Shifts and Devices

Here is an excerpt from the ‘Archdruid Report’, looking at the impact cheap energy has had on the development of our culture and technology over the past 25 years. The part below touches on the Internet, which has evolved into a far different, more complex, and perhaps more brittle, structure than the original ARPAnet designers intended.

For a 25-year interval [1980-2005], by reckless overproduction of rapidly depleting resources pursued for short term gain, the cost of energy was driven down to artificially low levels that had never been seen before – and, barring a whole concatenation of miracles, will never be seen again. The resulting glut of energy fostered ways of doing things that make no sense at all under any other conditions.

The explosive spread of the internet [was] a product of the era of ultracheap energy. The hardware of the internet, with its worldwide connections, its vast server farms, and its billions of interlinked home and business computers, probably counts as the largest infrastructure project ever created and deployed in a two-decade period in human history. The sheer amount of energy that has had to be invested to create and sustain today’s internet, along with its economic and cultural support systems, beggars the imagination.

Could it have been done at all if energy stayed as expensive as it was in the 1970s? It’s hard to see how such a question could be answered, but the growth of the internet certainly would have been a much slower process; it might have moved in directions involving much less energy use; and some of the more energy-intensive aspects of the internet might never have emerged at all. It remains to be seen whether a system adapted to a hothouse climate of nearly free energy can cope with the harsher weather of rising energy costs in a postpeak world.

Full Text: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/02/back-up-rabbit-hole.html

Or, more generally, into open source Content Management Frameworks (CMFs).

Back in 2004, Mike Gifford from Open Concept Consulting and I co-wrote an essay, Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism, that presented a roundup of the then-hot tech tools for online organizing.

Much can change in 1000 days, and the original article is badly in need of a reprise, taking into account the rapid evolution of open source tools and the web itself.

The original article was written on a wiki, with Mike and I chipping in to iteratively write chunks and massage the prose into final form, to the extent that I doubt if either of us could remember who wrote any particular word–a great form of collaboration that I would recommend to any co-writers who are in alignment on the general direction they want to take a text.

When reviewing the article, I was struck by the fact that many of the tools in the various sectors discussed have not so much evolved or been displaced, but that the sectors themselves have become blurry and blended.

Where before, strong single-purpose open source applications addressed well defined problems, now the problems themselves seem far mushier, and the solutions are often not dedicated single-purpose applications, but instead are built with the tools and modules of a CMF.

The sectoral software dinosaurs that evolved to solve specific problems are falling rapidly to weaselly little CMFs – furry little generalists with opposable thumbs that cross sectors without a backwards glance, leaving even the most elegant of the dino-apps gasping in the dust like an analogy gone bad.

By CMFs, I mean those content management systems that are flexible and easily extended with modular add-ins to take on tasks that have traditionally been done by specialized web applications. Drupal, Joomla and Plone all come to mind as examples of easily extensible content management frameworks that can solve the kind of specialized problems that were best handled by dedicated applications in the depths of the past. The first three recommendations in the original 2004 Top Ten Open Source Tools for eActivism article act as examples of the extent and limits of this shift:

• For online magazine publishing and content sharing, ActionApps was the top contender in 2004. Addressing the same design problem in 2007, I’d start with a CMF – with a special focus on selecting a framework with strong RSS content syndication capabilities – and then extend it with appropriate modules to meet the specific needs of the project. Depending on the exact project requirements any of the major CMFs might be the basis of a good solution: For example, a glossy magazine-oriented site might begin with Joomla and extend with the Joomla Magazine component, while a site oriented to content sharing between related sub-sites might choose Drupal and the Organic Groups Sites module.
• In what we described as the the slash/forums space, PostNuke was top of the heap due to widespread use and support. Again, approaching the much more developed ‘social/news-sharing software’ space of 2007, I’d start with a CMF and customize with membership and peer-rating modules to meet the specific needs of the project.
• We positioned Drupal as a top blogging tool – a focus that several readers pointed out ignored the versatility inherent in Drupal. Today, for a pure and simple blogging solution I’d go with WordPress or another dedicated blogging package, but for anything more complex, such as a multi-user blogging community site I’d again take advantage of Drupal’s extensibility, utilizing its well-developed Taxonomy and Organic Groups modules to build the exact features required by the site.

