Caucus
Caucus is the conferencing software The Meta Network ran on — which is to say, it is the machine item 8 was written in. Its shape is the work’s shape: a conference holds items; an item holds responses, appended in order, under each writer’s name, with the date and time; the system shows each reader only what is new since their last visit. When this edition prints a response’s Caucus header, that is Caucus’s own bookkeeping, kept.
the maker
Caucus was written by Charles Roth. In his own account — an interview conducted in 2004, fittingly inside a Caucus conference, by Lisa Kimball — Roth was a graduate student and instructor in computer science at Wayne State University in 1980–82, already the author of several e-mail systems at General Electric, when he encountered CONFER and saw what many-to-many conversation could do. CONFER ran only on the Michigan Terminal System, of which there were only ever about thirteen; Roth’s calling, as he puts it, was portability — “the prophet of portability” — and Caucus was written to run on everybody’s computer. By 1988 he was running a project across New York, London, and Tokyo inside Caucus itself to build its Japanese version: “each time a problem came up, it rotated around the globe” — the software developing itself in its own medium. He also names the forward-thinkers who pointed him: Jacob Palme, Murray Turoff, and Bob Parnes.
The 1994 user’s guide catches the text era exactly: you logged onto a UNIX host and typed caucus; a “captive Caucus account” could start it the moment you logged in. A 1994 directory of bulletin-board software lists Caucus as a commercial package, source not generally available, from Camber-Roth of Ann Arbor, Michigan, priced from $1,800 for an eight-user PC system to $20,000 unlimited — serious machinery, licensed per machine the way word processors and databases were licensed.
Screen Porch and the web
The web version began as Roth’s solo work. In 1994 he bought the Caucus rights back, for most of his Aule-Tek stock. In February 1995 he discovered the World Wide Web and—in his own words—“In a month I wrote a completely new language (‘CML’, the Caucus Markup Language) and built a web interface for Caucus.” CML was a working language, not a decorative tag set: Roth’s own Reference Guide defines it as a scripting language combining HTML tags with programming constructs and database functions, its interpreter “the core of the World Wide Web interface” to the system. CaucusCare’s architecture description is just as plain: each page a browser displayed was the output of a CML file, and CML was “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 offered it to organizations as the means to “create interactive applications.” The interface of a web Caucus was therefore itself editable text—an early web templating language, written by the conferencing system’s own author in the same month as the interface it powered, through which the people who kept the rooms could shape what those rooms looked like and did.
In 1996 Screen Porch was founded, in its own words, “to provide Caucus — groundbreaking, Web-based software.” Its backgrounder gives Roth, by then the company’s chief technical officer, nearly twenty years as an innovator in online collaboration software, and records that Metasystems Design Group — whose principals were on Screen Porch’s founding team — had nearly fifteen years’ experience building online communities, and hosted The Meta Network itself. Caucus 4.0, announced from Woodbridge, Virginia on March 10, 1998, needed nothing at the reader’s end but a common web browser; its two-level structure — conference items, and participants’ responses within those items — was defended as the cure for “topic drift.” Doc Searls called Caucus “the best social computing application of our time,” with “roots that run back more than a decade to collaboration platforms that predate even the likes of Lotus Notes.” The editor’s own thanks, printed in 2000, go “to Scott Burns, to Caucus Systems, and to The Meta Network” — the sysadmin, the software, the room.
Roth’s own course through that stewardship was harder. In 1999 he joined with the small Washington, DC consulting firm he calls “the MetaNetwork” to form Caucus Systems, Inc. By his account the new company hired twenty people in under a year and burned through $2 million in venture capital; in the summer of 2000 he was laid off, with about sixty percent of the company, from the system he had created. When Caucus Systems went bankrupt late in 2001, its board’s last act was to grant the Caucus rights back to him. He started CaucusCare—to sell new licenses, and to support the existing customers “left in the lurch”—rewrote Caucus on the open-source MySQL database, and in time open-sourced the software itself in two layers: the CML interpreter under the GPL, the CML pages under the CDDL.
Caucus Systems’ staff also included this edition’s editor, for about a year from 1999, as a Linux systems administrator. The fact stands on his period professional biography, published on Howard Rheingold’s site among the Rheingold Associates team pages, which records that he “worked at Caucus Systems as a Linux SA” and that, “as an employee of Caucus Systems, Inc,” he had “been hosting Professional Virtual Events since 1999.”
the legacy of Caucus
What is documented: the lineage. CONFER begat Caucus, PicoSpan, and YAPP. YAPP conferences ran for decades on Michigan’s M-Net in the identical grammar — a host titled “fairwitness,” items holding an author’s text followed by responses appended in order, the system showing each reader only what is new — and M-Net still runs. A 1999 survey of web conferencing software groups Caucus in the “WELL-style” family descended from Confer: discussions structured as linear chains of responses, displayed as a continuous stream of text. Caucus itself persisted through Screen Porch’s web incarnations, in use at British Telecom, Avery Dennison, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the City of Santa Monica, among others the 1998 announcement names; and its community’s later home, caucuscare.com, still stands as an archive — it holds Roth’s 2004 interview and the Screen Porch papers this entry cites. The keeping was hands-on, down to the tooling: Caucus 4.1’s “Bonanza” macros were partly based on customizations originally implemented by Scott Burns of TMN — the village maintaining the village’s own tools, by the hand of the sysadmin whose name stands first in the editor’s printed thanks of 2000. Roth’s own measure of the software, stated in his 2012 history, was not novelty but duration: knowledge sharing that lasts, serious conversation that can be tracked over time, and back-and-forth moderated by experts.
What is echo rather than descent should be labeled as such — but the echo is loud. Every forum thread, every comment section, every async team tool that opens a topic, appends signed responses in order, tracks what each reader has already seen, and trusts a host to keep the room is speaking the grammar CONFER wrote and Caucus carried to the world. Whether that makes today’s tools Caucus’s descendants or its reinventions is the same question, at one more remove, as the one asked about The WELL and TMN on this site — and the honest answer has the same shape: some descent is documented, much is convergence, and all of it is kinship. Item 8 is that grammar’s literature: a year of people answering each other in order, in a room a host kept. And the item this software held was opened by a writer of Scibe — the 1994 work written on ARTS WIRE and The WELL — expressly to recreate it. The legacy of Caucus is that the room never actually closed; it changed addresses.
consulted sources
Caucus 2.7 Menu User’s Guide (April 1994) — the text interface, the captive account
alt.bbs.unixbbs FAQ (September 1994) — Camber-Roth, Ann Arbor; the prices
Wikipedia, “CONFER (software)” — the lineage: Caucus, PicoSpan, YAPP
“Choosing Web Conferencing Software” (1999 survey) — the WELL-style family
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