Conclusion
With the In Other Words module, it is now possible to keep your structured content and display it naturally. The logic of how a list should display in various scenarios is boiled down to an intuitive user interface for site builders, with no coding required. Try it for yourself! Get the module at drupal.org/project/inotherwords.
Here are links and notes from the presentation "Iterative UX: Find It Cambridge" (most recently given at Drupaldelphia).
La gente a menudo pregunta por las herramientas de software libre que Agaric utiliza para administrar su negocio cooperativo. En este artículo, compartiremos los recursos que elegimos para las tareas diarias de oficina y administración, así como para las comunicaciones en nuestras operaciones comerciales.
Agaric utiliza software libre siempre que es posible. Por esta razón, creamos sitios web con Drupal, una plataforma de gestión de contenido que destaca por la calidad de su código y por su amplia variedad de funcionalidades. Como miembros de la Comunidad Drupal, buscamos contribuir activamente con los grupos que trabajan en encontrar opciones para su mejora y ampliación.
La necesidad de una tecnología responsable - Parte 1
Quizás podrán preguntarse por qué decimos "Software Libre" y no "Código Abierto", ya que en ambos casos esencialmente es lo mismo. Nosotros preferimos este término porque incluye los principios éticos sobre el respeto a la libertad del usuario. La ética del software libre dice que los usuarios merecen control sobre el código que usan, mientras que el uso del término "Código abierto" se refiere solo a permitir que los usuarios participen en el desarrollo. Nosotros apoyamos la idea de un software que proteja nuestros derechos y nos evite estar vulnerables.
Join us for an interactive day devoted to Drupal in healthcare— a relaxed and friendly close to DrupalCon with learning, networking, and discussing. Whether you are in a pharmaceutical company, a state department of health, a non-profit hospital, a public health organization, or anyplace else in the broad healthcare space, there are unique needs in ensuring security, accessibility, compliance, and availability of important information and tools.
Healthcare is a crucial, dynamic space for web development today. Online communication and emerging technologies promise improved access and capabilities for patients and professionals. Crafting inspiring and useful digital experiences, however, must be built on a solid foundation of accessibility, security, and compliance. Come listen to industry leaders share their experience solving these challenges in healthcare.
Get tickets to go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!
What You Will Get by Attending
- Andy Waldrop will talk about scalable healthcare content in Drupal— with lessons from building WebMD!
- Georgiana Masgras and Jesse Meece will talk about using Drupal to makes it easy to maintain our sites.
- Jon Stewart will talk about how to leverage Drupal for web application development— the Open Web in healthcare!
- Two table talk sessions will give everybody a chance to dive deeply into key topics, including the application of large language models in healthcare and biggest takeways from DrupalCon and the summit. Bring your needs and we will embark on facilitated peer-to-peer problem solving with others who are affected and tech and healthcare industry experts.
- Our sponsors, Evolving Web and Acquia (by way of their partner Phase2), will have special presentations
- We will be closing the day with lightning talks. Invited topics include: Future of Drupal at your company (and how to improve it), multisite platforms, knowledge bases, provider directories, and the healthcare take on layout builder becoming experience builder versus paragraphs.
We will be all wrapped up by 4pm.
Attend DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!
Who Should Attend
Everybody interested in hearing and discussing how companies and the community are creating rich digital experiences in the healthcare space. All levels of colleagues in the pharma, medical, clinical, hospital, payers, caregivers, advocates, and healthcare professional space should go to DrupalCon and the Healthcare Summit!
COVID-19 Safer Space
The Oregon Convention Center controls all rooms per ASHREA 62.1 standards, using sensors to monitor occupancy based on CO₂ levels and bring outside air into the space accordingly. They report at the most levels at 800–1000 ppm during normal occupancy, and use MERV-13 filters for any filtration, which is appropriate for COVID-19.
Agaric will have high-quality N95 masks available to anyone who wants them and will have our own CO₂ monitors.
More about the Healthcare Industry Summit
The Healthcare Summit at the 2024 Portland, Oregon DrupalCon is organized by Jeanne Cost, George Matthes, and Pooja Jeeva. I am glad to be playing a part in coordinating this summit as well, especially given Agaric's involvement in and commitment to health and science communities.
Healthcare is a complex, regulation-filled industry that poses great challenges to building vibrant and compliant digital experiences for patients. Whether you are a pharma working towards the next product, a hospital treating someone with cancer, or an insurance company making sure a patient has access to information and proper care, there is much for you to gain from this summit.
Hear from experts on areas of accessibility, compliant patient experiences, new regulations and standards that can affect your teams and customers, success stories, and much more.
Sponsored by: Acquia and Evolving Web
Coordinate with all of the city's service providers together on one platform
Add service providers to the platform and check for gaps and redundancies in services offered throughout the city.
V. Auxiliary Tech Projects
CoopGuide
Working together on projects is one of the most important goals of our tech coop. It is also the 6th Cooperative Principle, Cooperation among Cooperatives. CoopGuide is a work in progress being built to facilitate team members in locating each other and getting familiar with each other's skills. The idea for this site came from discussions at Agaric's weekly Show and Tell gatherings.
