Caucus

Caucus is computer-conferencing software: a system for holding many simultaneous, ongoing, written conversations on one machine. Its grammar is deliberately spare—Caucus keeps discussions, in its makers’ 1998 formulation, “to just two levels: conference items and participants’ responses within those items”. A host opens and tends a conference; a participant opens an item; responses follow in order, signed and dated. In that grammar ARTS WIRE ran the conferences in which the ARTS WIRE half of Scibe was written—Screen Porch’s own product pages listed ArtsWire among the communities using Caucus, and The Metanet with it—and The Meta Network ran on it. Item 8, preserved at item8.org, is one of its items by name: item 8 of TMN’s artist conference.

Its maker is Charles Roth, and his account of it is a first-person one. At Wayne State University in the early 1980s he saw CONFER, Robert Parnes’s 1975 Michigan system, and—his words—“as soon as I saw the power of this, I wanted to write one that everybody could use”. The portable program he built through Camber-Roth, a division of his company Aule-Tek, was named Caucus; its first copy sold in 1986, and by 1990 it supported two full-time developers. Screen Porch, the company that later carried Caucus onto the web, described its chief technology officer the same way: Roth “created technologies for computer conferencing software in the early 1980’s”, their prototypes tested on communities of users connected directly to UNIX host computers.

Cousins, not coincidence. This edition’s editor, who wrote in both kinds of room, asked whether the likeness between TMN’s Caucus and the WELL’s conferencing was coincidence—“like chimps coming up with food washing concurrently on different islands”. The record answers no. Both systems descend from CONFER: its record names Caucus and PicoSpan alike among its progeny, and PicoSpan’s own record says it “tried to provide CONFER’s functionality while using the least amount of resources”. TMN itself began, in 1983, on CONFER II. And the cousins visited: ARTS WIRE’s community lived in Caucus rooms while its people also wrote on the WELL, and Scibe was composed in both at once. Documented descent, documented contact; the genuinely independent inventions belong to the generation before, at PLATO and EIES (see online conferencing).

Roth bought out the rights to Caucus in 1994, for most of his Aule-Tek stock. In February 1995 he discovered the World Wide Web and, in a month, wrote CML—the Caucus Markup Language—and a web interface for the system. CML was more than a name for that conversion: Roth’s own Reference Guide defines it as a scripting language combining HTML tags with simple programming constructs and database functions, its interpreter “the core of the World Wide Web interface” to Caucus, and CaucusCare’s architecture description says every page the web system displayed was the output of a CML file—“a language like PHP or JSP or ASP, that describes what kind of data goes where on the page”. Screen Porch’s 4.0 announcement accordingly offered CML as the means by which organizations could “create interactive applications”: the conference interface itself was editable text, an early web templating language from the platform’s own author. Screen Porch, founded in 1996 in Northern Virginia with principals of Metasystems Design Group on its founding team, carried that work forward: its Caucus 4.0 release of March 10, 1998 names Roth as chief technology officer and Tom Mandel as president. In 1999 Roth joined with a small Washington, DC organizational-development firm—TMN’s own company, in his telling—to form Caucus Systems, Inc.; the venture capital burned, he was laid off in the summer of 2000, and when Caucus Systems went bankrupt late in 2001, its board granted the Caucus rights back to him. He started CaucusCare, rewrote Caucus on the open-source MySQL database, and open-sourced the software itself. And the system’s history was taken down inside the system itself: in 2004, in a Caucus conference at CaucusCare, Lisa Kimball—a partner in Metasystems Design Group from 1984, and the founder of the Electronic Networking Association—interviewed Roth about the beginnings, meaning, in her words, “to capture some Caucus history here so everyone has more of an appreciation of how Caucus has evolved”. That interview stands at caucuscare.com, beside the software it chronicles (see the village).

What Caucus left behind. First, itself: Caucus lives on as an open-source, web-based discussion and e-learning platform, maintained at caucuscare.com and used, its stewards say, in universities, nonprofits, and companies; version 5 arrived in 2005 and 5.1 in 2007, still extending the two-level grammar. Second, a documented lineage: the CONFER-descended, “WELL-style” design—discussions as linear chains of responses—was already, in Figallo’s 1990s survey, a recognized family of web conferencing systems, with Caucus listed among them. Third—stated as resemblance, not descent—the item-and-response grammar and the host-tended room are the recognizable ancestors in spirit of the forum thread, the comment section, and the asynchronous team channel: later systems reinvented the shape more often than they inherited it, but it is the shape Caucus and its cousins proved. Roth’s own later measure of the work, in his 2012 history, was duration over novelty: knowledge sharing that lasts, serious conversation that can be tracked over time, and back-and-forth moderated by experts. One smaller survival stands in the record too: Caucus 4.1’s “Bonanza” macros were partly based on customizations originally implemented by Scott Burns of TMN (see the village)—the village maintaining the village’s tools.

Sources and further reading