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Bødker and colleagues have studied a volunteer community working to distribute locally sourced organic vegetables in Aarhus, Denmark (AOFF). Their paper contains many stories of how a grassroots organizations design their technologies in real life. AOFF started out using a facebook group both as their public face and means of communication, but subsequently members of the group operated a wiki and several different websites. The first of these websites was created and hosted by a web developer volunteer, who eventually abandoned it: "the initial web developer became less and less involved with AOFF, resulting in minimal development, slow communication and lack of access to the basic configuration on the back-end, forcing the community to "invent" alternatives around the website." While the abandoned website was still in use, another member with development skills implemented a calendar feature on the website essentially by hacking it: "Paul, the member who later went on to develop the second website, "went into the database and put in an iframe as a content element...that's not done through the CMS at all, that's just some injected some SQL, into the database, which case the calendar feature [...] but I mean, that's what we had, that's what we could do, it's the only possibility".
Infusion's ResourceLoader model
One of our own, to round out the set. In order to get our half-baked incarnation of the FLUID-4982 asynchronous ginger world for Infusion 4.x, we special-cased the status of fluid.resourceLoader in the architecture - it's the only site where asynchrony may be resolved during component startup. However, this just creates a Bracha-ist "shadow domain" with respect to this configuration as was encountered when trying to update WeCount's covid-data-monitor project to account for the "latest" fetch idiom required by binding it to the merged data in https://github.com/inclusive-design/covid-assessment-centres/tree/main/merged. ResourceLoader's fixed record structure was designed to be a "one stop shop" for simple cases and so trying to insert any indirection here immediately breaks the user out of the structure they understand and requires them to understand some other primitive. In this case far from a simple one too - my first thought was to produce some form of transforming promise chain by bridging the Resource to a DataSource - but really at this point it is far simpler to break out entirely and write an arbitrary promise-producing structure in code using the "promiseFunc" integration that we produced for ADTKINS. Infusion 6 can't roll on soon enough!