the previous entry. The Migrate Files module provides another process plugin named image_import that allows you to directly set all the subfield values in the plugin configuration itself.

As in previous examples, we will create a new module and write a migration definition file to perform the migration. It is assumed that Drupal was installed using the standard installation profile. The code snippets will be compact to focus on particular elements of the migration. The full code is available at https://github.com/dinarcon/ud_migrations The module name is UD Migration constants and pseudofields and its machine name is ud_migrations_constants_pseudofields. The id of the example migration is udm_constants_pseudofields. Refer to this article for instructions on how to enable the module and run the migration. Make sure to download and enable the Migrate Files module. Otherwise, you will get an error like: “In DiscoveryTrait.php line 53: The "file_import" plugin does not exist. Valid plugin IDs for Drupal\migrate\Plugin\MigratePluginManager are:...”. Let’s see part of the source definition:

source:
  constants:
    BASE_URL: 'https://agaric.coop'
    PHOTO_DESCRIPTION_PREFIX: 'Photo of'
  plugin: embedded_data
  data_rows:
    -
      unique_id: 1
      name: 'Michele Metts'
      photo_url: 'sites/default/files/2018-12/micky-cropped.jpg'
      photo_width: '587'
      photo_height: '657'

Only one record is presented to keep snippet short, but more exist. In addition to having a unique identifier, each record includes a name, a short profile, and details about the image. Note that this time, the photo_url does not provide an absolute URL. Instead, it is a relative path from the domain hosting the images. In this example, the domain is https://agaric.coop so that value is stored in the BASE_URL constant which is later used to assemble a valid absolute URL to the image. Also, there is no photo description, but one can be created by concatenating some strings. The PHOTO_DESCRIPTION_PREFIX constant stores the prefix to add to the name to create a photo description. Now, let’s see the process definition:

process:
  title: name
  psf_image_url:
    plugin: concat
    source:
      - constants/BASE_URL
      - photo_url
    delimiter: '/'
  psf_image_description:
    plugin: concat
    source:
      - constants/PHOTO_DESCRIPTION_PREFIX
      - name
    delimiter: ' '
  field_image:
    plugin: image_import
    source: '@psf_image_url'
    reuse: TRUE
    alt: '@psf_image_description'
    title: '@title'
    width: photo_width
    height: photo_height

The title node property is set directly to the value of the name column from the source. Then, two pseudofields. psf_image_url stores a valid absolute URL to the image using the BASE_URL constant and the photo_url column from the source. psf_image_description uses the PHOTO_DESCRIPTION_PREFIX constant and the name column from the source to store a description for the image.

For the field_image field, the image_import plugin is used. This time, the subfields are not set manually. Instead, they are assigned using plugin configuration keys. The absence of the id_only configuration allows for this. The URL to the image is set in the source key and uses the psf_image_url pseudofield. The alt key allows you to set the alternative attribute for the image and in this case the psf_image_description pseudofield is used. For the title subfield sets the text of a subfield with the same name and in this case it is assigned the value of the title node property which was set at the beginning of the process pipeline. Remember that not only psedufields are available. Finally, the width and height configuration uses the columns from the source to set the values of the corresponding subfields.

What did you learn in today’s blog post? Did you know you can define constants in your source as data placeholders for use in the process section? Were you aware that pseudofields can be created in the process section to store intermediary data for process definitions that come next? Have you ever wondered what is the migration process pipeline and how it works? Please share your answers in the comments. Also, I would be grateful if you shared this blog post with your colleagues.

Next: Tips for writing Drupal migrations and understanding their workflow

This blog post series, cross-posted at UnderstandDrupal.com as well as here on Agaric.coop, is made possible thanks to these generous sponsors. Contact Understand Drupal if your organization would like to support this documentation project, whether it is the migration series or other topics.

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.

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!

 

Ayudamos a las organizaciones a cumplir sus objetivos y fortalecer el movimiento de software libre al proporcionar consultoría en estrategia de tecnología en línea, al crear y personalizar software de alta calidad, capacitar a personas y hablar en eventos.

Pregunte a un Agárico

Estrategía

Utilizamos los principios de justicia de diseño para ayudar a que su presencia en línea alcance sus objetivos y tenga un impacto en el mundo real.
 

• Formación analítica
• Gobernanza del contenido
• Estrategia de contenido
• Operaciones de contenido
• Estrategia de redes sociales

Desarrollo

Construimos con un software probado que le da poder y control sobre su sitio web y presencia en línea.
 

• Desarrollo de la gestión de relaciones constituyentes (CRM)
• Migración de contenido
• Desarrollo drupal
• Desarrollo de Django
• Optimización de la donación
• Posicionamiento en buscadores (SEO orgánico)
• Integración de redes sociales
• Seguridad del sitio web y CRM
• Mantenimiento del sitio web
• Afinación del rendimiento del sitio web
• Actualización del sitio web

Usamos y contribuimos con el software libre siempre que sea posible, Creative Commons licencia nuestra documentación y trabajamos bajo un modelo de organización abierta.

Capacitación

Asesoramos y enseñamos, aprovechando su experiencia actual.
 

• Asesoramiento personalizado uno a uno
• Introducción a Drupal
• Desarrollo del módulo drupal.
• Migración drupal
• Seguridad en linea

Obtenga más información sobre las oportunidades para recibir capacitación de Agaric.

