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…

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.

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!