We help organizations meet their goals by providing consulting in online technology strategy, by building and customizing high quality software, and by educating people.
Development
We build with proven software that gives you power and control over your website and online presence.
- Constituent Relation Management (CRM) development
- Content migration
- Drupal development
- Django development
- Donation optimization
- Search engine optimization (organic SEO)
- Social media integration
- Website and CRM security
- Website maintenance
- Website performance tune-up
- Website upgrade
We use and contribute to libre software whenever possible, creative commons license our documentation, and work under an open organization model.
Strategy
We use design justice principles to help your online presence meet your goals and make real world impact.
- Analytics training
- Content governance
- Content strategy
- Content operations
- Social media strategy
Migrations
We are experts in Drupal migrations. (We can train you to do migrations too.) We can move content from your old site—whether it is Drupal or not—to a new Drupal 9, 10, or 11 site so that you can keep working with all of your old content, all while gaining access to the flexibility and functionality of modern Drupal.
Training
We mentor and teach, building on your existing expertise.
- Custom one on one mentoring
- Consultation on your development and site-building projects
- Introduction to Drupal
- Drupal module development
- Drupal migration
- React.js
- Online security
Learn more about opportunities to receive training from Agaric.
Online Learning
We believe in the movement to protect the privacy of everyone using electronic devices. Every student should have the right to privacy when learning online. That is why we offer schools a suite of Libre Software learning management tools that will assist teachers in getting their students to take initiative and to engage fully in the learning experience.
Talk to us about your online learning needs.
Speaking
We share our knowledge and promote free software by speaking at events.
Topics include:
- How to Participate in the Digital Commons
- Effective Funding and Governance for Free Software
- Ethics in Technology
- Free Software = Free Society
- Solidarity Economy
- Cooperative Development
- Artificial Intelligence and Surveillance
- Personal Power
- Drupal - Community and Technical
Book us for an upcoming event.
Sign up to be notified when Agaric gives a migration training:
We work to raise everybody up
Whenever possible, we contribute our work back to the free software community to empower others to benefit from the solutions we build. We maintain more than seventy projects for anyone to use or contribute to in the Drupal ecosystem alone. By building tools in the open, and free for others to use and adapt, we help protect the open web and expand the software commons while meeting people's unique needs.
Our worker-owners are also participants in movements that are building ethical technology for grassroots movements. Michele Metts serves on the board of May First Movement Technology, Solidarity Economy Network, and Snowdrift.coop. Mauricio Dinarte serves on DrupalCon planning committees. Benjamin Melançon is on the Drutopia leadership team but mostly avoids the responsibility of formal positions, and is increasingly involved in non-hierarchical mutual aid and mutual defense networks that do not go for such labels anyway. Chris Thompson quietly helps Drutopia and May First and many other networks we a're involved in, so they actually function, on a technical and human communication level.
Agaric is a member of the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Drupal Association.
Valoramos aprender cosas nuevas y compartir nuestros conocimientos, por lo que nos tomamos el tiempo cada semana para compartir lo que hemos descubierto o descubierto. Nos damos cuenta de que esto puede ser de interés para personas ajenas al Agaric, especialmente para aquellas personas que trabajan solas o están en organizaciones que no fomentan el intercambio de habilidades. Por lo tanto, estamos invitando a socios, estudiantes, colegas, y usted, a participar en la observación o presentación de presentaciones cortas.
También discutimos nuestros flujos de trabajo y modelos de negocio como cooperativas. Esta cita es de nuestros amigos en Argentina - Fiqus.coop:
"El propósito de ponerse en contacto con otras cooperativas en el mundo no es solo una, y se podría decir que son varias al mismo tiempo y con la misma importancia.
En primer lugar, creemos que la mejor manera de fortalecer el movimiento cooperativo es conectarse, compartir experiencias, información ... en otras palabras, cooperar entre sí. Esa es la esencia de la forma organizativa que adoptamos para nuestras empresas ".
Suscríbase a la lista de correo para recibir invitaciones al chat y comparta este enlace con un amigo: Mostrar y Contar.
I attended BarCamp9 this year and had a more than wonderful time. The sessions were off the chart, everything from a Public Speaking 101 - Overview & Workshop, to a lecture on Immortality, a GNU/Linux sysadmin introduction, and a lively discussion on the state of mental health in tech, mixed in with Dating for Nerds.
