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.

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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!

Agaric is grateful to the Drupal community for all the effort poured into the amazing collaborative project. As part of giving back to it, we go to conferences to share with others what we have learned. These are some events where Agaric will be presenting this month.

Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy

This is a convergence of worker-owned cooperatives. Representatives come from all over the country to attend workshops and sessions on all things related to owning a cooperative. It will be help in New York City on weekend of June 9th -11th at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Benjamin and Micky will be hosting a workshop/discussion with Danny Spitzberg on Drutopia. They will cover how it can help cooperatives and smaller businesses have a we presence above and beyond the costs they can afford by consolidating the hosting and feature development into a group effort.

Montreal Drupal Camp

This event will take place on June 15-18 at John Molson School of Business de l'Université Concordia. Benjamin will be speaking on how Software as a Service can lead to long-term success in a software project.

Twin Cities Drupal Camp in Minneapolis

At Twin Cities Agaric will be presenting one workshop and two sessions.

On Thursday, June 22, Benjamin and Mauricio will be presenting the Getting Started with Drupal workshop. It is aimed to people who are just starting with Drupal and want to have a birds eye view of how the system works. As part of the workshop attendees will have the chance to create a simple yet functional website to put in practice their new knowledge. The organizers have gone above and beyond to make this training FREE for everyone! You do not even need a camp ticket to participate. You just need to register.

On Saturday, June 24, Mauricio will be presenting on Drupal 8 Twig recipes. This will be an overview of the theme system in Drupal 8 and will include practical example of modifying the default markup to your needs. The same day, Benjamin will present his Software as a Service.

Design4Drupal

This is THE yearly Camp for Drupal doers in Boston and it happens June 22nd-23rd. Micky will be hosting a workshop/discussion on Drutopia, an initiative within the Drupal project based in social justice values and focused on building collectively owned online tools. Current focuses include two Drupal distributions aimed at grassroots groups also offered as software as a service, ensuring that the latest technology is accessible to low-resourced communities.
Agaric will have a busy month attending and speaking at conferences. Please come to say hi and have fun with us.

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.

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With Europe threatening $25,000,000 fines and Facebook losing $80,000,000,000 of stock value, are you paying attention to data privacy yet? If millions and billions of dollars in news headlines never grabbed you, maybe you've noticed the dozens of e-mails from services you'd forgotten ever signing up for, declaring how much they respect your right to control your data. These e-mails are silly and possibly illegal, but they nonetheless welcome us to a better world of greater privacy rights and people's control of their own data that we web developers should embrace.

The huge potential fines (for large companies, the sky's the limit at four percent of global revenue) come from the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, and they signal that the GDPR is more than a suggestion. If you're not a European-based company, the European Union does not intend to discriminate: You're still liable when citizens of member states use your services or are monitored by you.

Don't lose sleep for Facebook's wealthy stockholders. That sizeable dip in Facebook stock was not due to the impending GDPR enforcement, but came in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Since then, the privacy-invading monopoly so many rich people are betting on regained its market cap and then some. (GDPR-related lawsuits are just starting.)

There's a lot of good resources for GDPR-proofing existing sites (see the bottom of this article); the work ranges from trivial for most sites to monumental tasks for web developers who, fortunately for me, aren't me (and who have finished their labor, I hope, as GDPR enforcement took effect today).

The fun and exciting part starts when we get to build new sites or new features on existing sites and from the beginning put privacy by design into practice (which also is in the law). And yes, I'm referring to complying with a continental government's regulations as fun and exciting.

Get updates from Micky, Ben, and other Agarics on their involvement in lots of movement work.  We will send you  occasional dispatches from our perspective on various overlapping movements for freedom and justice, and the building of democracy thereby, as workers fighting the good fight and as passionate observers.

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.