I grew up on a farm at Dunneworthy, near Ararat, where independence isn’t a lifestyle choice. Nobody is coming to fix the pump. You work it out, or it doesn’t get done. But nobody on a farm is truly alone either. They turn up when the shed burns down, and everyone knows who pulls their weight and who doesn’t. Self-reliance and community weren’t opposites. They were the same habit, seen from two sides.

Rugby taught me the same thing. I played at state level, then semi-professionally in England, until a broken leg ended it. Fifteen stubborn individuals only become anything when they agree to play for each other. The best players I knew were the most independent-minded and the most committed to the side.

Then I spent fifteen years in banking, and learnt the opposite lesson. A large organisation offers neither independence nor community. You don’t govern yourself, and you don’t really belong to anything you help govern. You comply. Decisions arrive from somewhere above, wrapped in process, owned by no one you can argue with. I chafed under it.

It took me a while to realise the Greeks had already named what I was looking for.

Free, together

To the ancient Greeks, independence and community were not in tension. Freedom, eleutheria, meant not having a master: not being a slave, and not living under a tyrant. But it was not the modern freedom to be left alone. A free man was free because he took part. He spoke in the assembly, argued, voted, and then lived under laws he and his fellow citizens had made. Aristotle called us politikon zōon, creatures of the polis. Outside a community, he said, a man is either a beast or a god.

But the Greek idea had a blind spot. Citizenship was for a minority, and women, slaves and foreigners were shut out. But the core insight survives: you cannot be free alone, and you cannot be free in a community you have no say in running.

The new tyrants

Look at where most communities live now.

The local footy club runs on a Facebook group and a WhatsApp chat. The residents’ association keeps its members in a spreadsheet on someone’s Google Drive. The choir, the surf club, the parents’ committee: all of them tenants, on land owned by a handful of companies on the other side of the world.

Those companies are not malicious. But they are masters. They decide who can see a post, what may be said, which members are reachable, what the data is worth and to whom. They change the rules without a vote. When a community’s page is shut, its group throttled or its history lost, there is no assembly to appeal to. The Greeks had a word for rule like that, and it was not democracy.

We have rebuilt the tyranny the Greeks fought to escape, and we did it for convenience.

Self-government is a practice

I founded Princes Park Touch to have fun, and it became something more. Today it has more than 760 members, and 500 to 600 people play each season. It runs on its own infrastructure: its own website, its own member records, its own communications, with no Facebook group holding the keys. Members can see the rules. The club answers to them, and every year the committee reports to them at the AGM.

It is not frictionless. Self-government never is. People have to turn up, argue, accept outcomes they voted against, and hold each other to the standards they set. That is the price of freedom, and it is cheaper than the alternative.

That is why I build LocalHero. It started in 2016 as a way to link local content to local people. It has become a platform that lets community organisations own what they depend on: their website, their members, their data, and increasingly their AI tools. Because a community that does not control its own infrastructure cannot govern itself.

Independence needs community, and community needs independence

I still dislike being told what to do by people I didn’t choose and can’t remove. But the cure for that was never isolation. It was building communities worth belonging to, and making sure they belong to their members.

The Greeks understood that the free individual and the self-governing community are one thing, not two. Online, we have forgotten it. We traded the assembly for the feed, and citizenship for a terms-of-service checkbox.

We can take it back. It starts one organisation, one community at a time.

Every community has behaviour that is legal but corrosive: the committee member who treats the organisation's money as their own, the volunteer who bullies newcomers until they leave, the member who harasses others and dares anyone to prove it. No law covers most of it, and no law should. For most of history it was handled by something more powerful than law: reputation. People cared what their community thought of them, and behaved accordingly.

I made this argument in 2000, in The thin veil of civilisation. Social norms, enforced by approval and disapproval, are the real glue of a society. Laws are the backstop.

That glue is weakening. Communities are larger, more anonymous and more transient. Someone can behave badly in one organisation and turn up fresh in the next, with a clean slate and a new set of targets. The tools communities now run on make it worse. Facebook groups and WhatsApp chats give organisers no memory and no standing: complaints vanish in a scroll, and the platform's rules, not the community's, decide what can be said.

Privacy matters

I take privacy seriously. People should control their own data, decide what is shared, and never be exposed on a whim. That principle is why I build member-owned infrastructure in the first place.

But privacy protects people from strangers, corporations and the state. It was never meant to protect people from the consequences of how they treat others. Privacy that means no one may ever say "this person did this, and it isn't acceptable" is not privacy. It is impunity.

