If you see a good acronym and wish to share them, do so in this thread so we can collect them for posterity. Some have already been posted on the wire, but they will drop off eventually, so I’ll reproduce them here. Also, feel free to make some up that you like… B)-

Zeitl0ch posted "Kamadeva Infected with Ayaba! ROFL!" on the wire (3 days ago)

Zeitl0ch posted "Ha! Komputer Imitated by Atum-Ra!" on the wire (7 days ago)

Count Anton posted "Killer Intercourse Aeons! rofl" on the wire (11 days ago)

Zeitl0ch posted "Wow! Khepri Information Agé!" on the wire (11 days ago)

Feather posted "ROFL! Kali Infernal Activists" on the wire (12 days ago)

Feather posted "LOL, I like the one for the wiki! Kaotic Information Aethers Yes!" on the wire (13 days ago)

Feather posted "Key to the Independent A.’.A.’. LOL!" on the wire (13 days ago)

Count Anton posted "Kingdom of Infected Agents, lol" on the wire (16 days ago)

I’m thinking I can host some websites on kia subdomains if anyone is interested. For a small fee, maybe $10 set up, plus $2 per month thereafter. FTP access for flat file html sites. Wordpress sites can be available for an additional $15 set up, plus $2.50 per month (extra $0.50 to cover database usage). Wordpress would come with a KIAMagic.com theme be default: such as this sample one on KIABot’s demo blog, although you could always mod this, or upload a different one via ftp. I’ve also released it on GPL license, so I’ll make it available for download somewhere.

Other CMS sites are available, but I’d have to work out an adhoc fee for configuring them. The more you can do yourself the better.

Anyone interested in this?

Just a quick note because I am testing a new feature on kiamagic.com that will allow users to include their external blog activity in the activity river using a special trackback url. This isn’t ready yet completely as I have some security settings to add, but it’s nearly ready so I don’t mind announcing it…

For some time I have documented the spread of Open Source Sorcery by starting a page in the KIAwiki just for that specifically.  This followed the spread of the Open Source movement in computing that believed in sharing the code that programs ran on to allow community feedback on parts of the code that needed improving.  Some Open Source licenses went further, releasing code on permissive licenses that allowed for branching, or even protected the code so that all branches need to be released on the same license.

As the buzz word grew some new occult groups formed and adopted the term.  Mainly they seem to have used it to mean open participation, or that the rituals, theories and other writings of the group are made public, albeit often on a still restrictive license.  Sometimes without even permission for others to republish.

Others however have begun wiki projects with licenses such as the GNU Free Documentation License or Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike.  These licenses qualify not just as Open Source, but moreso as Free Cultural Works.  These can be copied, modified and redistributed, by others, provided they give credit and provided they use the same license for the work they release it as a part of.  There is no restriction on commercial use, but exploitation is protected against by the Share Alike license.  If some Hollywood producer were to try and use some clips from a CC AT SA film, they would have to release their whole film on that license, or pay the copyright holders of the clip for rights to use it without those terms.  But if somebody wants to use it on a blog with an advertising banner, no problem.

Wikipedia and other projects show the power behind the kind of collaborative approach that a Free Cultural Works can provide in the realm of reference texts.  The GNU/Linux operating system and most of the software that runs on it demonstrate the power of this approach in writing software.  Less well known projects such as Kaltura video are forming and will in time demonstrate the power of this approach in the realm of film, soundtracks and other creative projects.

With this in mind I started a page in the KIA wiki called ‘Free Cultural Sorcery‘, which is an attempt to catalogue those open source sorcery projects that opperate on a Free Cultural Works approved license. Projects that I organise that fit with this definition include the content on this blog (excluding the nest which remains copyright of its contributors), the KIA wiki, and now the films on alchemical.tv.

For the latter, I am hoping to draw together artists, musicians, script writers and film makers willing to collaborate on Free Cultural Sorcery film projects.  Whether or not others join us, Lolita Perdurabo and I will be working on such projects in any case…

A while ago, about the time KIA was entering version 4 I wrote an article giving a history of KIA’s progress, entitled ‘KIA Network, Forum and Wiki Integrated‘. I mostly intended this as a promotional announcement about how KIA had evolved to encompass a social network, a forum and a wiki with single sign on (a big achievement for me at the time, as I’d been planning it for years), but I also gave a look back on how KIA had got to where it was back then, including its logo history and name changes.

One of the things about KIA has always been its openness, and whilst I am not aware of anyone taking advantage of it yet, the fact the logos are released as creative commons, means anyone so inclined can take them in modified or unmodified form, and use them in their own projects (provided they release any modifications and redistributions on the same license). This was to facilitate the growth of KIA as a decentralised movement that didn’t revolve solely around activities on kiamagic.com. However this hasn’t happened as far as I’m aware, and I’m left wondering if its even necessary. Probably a valuable contribution regardless of necessity.