SnowDrift
A crowdmatching platform that is a fund raising source for public goods. The first project will be to fund the building of Snowdrift itself. Micky is on the board and is working with the team to guide the formation of this cooperative effort.
IEEE.org SA Open
The SA Open is a platform, by the IEEE and managed by LeadingBit, that
aims to create a set of agreed upon standards to help people, both technical and organic, co-work more effectively to build Free Software with proper documentation and support materials on using and changing it. Agaric volunteers as a member of the Community Advisory Group, where we offer our expertise on this very subject. You can get involved with SA Open and help make it happen.
meet.coop
Meet.coop is an online meeting co-operative dedicated to hosting BigBlueButton video chat servers in multiple locations around the world. Agaric is a member. We meet weekly in different teams to work out the governance and member issues. There is an operational team that builds and maintains the hardware and software for providing an excellent video conference network structured in Sociocracy, also called dynamic governance. Meet.coop has forums where you can mingle with members and get up to date information on the development and learn more about the project.
Mastodon
Mastodon is a federated social network made up of affinity groups. The functionality is much like Twitter, where you can message other members and share information or "Toots" as they are called, in a group or one-on-one. You can join a sub-community or create your own. Agarics are members of the social.coop sub-community. Members can contact members of other sub-communities and there is a directory where you can browse the groups in the whole federation.
Mass Mesh
Mass Mesh is a high-tech social club building community-owned mesh networks throughout Boston. These networks enable home Internet access that is fairer, more secure, and more locally resilient than traditional cable. The purpose of this wiki is to provide you with all of the information you need to join the mesh by setting up your own mesh node. All of the information on their site and all of the code in their software is free to use share and edit.
This goes well beyond an organization's web site, of course. Web developers may be the ones to introduce it to organizations, though, so we should be prepared. Here's the gist.
Organizations must request any personal data in clear and plain language describing the specific pieces of information and how it will be used, such that consent can be given freely and unambiguously through an affirmative action.
This means you need to be always thinking of why you are collecting information, and not collecting information you don't need at all, and deleting any personal information you no longer need. You can collect nearly anything if you get clear consent, but if you have a legitimate business interest for the data you collect, you'll have even fewer requirements, and the people who use your site or service will have a smoother experience.
You further need to allow people to export their personal data, to rectify inaccurate data, and to challenge decisions you make on the basis of their personal data. If you don't have a legitimate business interest for the data (or it's overridden by people's rights), then you must also provide a mechanism for people to erase their data.
If your business interests involve spying, lying, or trying to manipulate people into bad financial, personal, and political decisions— maybe re-think your business. At the very least, try to avoid becoming part of the infrastructure for a police state.
It's GDPR day, a wonderful opportunity to think ethically, and explore another way to put your customers, clients, or constituents first!
Resources
From most thorough to most practical.
- The whole regulation
- The regulation, as a web site, with a page per section
- A quick-read news article on the likely implications
- The business case for complying when not legally obligated
- Official document "The GDPR: New Opportunities, New Obligations" (PDF)
- UK information commisioner's guide to GDPR for small and medium organizations
- Guidance: Legitimate Interest Assessment (PDF)
- Privacy policy recommendations
- General Data Protection Regulation Drupal module, with a built-in checklist and tools for tracking and deleting sensitive data
Sign up to be notified when Agaric gives a migration training:
Election-first organizing is failing us
We need to move to movement-first organizing
Welcome to the Drutopia Platform by Agaric, a cooperatively hosted website builder for grassroots groups.
Collaboratively building the future of online support for on-the-ground organizing.
Everything needed to grow a movement— together. Simple, easy website building tools for big, complex work.
Drutopia is a flexible content management system with many features built specially for grassroots organizations. It already helps groups share goals, call for action, collect donations, and report progress. Most important, Drutopia's developers seek to design ongoing improvements and capabilities with groups organizing for a better world.
The Drutopia Platform by Agaric combines the ease of use you find from software as a service website builders (like Wix and Squarespace) with the freedom and control of free (libre) software. It is LibreSaaS like Ghost(Pro) or WordPress.com, but it is built for and with grassroots groups. Importantly, the platform is collectively controlled by the people who rely on it.
Please let us know what would be useful toward your organizing efforts. We are looking forward to learning more about you and your goals and building this platform with you!
Publish once in Drupal, Syndicate Everywhere
Presentation resource page
Surviving a civil war has a way of making a person focus on the present. Putting in a solid day of work and taking time with family tend to come before putting items on an agenda for a board meeting, even if one owns the company.
Most of the 30 workers at Brookline-based A Yard and a Half Landscaping, who have chosen to take ownership of their company and transform it into a cooperative, are immigrants from El Salvador. From 1980 to 1992, El Salvador endured a civil war in which 80,000 people died—more than two percent of the population—including many, many noncombatants, most killed by the US- and oligarch-backed anti-Communist military government. The violence still echoes.
