The bet
Charlie DeTar, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, started InterTwinkles as his dissertation project. His bet was that software for online group decisions failed for reasons that had little to do with scale. The trouble lay in the specific, structured needs of small groups trying to reach consensus: a co-op board, a housing collective, an activist working group. Tools built for that narrow case, he reasoned, would beat generic forums or voting software.
DeTar developed it with Boston-area cooperative housing groups, in participatory design sessions, from the start.
Peak
The project grew into an open-source toolkit, presented publicly through MIT's Center for Civic Media. DeTar defended it as a full dissertation in 2013. Few platforms in this catalogue have had their design thinking documented and scrutinized by peers to that degree.
The cooperative and consensus-based groups it was designed with actually used it. Its footprint was smaller than most platforms here, and the fit between tool and user was closer than most achieve.
What worked
DeTar designed the tool with the people who would use it instead of guessing at their needs from outside. The result was software that reportedly matched how consensus-based groups make decisions, and that kind of discipline is undervalued in this field. The open-source release also meant the ideas and code outlived any single hosted instance of the tool.
What failed — the mechanism
InterTwinkles handled logins through Mozilla's Persona identity system. At the time that was a reasonable choice from a respected source. It was also entirely outside the project's control.
When Mozilla later wound Persona down, the hosted version of InterTwinkles lost its login layer. No dedicated funding or team was in place to re-engineer around the change, so the hosted service stopped instead of migrating.
InterTwinkles didn't fail the way the other cases here failed. The lesson is that a small academic project has no slack to absorb a breaking change imposed by someone else's infrastructure decision, made for reasons that had nothing to do with the project.
What Agora takes from it
Platform risk also lives in the parts of your stack you don't control. Depending on someone else's infrastructure means depending on their roadmap. A project with no resources to respond when that roadmap changes is exposed, however good its design work.
Agora's answer is mundane. It builds and maintains its own identity and participation layer as core, funded infrastructure.
Common questions
- What was InterTwinkles?
- An MIT dissertation project turned open-source toolkit for small-group consensus decisions, undone not by funding or users but by the shutdown of the one third-party login system it depended on.
- Why did InterTwinkles shut down?
- InterTwinkles is recorded here as shut down. We file it under the pattern we call The business-model void, which names the recurring way this kind of platform comes apart.
- When did InterTwinkles operate?
- About 5 years (2011-2016).
- AmericaSpeaksThe gold standard of large-scale in-person deliberation, which convened 180,000 citizens over two decades and closed as soon as the grants that paid for it dried up.
- BlockboardA neighborhood app for reporting potholes and watching out for your block, bought by Klout (a company built to score social-media influence) and functionally ended as a civic tool the day the acquisition closed.
- BrigadeSean Parker's social network for political positions, with an estimated $40–50 million behind it, that never found enough users, or anyone to pay.