Convene

Convene is a video conferencing software that provides secure, affordable, and private digital meeting spaces. Spaces where anyone can (play || work || grow || be).

Purpose

Convene is the Means of Connection. It's space to co-conspire, to relax, or to push your limits. The premise behind Convene is simple:

  1. Define a Space, with Rooms.
  2. Gather People in those Rooms.
  3. Do things together.

We provide the infrastructure.

You provide the purpose.

Convene is Community Owned. Passport Holders vote on Resident Representatives. Maintainers and Contributors vote on Worker Representatives. Representatives sit in the Circle of Stewards, and guide the Budget and set Objectives.

The Circle of Stewards

The Circle of Stewards is balanced 1 to 1 between Community Representatives and Worker Representatives. This ensures that consensus must be reached between the people using and the people building Convene.

Budget

At present, Convene allocates 33% of revenue towards infrastructure, 33% towards operations, and 33% towards paying contributors and maintainers through [Patronage Payouts].

Objectives

Convene is driving towards:

  1. Face-to-face connection
  2. For small groups
  3. Co-creating a better future.

We're still figuring out how to make that happen, but that's our guiding light.

Developing Convene

Once you have installed the appropriate ruby and node and postgresql versions run bin/setup. See Convene::Web/README.md "Configuring your Development Machine" for more information.

Using Convene

Convene is pre-alpha software, so while we intend to provide interfaces that do not require a high degree of technical skill to operate, our current phase expects operators to be comfortable with infrastructure management techniques and tooling such as Ansible, Hashicorp's product line, or similar.

Purchasing Convene

Convene is licensed under the Prosperity Public License. This provides generous usage rights to individuals and non-commercial organizations to use Convene however they see fit.

If your organization engages in commerce, defined as taking currency in exchange for goods or services, then the organization must purchase a license to use Convene.

Pricing is determined on a case-by-case basis, with an emphasis on mutually beneficial socioeconomic transactions.

Help and Support

Organizations and individuals who are comfortable relying on free Community Support are encouraged to create issues in our public issue tracker. A maintainer will respond as they are available.

Paid support is available for \$135 USD per hour1.

Architecture

At present, Convene is split into three modules:

  • infrastructure, which contains infrastructure management code for Packer, Terraform and Ansible.
  • web which provides the human interface for Convene.
  • api which stores data long-term and provides a programmatic interface.

Design

We have a set of Personas that we use to guide our design and development. Designers who have agreed to protect the privacy of our clients may access our Customer Research Interviews

Footnotes

Our paid support rate is pegged to 3x the San Francisco Living Wage for a couple with a single worker raising three children.

This rate is negotiable for organizations that offer Zinc a patronage account or corresponding equity stake.

Paid support clients may also request a deferred payment program, with terms to be determined on a case-by-case basis.