Swarmops is a necessary tool to enable any bitcoin-native and decentralized gamechanger.

Swarmops is an admin system for swarm-type organizations. It's a bureaucracy system for people who thoroghly dislike bureaucracy, so it removes all visibility of it and focuses on the ops aspects. It manages decentralized authority, volunteers, members, activists, budgets, mass communications, expenses, payroll, invoices, and complete financials/bookkeeping.

The goals of Swarmops are three:

• Become the #1 software for organizing swarm activism to effectively change policy,
• Become the #1 software to manage native-bitcoin startups' cashflow and accounting,
• Become the #1 software to run civil liberties resistances in repressive regimes.

Goal #1, organizing swarm activism: the Swedish Pirate Party used a predecessor to Swarmops in its effort to put two representatives in the European Parliament, and could literally not have succeeded without the ability to decentralize authority that Swarmops provided, pushing all the crucial decision-making out to the edges of the organization where the most information was available. It's an administration tool for people who hate paperwork, so it's built to optimize the time available to activism.

Goal #2, the primary back-end software for bitcoin-native unbanked startups: Swarmops does bookkeeping and accounting on fully automatic. Today, there are no services or packages for bitcoin-native and unbanked organizations – for startups which are unbanked by choice. Swarmops seeks to fill that role and provide automatic accounting and cashflow management for such organizations, maintaining hot and cold wallets along with automated invoice and payroll processing. (Imagine invoices being paid on fully automatic, and not needing a €100,000 software package and a fifteen-page bank contract to do so.) There is a huge void to fill here, and Swarmops fills this role in addition to all other back-end management.

Goal #3, functional software to assist civil liberties resistances in repressive regimes: With the swarm functions and the bitcoin-native cash flow in place, a “hidden branch” of organizations can be enabled, where nobody knows the identities of other people in the organization's “hidden branch” swarm except those closest to that individual, but where everybody is still working toward a common goal. Recruiting would take place face-to-face using mobile phones and BitID, and code names would be used for all other purposes. In this way, Swarmops enables large-scale change while able to protect the individuals involved in making that change come about. Lack of information even at the central level provides deniability against rubberhose attacks.

Stable releases are built every six months, at the end of every calendar half-year. Sprints are built every two weeks. Internal builds are built all the time and can be tested at http://dev.swarmops.com/ which doesn't require a login.

If you're daring enough to install a pilot of Swarmops, you're most welcome to do so. Using a fresh Debian or Ubuntu server, everything running as root:

wget http://packages.swarmops.com/swarmops-packages.gpg.key apt-key add swarmops-packages.gpg.key

Then, edit /etc/apt/sources.list to include this line:

deb http://packages.swarmops.com/ squeeze contrib

Then run

apt-get update apt-get install swarmops-frontend

(the install sometimes hangs on installing a dependent package, apache2-mod-mono. That's not an issue with Swarmops, but still irritating. It manifests as Apache restarting and never restarting. If so, break, fix, and redo until installed.)

Install a new Virtual Host in Apache, a Mono host, pointing at /usr/share/swarmops/frontend as its directory. We're using /usr/bin/mod-mono-server4 as our server. Note the 4 at the end; many configurators are old and will set a 2 there.

Navigate to the new site and configure from there.

Once configured and logged in, you may also want to install

apt-get install swarmops-frontend-external-scripts

These are GPLed scripts that cannot be conveyed as part of Swarmops for license reasons, but Swarmops runs better with then installed on the frontend host.

The packages named as listed above (swarmops-frontend) are the sprint packages, released every two weeks. If you prefer, you can opt for the development builds (swarmops-frontend-internal) or the stable six-month releases (swarmops-frontend-stable) instead. The development builds aren't really recommended unless you're actively contributing to development and want to see new changes running on the development sandbox.

No permission necessary, really. Just check in code. The backend is ASP.Net/C# and the frontend (where most of the development happens) is Javascript and jQuery. But if you want to see what's being worked on, feel free to get an account at http://scrum.pirateacademy.eu and join the Swarmops project, and grab tasks from the master list.

There's also a Facebook group named Swarmops Developers which you may want to join. Yes, Facebook is evil, so give me a better alternative. Until there is one, that's where discussions happen.