The reason is that free open occult network already exists and doesn’t need to revolve around any particular image, flag or name in order to exist. KIA can be seen as a small part, or node, within an already existing open occult network that spans all cultures across the globe. Another such node within this network might be Free Illuminism (aka Congregational Illuminism). This describes itself as a bottom-up, decentralised open system, non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian. They say that by doing away with hierarchy, they do away with the pointless politics that can prove so much distraction in the work. They say they have ‘an ever-growing number of sincere and dedicated Illuminists who have voluntarily come together in free association with each other to work in unity, openness and peace.’ This sounds good to me, and rather in tune with what KIA has been trying to achieve since its inception. To me, KIA and Free Illuminism seem eminently compatible, to the extent they seem like different names for the same thing.

Other examples include the growing number of open source occult resources and wiki’s on various occult subjects that can share content with each other via permissive licenses.

Perhaps the importance of KIA within that network relates to the importance of what we do together within it. How well it delivers something of value to its participants given the effort of their contributions. This of course leads to the question ‘what do we consider something of value?’ We may have to answer that each for ourselves, but to really take things forward some kind of consensus on where to from here may need to be reached. This may include common esoteric projects as well as simply developing more features for the website. Back in its early days, KIA didn’t shy away from big collaborative rituals that spanned the world. This may or may not be what we are looking for today.

Another thing I have been looking into lately is the idea of hosting user websites on subdomains of kiamagic.com. The idea behind this was not so much to monetise KIA but to raise a fund that could be used to develop KIA further. This would likely be in the form purchasing the development of plugins for Elgg, which KIA would release on a GPL license. I have ideas for not yet existing plugins that would be great not just for KIA, but for all Elgg websites, but I don’t have the time develop these myself, nor the money to pay for them. Which is why I got the idea of a development fund. Of course, subdomain websites are not the only means by which money can be raised for this. I conceived of it as a way of giving something back to those that contribute.

Just a quick update on my Curious Foxes post from last week.  Lolita has now posted her own account of the experience on her kiamagic.com blog, along with some photos.

Its been a while since I’ve been active on this blog, for many reasons including moving home, city and job. I am finally more settled again, but my time is currently taken up working on a new and improved KIA website with many new features. More on that in a later blog.

In the mean time, you may want to get your ears around some free tunes…

http://www.ninja2009.com/

If you look in the menu across the top of this site, you will see I have added a nest option. This pulls posts from other websites via a syndication tool. For example, to start things off I have added the feed from the KIA forum. I won’t add anyone’s feed to the nest without their permission, so if you have a blog or forum with a rss or atom feed that you would like included in the nest, let me know…

I’ve noticed some discussions on irreality.net about sharing culture, which usually revolved around justifications for music piracy and stuff.  Now I’ve got nothing against music piracy.  Many a band I own on vinyl and cd, and have attended concerts of, I first listened to on pirate tapes made for me by friends.  Sometimes I didn’t even like the music until I’d heard it a few times.  Some music really does need to grow on you.  So I’m not down on piracy or anything.  I think many bands whose music is not immediately accessible have benefited from piracy.  Its corporate capitalism that’s killing music, not home taping.

But this article is not about piracy, or even musicians that are giving their music away for free, but rather a more relevant movement to the culture of sharing.  I am talking about Open Source and Creative Commons.

Open Source software, especially Free Software (free as in libre, as well as in beer), has been incredibly successful so far, and is continuing to grow and challenge previously complacent corporate software monoploies for dominance.  Most of the web is hosted on the Open Source apache webhost for example.

I am writing this article on a GNU/Linux PC (an open source operating system) and using the open source Mozilla Firefox web browser.

What is open source?  Well at the basic level it means that the source code is open for to all see.  But proper open source software is released on a license that allows that source code to be reused and modified by other open source projects.  In the case of some licenses, such as Apache and FreeBSD (the open source OS used as the basis for Mac OS X), the license also allows for non open source derivatives to be reproduced.  Essentially it is a challenge to the existing copyright paradigm by presenting a freer alternative.  Ironically these licenses are built upon and rely upon the very copyright laws they are challenging.  But this doesn’t make them less useful.

A number of sorcery and magick related groups have adopted the open source banner, sometimes just to mean their rituals are public, but at other times adopting rather more of the open source philosophy and methodology in the sharing and developing of ideas.  This includes the KIA Illuminated Adepts, which has a wiki article listing those open source sorcery groups we’ve discovered so far.  This includes key23/key64, The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, SourceryForge and frequency23.

Creative Commons is a movement to extend this philosophy into the realm of art, photography and other creative pursuits.  I have already released all the internal illustrations from the books Chaos Monkey and Kaos Hieroglyphica on Creative Commons licenses and plan to release more.  The KIA logos, current and historical are also available on these licenses.  These images can be found in my deviant art gallery.  Not everything in there has been released on said license, but good portion has been.

I am very interested to see what other creatives are able to do in terms of derivations on these works.  The license I have chosen allows derivations, allows commercial works, but requires that the new image be released with the same license.