 

Speaking

Compartimos nuestros conocimientos y promovemos el software libre hablando en eventos.

Los temas incluyen:

• Cómo participar en el Común Digital
• Financiamiento efectivo y gobernanza para el software libre
• Ética en la tecnología
• Software Libre = Sociedad Libre
• Economía solidaria
• Desarrollo cooperativo
• Inteligencia Artificial y Vigilancia
• Poder personal
• Drupal - Comunitario y Técnico

Reserve con nosotros para un próximo evento.

 

Originally published on the Nonprofit Technology Network's Connect Blog.

Most of us don’t look at our site analytics. At least, not often enough. We know we should, but life gets in the way. How do we make it easier for nonprofits to truly take a “data-driven” approach to their work?

I’ve found success with putting the analytics where people will see them. One of those places is the website itself.

Figure Out What Really Matters

There’s no shortage of data to review. So, it’s important to move beyond vanity metrics and get to the heart of why we do what we do. This means turning to the goals and key performance indicators you have for your website (or defining them for the first time!).

For my work at Agaric, those goals are:

1. Secure well-matched projects by communicating the value we provide to potential clients.

Key performance indicator: feedback on design and content from target audiences.

2. Diversify and expand free software communities by sharing relevant knowledge.

Key performance indicator: pageviews of blog posts.

Each goal should be accompanied by at least one key performance indicator. This is data that tells you how successful you are being at reaching your goal.

In our case, our first goal of feedback is best measured qualitatively by asking our current clients— and those who we like working with—what they think of the website. We conduct interviews to gather that feedback. For our second goal, we can get a good picture of content relevance by pageviews, a valuable data point to share with the team.

A different site might try to increase one-time donations, in which case seeing the number of donations made during a campaign would be helpful. Another group might focus on building a regular readership, therefore email list sign ups are the best indicator of success. Whatever it is, make sure you can link the analytics you are tracking back to a goal you have for your site. There’s no point in measuring something you won’t take action on.

Know Who Needs to See the Data and Where They Hang Out

After identifying your key performance indicators, decide who on your team should review that data.

For our six-person worker-owned cooperative, that answer was easy – all of us. We all blog and we all have a vested interest in helping our free software communities thrive. We want to know which posts are resonating the most.

After knowing your target audience, find out where they spend their time. In our case, it’s the website’s back-end content overview page. Our website admins go here to pull up a page we want to update and to see what posts are still in draft mode. So, we added a column for pageviews and made that column sortable.

This content overview page was customized to include each post's total pageview count.

For the independent news site Portside, the same was true. In addition to showing pageviews on their content overview page, they also include them directly on each post (visible only to content editors).

Showing the pageview count on the page itself makes it clear to content editors how popular it is.

For the online educator portal Teachers with Guts, the organization wanted to track several data points on their members’ use of the platform. So, they have a report page built into the site showing information such as the number of downloads made, comments left, and pages bookmarked.

Teachers With Guts began tracking user engagement to inform how they manage their online portal.

Other opportunities to share analytics include weekly email reports, a user dashboard upon logging in, or via mobile texting or apps. Don’t be shy about asking your team where they would most likely notice the data you’re sharing with them.

Meaningful, Informed Conversations

By showing key data in high traffic areas, you foster an informed team. From there you can have the conversations you want and need. We now know which posts are getting the most reach and are evaluating why that is. As a result, our best practices have evolved to make our writing more relevant with readers.

 

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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.

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.

Wow, that was fun. The very first event for the Boston/Cambridge Worker Ownership Meetup group on October 10th, 2014, was a great success. We met at The Industry Lab, Agaric's new co-working headquarters and event location. We had a great discussion that was led by our friend Gonzalo Chomon of EvoVelo, a cooperative located in Spain.

Gonzalo Chomon shared a wealth of knowledge about the inner workings of cooperatives that engaged everyone from the start. About a dozen attendees talked about the different ways cooperative companies are structured, laws governing different types of companies in Spain and the US and about the different internal processes used to add or remove members from the group.

Attendees were very engaged in the discussion from the start. One member asked about the company structure, how does it work, are there contracts, bylaws? A cooperative company can be structured in any way the partners agree upon. Usually the company is formed as an LLC between the partners with equal shares, but that is not an absolute. An organization the size of Mondragon has an entirely different structure, it is a federation of cooperatives.

The pizza from The Just Crust rocked and was totally consumed by the end of the evening. Many thanks, to our friend Kay Van Valkenburg who brought some lush fruits and scrumptious chocolate chip and dark chocolate dipped cookies—oooooh. Thanks to everyone that came to the first Boston/Cambridge Worker Ownership Meetup at the Industry Lab in Cambridge, despite the brilliant New England weather.

We have already planned our next meetup for November 17th at the Industry Lab.

We will talk with Carolyn Edsell-Vetter, from A Yard & A Half Landscaping Cooperative, based right in Waltham, MA, about transitioning to a coop from another ownership/governance structure. Meet some local people that are currently working in successful worker cooperatives in any industry, doing what they love to do. Let's discuss how they started and how they continue to thrive in this economy. What are the benefits and what are the hurdles to overcome when forming a cooperative relationship with your partners?

Join us! Visit the Boston/Cambridge Worker Ownership Meetup, we have started to list some great coop resources and links, and if you are in the Boston area, let us know.

Sign up to be notified when Agaric gives a migration training:

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.