… and so on through the list. Many of the strongly specialized sectoral apps of 2004 are coming under challenge by content management framework solutions in 2007. I’d expect that only very elegant and flexible applications in specialized areas – such as phpBB for discussion forums – will hold their reptilian ground against the swarming attacks of these warm and fuzzy CMFs.

I have run across several thinkers lately that draw the Open Source rabbit out of the black hat of current affairs, offering free/libre software culture as a model for future political and social organization. A couple of examples:

The Upside of Down – Thomas Homer-Dixon

Thomas Homer-Dixon delivers a well-crafted presentation covering creative responses to environmental crisis and energy descent. He focuses on collective action under the impetus of “catagenisis” – catastrophically induced creative system change. There is a very interesting comment on Open Source Democracy in the questions at the end, a theme that is expanded in his book.

Presentation Link: http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=4658
Book: The Upside of Down: http://www.theupsideofdown.com/

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century – Eben Moglen

Another great online presentation viewing the world in broad terms – and directly from an open source perspective – delivered at Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle, by Eben Moglen.

It is a brilliant and idosyncratic synthesis, positing the free software movement as the fundamental transformative technology of the new millennium. Eben draws on an eclectic mix of history, socialism, free-market and post-market economics. His thesis is flawed only by the minor inconvenience that software is not the fabric of reality–unless you are attending a Plone conference.

His view is that in the 21st century production happens not in factories, but in collaborative communities, and that this fundamental shift in the control of the means of production changes everything. Eben goes further to hypothesize that the forces that have confronted each other over social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than ever before, based on the efficiencies of open source community-based technologies, and the emergence of information and education replicated freely, without proprietary ownership.

Presentation Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8
Review: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//005626.html

The Design Imperative – Jeff Vale
And an excerpt from Jeff Vail’s recent essay:

If we choose to pursue technics as a means of maintaining or improving our quality of life, how should we organize this pursuit? I have three suggestions: decentralized, open source, and vernacular.

Let’s start by taking discrete examples of places that produce a quality of life seemingly disproportionate to their energy consumption. There are countless examples, but because it has a long tradition in this area in American popular culture, I’ll choose the Tuscan village.

…

How is the Tuscan village open source? Tuscan culture historically taps into a shared community pool of technics in recognition that a sustainable society is a non-zero-sum game. Most farming communities are this way – advice, knowledge, and innovation is shared, not guarded. Beyond a certain threshold of size and centralization, the motivation to protect and exploit intellectual property seems to take over (another argument for decentralization. There is no reason why we cannot share innovation in technics globally, while acting locally: in fact, the internet now truly makes this possible, leveraging our opportunity to use technics to improve quality of life.

URL: http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/design-imperative.html

EnergyBulletin has an interesting skim on computer energy consumption posted at http://www.energybulletin.net/23829.html
A clip to contemplate:

At the moment Linden Labs, who host the popular Second Life virtual world, has around 4,000 servers. Although they have two million signed up users, at any one time only around 15,000 people are logged on.

Blogger and technology writer Nicholas Carr did some rough calculations, based on the power consumption of each server being 200 watts and the power consumption of the logged-on user’s own PC being 120 watts, and reckons that each avatar uses 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity–or about the same amount as an average person living in Brazil.

Thresholdware (software that stores user transactions, then acts on them when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached) has many applications beyond the fundraising discussed in the previous Thresholdware post.

To recap, in fundraising thresholdware works like this:

[Commonly] a $100,000 project might be built out of many small donations. Using thresholdware allows users to rack a $50 donation onto their credit card, with the knowledge that it will not be processed until enough donations have come in to make the project a success. By using thresholdware, the risk of your donation disappearing into a black hole because a project does not raise enough funds to succeed is eliminated: every donation is actualized in the real world, and donors can be confident that their contribution will make a difference.

This is a powerful online fundraising approach, and I’m interested in seeing it adopted widely by NGOs.
However, the applications of thresholdware goes well beyond the economic realm. Consider this scenario, very loosely adapted from Harel Barzilai’s essay On Funding: A Plan to Put the Movement on Solid Financial Ground

Suppose – hypothetically of course – that there is a rogue superpower that intends to invade and occupy several Middle Eastern countries in the near future. Having already used up their standing army in losing two such wars, the nation in question will need to institute a military draft to carry out this latest project.