It’s been a long time since I wrote the original KIA manifesto late in the year 2000 and with a small group of others launched the original Kaotic Illuminated Adepts as a newsletter on Yahoo! Groups.  In Norwich UK a small temple of about six real members took shape, all of whom were at the time in the IoT.  International membership quickly grew into the hundreds.

At the time I had been working as a website developer and it was my plan to build a membership website that would allow members to save other members as their friends, form sub-groups of the main site and have complete autonomy to run that group how they liked, and to be able to search for other members that lived near by to them.  I was able to envisage that this was what KIA needed to be, and whilst I had the skills to develop such a site, I lacked the time.

Well, I never did find the time, and so KIA went from being a yahoo group, to being a web forum hosted by proboards.  Actually the two ran side by side for quite a while, some members preferring to stay with Yahoo, others having a preference for the forum.  In 2003 KIA got an updated, psychedelic logo.  It was lucky the forum existed, because for various reasons they never explained, yahoo deleted my account, and as the sole owner of the group, chaosmagic-kia was eventually deleted along with all the other groups I owned.  Jaq D Hawkins, one of the original Norwich members, and my partner at the time, created a new Yahoo Group and made sure it had multiple owners, including a dummy account that was used for nothing else.

I mean while more or less abandoned the Yahoo Group, feeling let down by my account being deleted and feeling that Yahoo had become a bastion of authoritarian censorship on the net.  I felt it was more important than ever to concentrate on building an independent community on kiamagic.com itself.  Proboards had so far shown no inclination towards banning the kia forum, but I couldn’t take the risk of staying there.  So in the end I set up a forum on kiamagic.com itself using Simple Machine’s Forum.  For a while I ran this side by side a more or less flat website that only really used php to include common menu’s, but eventually I started to experiment with using content management systems.

After a few false starts that only half worked, KIA eventual came up with success for the second part of its website by providing a wiki using MediaWiki, the same websoftware used for Wikipedia.  The main problem was that it required users to have two login accounts, one for the forum, and one for the wiki.  I wanted to add more software to the site, but could only do so if I could integrate the user accounts.  Otherwise navigating the site would be a horrible experience of multiple login accounts.  For a while I pinned my hopes on OpenID.  MediaWiki already supported it via a Mod, and SMF promised support at some time in the future.  So I waited.

Well I got tired of waiting.  Last time I checked,  SMF still had no estimated time of arrival for OpenID support.  By this time the original forum had become quite quiet, and keeping it seemed less relevant than ever.  I had for some time begun to recognise that my original plan for KIA closely resembled what was now known as a ’social network’.  Hell, maybe they were known as as social networks back when KIA started.  I don’t know.  I hadn’t actually heard of the things back then.

Anyway, I ran some tests.  First thing I tried was Moodle.  But this was too closely linked to academia, and it proved too difficult to change the kind of academic language used.  I then had a look at PeopleAggregator, even setting up a KIA group as a test on their website.  But for some reason I can’t remember I was unable to install it.

During this time I became disillusioned with the Chaos Magic movement and wished for KIA to be something more than such a limited scope would allow.  As result I decided to change the name from Kaotic Illuminated Adepts to KIA Illuminated Adepts.  The Yahoo! Group continued under the old name, so the split between email list and website was a fait accompli.  To represent the break from Chaos Magic, whilst emphasising a continued influence from the pre-chaos magic sorcerer Austin Osman Spare (from whom we get the word Kia in the first place), I changed the logo yet again, this time removing the eight rayed chaos sigil (which by this point seemed like a less than serious glyph derived from the fiction of Michael Moorcock and made popular by the rather boring Warhammer games by Games Workshop.) but keeping Austin Osman Spare’s Kia glyph.  I also changed the Illuminati Eye in a Triangle symbol for a vertical yoni shaped eye in an inverted black triangle.  However, at the time the move away from Chaos Magic, my break up with Jaq D Hawkin’s and a heated confrontation with more politically authoritarian members of the old group lead to KIA losing a lot of its membership during those turbulent times.  Still the last thing KIA needed was a large contingent of closet Hitler fans, so I don’t consider it a great loss.

More recently I heard about some software called Elgg.  I had a look into this and it much more closely resembled what I needed.  Just one problem.  It lacked support for integration with SMF. It did support other forum software however, and since no-one really posted on the old forum, I decided to let it go.

KIA now runs Elgg for its social network, has MediaWiki integrated successfully, and also has a Vanilla forum.  All three are fully integrated and work from a single sign on.  Eventually I will also be able to add a plugin that will mean that single sign on will work as an OpenID.   So its taken me just over seven years, but KIA finally has the software set up I always intended it to have.  The only thing it currently lacks is support for finding members nearby.  But I should be able to correct that using some kind of map integration.  There are several available now…

So far the change in site is working and the seeds of a new community have sprouted new shoots of promise.  With some tender care I hope these seedlings will flourish into a mighty forest and become a useful service to occulture at large.

Be excellent to each other!  And party on dudes!