Accountability done properly

Naming has to be done carefully or it becomes a mob. The rules that make it legitimate:

• Conduct, not character. What someone did, not who they are.
• Decided by those accountable, through a known process, not by whoever shouts loudest.
• A right of reply before anything is published.
• Proportionate and time-limited. Records expire. People can change.

Whether to go further and name people publicly is each community's call. I would, and I do. A community's duty doesn't end at its own boundary: if bad actors are quietly shown the door, they simply move on to the next organisation, which gets no warning. Keeping it private protects the offender, not the next victim. But I understand why others stop short of that, and a fair internal record is still far better than none.

Whichever you choose, the truth matters. Publish only what you can stand behind. Anyone named falsely has the law of defamation on their side, which is exactly as it should be.

Communities should own this

The point is not shaming for its own sake. It's that a community should be able to set its own standards and enforce them, on infrastructure it controls, under rules it writes. When the platform belongs to someone else, you get their rules and their priorities, and usually their silence. When it belongs to you, you can build accountability that is fair, transparent and answerable to members.

It's how I run Princes Park Touch, whose Hall of Shame is public, and it's what LocalHero is built to let any community do, publicly or not.

Dont get me wrong, I love javscript, and I think the rest api is one of the best things to happen to WordPress but every time I read about someone usea front end framework to build a theme I shake my head.

A wise man once said,

just because you can doesn’t mean you should

This applies to so many things, especially JavaScript when used to output content.  In order to explain we all need to be reminded of the way the web is traditionally designed namely:

• HTML for con­tent
• Css for pre­sen­ta­tion
• Javascript for func­tion­al­ity

This combination might seem old hat but it was created by smart people with good reasons.

When done properly it has three major strengths

1. It conveys meaning
2. It is robust
3. It has a clear separation of concerns

However it can be slow so today many advocate using JavaScript to interract with apis to replace this traditional paradigm. This has  major advantage in that can be substantially faster as the client side javascript can request only the information that it needs. However it also means that javascript is now the creating the content as well as the providing the functionality

However lets just compare how this compares to the traditional approach. Namely:

Conveying meaning.  Yes javascript can convey an experience that may be indistunguishable to the eye BUT the web is not just a visual medium for humans. Machine like search engines, and screen readers are important and in most cases a javascript front end is invisible to these agents

Being robust. Javascript is a not a fully standardized lanaguage and is notorious for conflicts and errors, and being browser depe3ndent. So an error on a javascript front end usually means the whole site falls over. In contrast a traditional semantic html front end degrades gracefully

Separating concerns. In a JavaScript front end you are tightly coupling functionality with content and potentially presentation as well. This actually if you change the api or you change your javascript the whole thing falls over. In contrast html is html and if the JavaScript stops working you still have the html.

Javascript is important but its not a replacement for html. Its future is in rproviing functionality, both in enhancing the reading experience and in making the eually important area of creating, updating and deleting content on the web.

Finally I’d like to urge you that is you need speed work on the basics like http caching, or look to modern technologies like http/2 and service workers.

There has been a lot of discussion that WordPress is becoming less user friendly, and it has gained some traction: the upcoming WordPress 3.8 is aimed, amongst other things, at making the dashboard friendlier. I don’t think WordPress is becoming less user friendly. It has simply never been friendly to newcomers.

Where WordPress has dropped the ball is elsewhere. The sensible projects that would make it far better are not being tackled. Instead, development chases UI improvements and quick wins. Those are welcome, but a better platform would make them easier. Indeed, a better platform would let people build their own UI, making efforts like rolling MP6 into core moot, because developers would build their own dashboards through plugins.

Things like BackPress, post-to-post relationships in core, and cleaning up the ridiculous database schema are not being tackled. These projects would make WordPress a better CMS and a better blogging engine. But they are not on the roadmap.

You can bet WordPress’s competitors are tackling them.

However due to its blogging background it has one very substantial weakness. Namely there is no way of easily relating one post to another and detailing its realationship. Of course taxonomies can be used to group posts and provide some form of relationship. However this is not an elegant solution.

This issue has been raised before by the WordPress development team here. Some use cases are outlined, however, I think the discussion (which is now closed) misses the elephant in the room, semantics. WordPress claims to be a semantic personal publishing platform but until it has the ability to seamlessly and elegantly relate one post to another it will be nothing more than a publishing platform, and until it then exposes those relationships in an unabiguous machine (and human) readable format it will never be truly part of the semantic web.

Frustrated at this weakness I am releasing a series of plugins that will truly RDF enable WordPress.

The first is LH RDF. LH-RDF is a wordpress plugin that automatically creates a SIOC compliant RDF feed of wordpress posts, categories, tags, and author ojects. It comes with embedded content negotiation thus properly exposing WordPress’s existing linked data to the semantic web.