Based on previous history, citizens of the rogue state might decide to individually resist this military draft. They might do so in the hundreds, or even thousands, in a series of symbolic actions. The result would be a trickle of resisters, tossed into jail, or perhaps into the new camps, if numbers warranted.

For resistance to result in stopping the proposed war, it would have to be far more effective than past efforts, which invariably resulted in manageable numbers of political prisoners, and the diversion of draft resistance efforts into prisoner support campaigns.

Enter thresholdware.

On the surface, Draft Resistance is a completely separate topic from fund-raising. But they have in common the usefulness of conditionality. In the case of making donations, interactive, ‘intelligent’ and conditional donations are desirable because you don’t want to waste your donation; you would like to be able to base your choice, at least in part, on what others are committed to doing.

The same applies when the stakes are higher than money. In draft resistance, a resister’s effectiveness depends on how isolated they will be. Will the action merely be symbolic self-sacrifice and jail, damaging both the activist and the movement as it shifts energy from taking action to supporting jailed activists, or can thresholdware ensure that it becomes something much more?

How about if resistance simultaneously involves 100,000 other citizens, organized through an encrypted thresholdware system? A critical mass of citizens far beyond the number that can be prosecuted and jailed? Here is one way this might work, paraphrased from Harel:

Say the campaign was set up so that all resistors would simultaneously send a letter of non-compliance and their defaced draft card to the authorities. One concern participants might have is that of premature release of their identifying information. To guard against this, we might imagine an independent organization like a lawyers’ guild, looking at the online secure ‘draft resistence thresholdware’ software, and being willing to offer a kind of insurance to each participant: insuring them against the very unlikely possibility that there is a malfunction and a letter is sent with their (pre-authorized) signature, but with a total number of such resistors being less than the limit they set (100,000 in our example). That is certainly a possibility. The insurance may include money, guaranteed hours of free legal defense, or both.

Thus anyone participating would have a high degree of confidence that, if the software works as advertised, there is safety (and, also crucially, effectiveness) in numbers and that ‘there will be 100,000 or more of us.’  But not only that  – also the confidence in and assurance of the process.

Just as having added ‘conditionality’ allowed us, due to considerations of both safety and effectiveness, to increase the number of people willing to participate in draft resistance, likewise, assurance procedures such as these would increase even further the number of people who are ready, willing, and able to take part in such a mass-based act of civil disobedience.

Thinking still further ahead: The government may try to make it a criminal offense to even conditionally give permission to the grassroots organization to send out such a letter on your behalf, but that runs into several problems. First, how will the government find out you did it, without succeeding in breaking the encryption of the grassroots campaign’s computers?

And what if the government goes after grassroots organizations suspected of running the conditional draft resistance? Let’s just say that there may be a lesson to be learned from the history of file sharing, where Napster was much easier to deal with, having a central server, than the Gnutella type de-centralized software, where no central body is in control, but large numbers of users just choose to get together and run that software. Similar ideas could  – and should – be investigated to protect citizen’s rights and freedoms from unjust control by the State.

While the draft resistance scenario is extreme–and the capabilities of modern national security agencies to oppose this kind of action may be under-estimated in this basic scenario–it does dramatically point to the potential use of thresholdware in citizen actions: strike votes, union organizing, tax revolts and more could certainly be organized and carried out using secure thresholdware.

As for the underlying technology for secure thresholdware, there is much work that has been done in the last few years, some of which is summarized in Using Technology to Protect Free Speech in Dangerous Places, posted on WorldChanging. Much of the software discussed is available at Secure NGO in a Box.

It is not hard to roadmap a secure thresholdware application based on current open source technologies: It’s a sweet spot at the intersection of secure communications, distributed storage, and decision-making groupware –  a Free/Libre Open Source application just waiting to be built – Queue|Cue the Revolution!

The “Problem of Many-in-One” is a shorthand term for the commonly encountered challenge of creating a web presence for an umbrella organization that is composed of autonomous chapters. A typical solution is sketched below, with an organizational web site exchanging content with autonomous chapter web sites:

A description of the Problem of Many-in-One which hints at the typical requirements is:

The Organization consists of multiple Chapters, many of which require a Chapter Web Site. The required Chapter Web Site may vary in scope from a single contact page to a full web site with a calendar and other plugin features.

The Chapters each need to administer their own site, but the Organization needs to be able to overide local control on occasion and administer the site directly.