The Yard and a Half landscapers are laying a new path of owning and managing the company themselves. To do so successfully, they must cultivate a culture of involvement in decision-making. Carolyn Edsell-Vetter is the first CEO and President of A Yard and a Half Landscaping Cooperative after its transition from ownership by its founder. Carolyn, who was the featured speaker at the Boston worker coop meetup on November 17, is determined to work herself out of presidency of the board. Along with ownership, all worker-owners must take on more leadership roles, including board officerships (all worker-owners are already on the board of directors).
For many at the meetup, the challenges Carolyn recounted about making a cooperative work matched experiences of our own, even though none of the rest of us were part of a transition from a non-coop company. Indeed, those of us in and out of cooperatives found much to discuss, from democracy to dollars.
How we talk about work and other things in worker-owned cooperatives was itself a topic of interest. Part of this is treating everyone with respect and trying to remove oppressive language, words and phrases or statements that intentionally or unintentionally reinforce racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and gender conformity.
"We spend about 30 minutes a working day working on our language," said James Bachez of Boston Collective Delivery, "and not the lunch hour." Collective organization calls for a "whole new language just beginning to understand." James stood up and paced while he thought and spoke. "Capitalist businesses talk about culture all the time," as something set from the top. Company culture is key for cooperatives too, but it comes from everyone. "The coop develops its culture. It's there. Whatever bubbles up to the top. I feel far more effective as part of a cooperative."
Most agreed that working on communication needs to be a constant, conscious effort. Collaboration, like other skills, should not be left to chance. Carolyn's praise of the
The business of co-owning a business calls for financial literacy for all workers, too. "Everyone needs to know how to read a P&L", said Carolyn, referring to a statement that shows the profit and loss of a business. Used to see and estimate sales and expenses, it is fundamental to understanding any business's financial health.
We talked a great deal about fair compensation and balancing effort and types of work. A Yard and A Half does not have the same pay rate for all workers, and exactly what to pay everyone "has been really contentious. We inherited the wage structure from the previous owner," said Carolyn. They wanted their starting wages to be higher, but now people coming in can get almost as much as a crew leader who has been working for ten years. Either all pay rates have to bump up proportionately, or pay differentials have to flatten and everyone needs to be all right with that. "Thirty-five percent of cost to field labor would make us uncompetitive."
Like Carolyn, most felt there could be fair tiered systems in cooperatives, but no one felt they had one permanent answer. "This is how worker cooperatives reconcile the valuation of our labor in a capitalist system," said James, "while building something new." Most felt equal pay to be a good goal, but also that more experience, more responsibility, or just doing boring work no one else wanted to do could all justify more money. Sharing skills and sharing different kinds of work might be ideal, but isn't always practical and different work can be treated differently to have an overall just outcome. One attendee said she learned in Argentina that retirement age for physical labor is set lower, at 50 years.
Whatever the pay, there's no replacement for enjoying what one does. "Landscaping, you just have to love it," Carolyn said, "to make it through one season. We've had people come to [start their first day of] work and turn in their work clothes at lunch break." For those who like all that physical work, changing landscapes, making things beautiful, are extremely worthwhile.
A final big topic we talked about was hierarchy. A cooperative does not mean you don't have one person in charge of certain domains. Hierarchies help accomplish specific tasks efficiently, but they need not be permanent, and the structure adopted for a specific purpose or project in a cooperative is "a consensual hierarchy".
As interesting as our common ground was, the transition-specific experiences were also fascinating. A Yard and a Half has some great advantages coming from a transition— an established, profitable business and the passed-on wisdom from their founder, including advice which Carolyn said they are just beginning to recognize the truth of: "You either have to grow or you'll lose ground." The clientele is largely friendly to the progressive business that was built and the worker cooperative that it has become: hippies done good, people who want their kids or grandkids to be able to run around on the grass and eat dirt without being poisoned, thanks to a decision to stop using chemical pesticides and adopt organic practices.
Unexpected challenges of A Yard and a Half's transition to a cooperative corporation included having to re-establish the company's credit. Some businesses wanted personal guarantees from all of the owners for debts. They had to discuss and ultimately accept that some worker-owners—with homes and credit cards—were putting more at risk than others.
Transitioning from a hierarchical structure or creating a new worker cooperative both mean learning to self-govern. It is work that all in attendance recognized as hard but affirmed as worthwhile. Worker cooperatives offer control over our own work, increased control over our lives, and the promise of, perhaps, an economic base that can support collective liberty and justice.
A Yard and a Half Landscaping was not the only inspiring worker-owned cooperative we got to learn about that night. Boston Collective Delivery is one of three cooperatives in a fledgling federation that plans to grow, and in five years or so apply to be accepted into Mondragon, the largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives in the world— but we hope to learn and write about more on that later. There's no reason for you to wait if you're anywhere near Boston though! Meetup coordinator Micky Metts, James, many other attendees, and many more look forward to meeting interested people at WORC'N's holiday party this evening at Industry Lab. Join the meetup group for notice of new events or the WORC'N discussion list for discussion of worker cooperatives in the Boston area, including notice of these meetups.