First, I love the idea of the un-conference where nothing is scheduled in advance and everyone is encouraged to participate on some level. Most cons and camps I have been to are a "smash and grab" of info, BarCamp9 and the un-conference style bust that wide open in a non-intimidating way for people. The attendees I spoke to found themselves going to sessions they would never have thought to sign up for. The non-schedule atmosphere invites people to explore in a non-threatening way. This un-conference was one of the best I have been to because the organization was smooth and the volunteers made the event really personal. The sessions ranged from highly technical discussions and presentations to down to earth heartfelt meetings. One session in particular was intriguing in that it drew a capacity crowd for the room. The gender balance was pretty much 50/50 and everyone was engaged in the conversation... the topic: "Things you wish you knew earlier".
I tossed my sticky note up on the board and proceeded to do a presentation/discussion: Cooperatives and Collectives—Think Outside the Boss. A moderate sized group of people filled the room and I started the slides. When discussing the difference between a freelancer, an employee and a worker-owner, Gonzalos Chomon, a cooperative member of evovelo.com took part and gave great details of the different laws that affect European cooperatives. In Spain it seems like coops are given the benefits of the law as corporations are in the US. Twenty percent of a cooperatives earnings go into a fund to support new and growing cooperatives—this is mandatory. Sometimes the audience makes the presentation come alive! I have posted my slides.
My colleague Fernandes Paredo Garcia, of Dilygent, based in Peru, translated my presentation to Spanish and presented it at an event in Guatemala—some of the attendees started the formation of a new cooperative that night!
I would recommend that you go to the next barCamp in your area, or any un-conference near you - you might be suprised by what you find, and by what you may contribute!
Mighty thanks to all the sponsors that made this event possible http://www.barcampboston.org
Here is the schedule for Saturday and then for Sunday, eclectic or what? There should be a lot more unconferences! Agaric is working on PowerToConnect.org to facilitate conferences and events of all types—more on that later.
Note of interest: I heard in passing that the name barCamp came from a play on words in response to fooCamp, a programmers play on the term foo-bar, which is yet another play on the acronym F.U.B.A.R.
As starving authors we at Agaric don't have a lot of cash to burn right now, but we've thrown $25 in the project to make it possible to subscribe to drupal.org issues without commenting. (On top of whatever we donated when this request for funding went out a year and a half ago).
In this installment of our case study about working with long term projects I will explain the architectural decisions made by our client, ZEIT ONLINE, regarding the relaunch of their digital subscription platform. Please refer to part 1 of this series for basic information about the project and a discussion of how to deal with the evolution of programming languages and operating systems.
Early on our client had decided to split up the platform into separate services that communicate via HTTP. This would allow them to develop those components using the most suitable technology for each, as well as allowing the services to progress more independently. The existing platform already used a separate service for authentication and storing user profile information. We took it from there and worked with the client to take it a step further.
First we identified the major logical components of the platform:
- User accounts
- Product presentation
- Checkout
- Order management (including data exchange with fulfillment provider)
- Content delivery (via HTTP and E-Mail)
When considering how to divide the whole into services, we found it helpful to elaborate on the interfaces between them. The overall idea here is similar to what is accomplished by writing tests first: by grasping how you will consume an interface, it helps define the implementation more succinctly. In order to keep it simple we imposed a constraint on communications between services: When responding to any request, a service must not depend upon another HTTP request to a third party. That way developers would not have to deal with complex dependencies in their development environment and errors would be easy to locate.
Another important consideration was not to do too many things at the same time. Drupal 6 was fulfilling the roles of delivering content and product presentation to the client's satisfaction and the functionality was provided by a small amount of modules. As an upgrade of those parts to Drupal 7 would be straight forward, that was the direction taken for those items. A new client side order form had been developed already and was in experimental use as an alternative to the Ubercart checkout process.
That left the order management as a candidate for a new service. It needs to take orders from the client side order forms, store them, and send them to the fulfillment provider. It would also need to receive updates about the states of an order from the fulfillment provider. Agaric was asked to develop that component and picked Flask as a framework. That was a subjective choice, any other technology for building web applications could have been employed as well.
In upcoming posts I will cover the individual components and how they fulfill the goals of the overall architecture. ZEIT ONLINE is happy with the architecture and is currently moving further along those lines.
Clayton speaks at events around the world on topics including Free Software, Platform Cooperatives and Cooperative Business Structures.
It's great to be here, and there, and there.
Thanks Indieweb module for Drupal!
Photo courtesy of Women of Color in Tech stock images. CC Attribution License
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Practical individual resources for opting out of surveillance
Things you can do personally and without too much difficulty to get a little more free from Nineteen Eighty-Four style government oppression and surveillance capitalism. (But remember, the most important and impactful things will require collective action!)
- PRISM Break
- Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense
- Micky's blog post on daily business operations using (privacy-protecting) free software
