Community-owned tools to bring people together, online and off.
Many public domain, open-source, and free software products leverage the Open Core model to be socioeconomically sustainable. The Open Core model allows producers and maintainers to capture a portion of the wealth generated by their efforts; but requires people or organizations to maintain their own infrastructure tooling or pay privately held companies to host the services they use.
As a result, much of the software tools to safely, securely, efficiently, reliably and self-sufficiently host public-domain services is unavailable to the public.
Convene provides software tools to reliably, safely, and securely provision, deploy, host and scale public-domain software services for personal, communal, or organizational use.
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.
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.
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.
At present, Convene is split into three modules:
infrastructure, which contains infrastructure management code for Packer, Terraform and Ansible.webwhich provides the human interface for Convene.apiwhich stores data long-term and provides a programmatic interface.
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
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.