The Chapter sites need to be able to feed content into the Organization site, subject to organization editorial controls, and the Organization needs to be able to cascade selected content down to the Chapter sites.

The Organization needs to be able to control branding, themes, and information architecture templates of the Chapter sites. The Chapters need the capability to select from the menu of themes and templates made available by the Organization.

Administration at both the Organization and Chapter levels must be simple and WYSIWYG, as the administrators will generally have only basic web user skills.

Politically, the solution must balance Chapter autonomy and creativity in generating their own content with Organization requirements for coherence and consistent messaging.

A real-world example of the Problem of Many-in-One was discussed at the Web of Change Conference, and is summarized in a report on a special session of Drupal developers that focused on the Council of Canadians’ web presence, a typical instance of the problem.

The Problem of Many-in-One is a recurring ‘problem pattern’ that many web developers have confronted and solved for individual clients, but that currently lacks a robust solution at the content management (CMS) level: Instead we reinvent a solution each time the problem arises.

I think that instead of continuing to cobble together ad hoc solutions, we can tackle the problem head-on, at the CMS level. A robust, out-of-the-box solution to the Problem of Many-in-One will have the following attributes:

• Organization and Chapter structure as a built-in default, reflected in domain and subdomain or directory and sub-directory architecture.
• Simple templating of theme and architecture at the Organization level, with a set of built-in architecture defaults tuned to typical chapter needs.
• Simple admin with the ability to hide unwanted features at both the Organization and Chapter levels.
• Selective content exchange in both directions between Organization and Chapter sites.
• Simple ability for the Organization administrator to create, template, and delete Chapter sites.
• ACL that allows Chapter admins access only to their Chapter site, and Organization admins access to all sites.
• Ongoing operations must not require modifications of code, and must be capable of being carried out within the admin interface.

Clearly, many of the available Open Source CMSs have part of the solution, but so far none has been identified that has all of the features required to solve the Problem of Many-in-One in a way that is efficient and easily reproduced.

I’ve just come back from the excellent annual Web of Change conference, held on Cortez Island in BC. Always thought-provoking and often passionate, the conference has sparked a number of thoughts and follow-up projects, some of which will appear on Shifts and Devices over the next few weeks.

One topic that resonated with several of the conference participants was the concept of thresholdware.

Thresholdware is my term for software that stores transactional commitments, then acts on them when a specific critical mass or threshold has been reached. The point of thresholdware is to allow users to commit to an intention that can be carried out successfully only when this predefined tipping point is reached.

Perhaps the clearest example is in fundraising, where a $100,000 project might be built out of many small donations. Using thresholdware allows users to rack a $50 donation onto their credit card, with the knowledge that it will not be processed until enough donations have come in to make the project a success. By using thresholdware, the risk of your donation disappearing into a black hole because a project does not raise enough funds to succeed is eliminated: every donation is actualized in the real world, and donors can be confident that their contribution will make a difference.

The economic concept behind thresholdware is outlined in some detail in Harel Barzilai’s essay ‘On Funding: A Plan to Put the Movement on Solid Financial Basis’. As far as I know, Harel is the originator of the concept, though I would be glad to post other links to similar approaches. It’s the sort of powerful but simple idea that likely has multiple origins, and has just been waiting for the correct conditions to crystallize.

Personally, I consider it a key interface/functionality enhancement, straightforward to code but socially very powerful, with applications that go well beyond fundraising – one of which I will discuss in an upcoming post: ‘Queue|Cue the Revolution’.

Shifts and Devices is reflections on environment, technology and communications.

The title comes from a travel guide from Victorian era that I ran across once in reprint: something like “Shifts and Devices for Travelling in Wild Lands”. Or maybe not – Googling Shifts and Devices does not bring up any such book.

I do consider the emerging future to be a ‘wild land’, as our technological civilization bangs into the limits and constraints of climate change and energy resource depletion, and we make adjustments and try solutions both personally and globally, and these topics will be core to Shifts and Devices.

Since much of my work involves online learning, communications, and the use of Internet technology to support communities and social change, there will also be a strong thread of reflection and comment on software and the web as part of the Shifts and Devices mix.
The intention cloud below shows the blend:

Actual mileage will vary, so it will be interesting to see how the Shifts and Devices tag cloud evolves.