Q1 2022 Update

For everyone who has stood by us between Q3 2020 and today, I would like to express a heartfelt appreciation through our “quiet time.” 

Between August 2020 and March 2022, we’ve mostly focused on solidifying our existing initiatives. We:

1. Consolidated our efforts across different projects into two: Convene and Moment Park. 
2. Hosted over 100 “Each one Teach One”  and Ensemble sessions where we provide small-group mentoring in Computational Thinking and Software Development in Ruby and JavaScript.

3. Added Ana Ulin as a Member-Owner!

As we’ve continued refining what Convene wants to be, we’ve landed on either a “Digital Community Garden” or “An Operating System for the Solidarity Economy.” 

As a digital community garden, Convene hosts group-oriented websites, customizable with the toys that bring your community joy and the tools that make nurturing self and community care a snap. 

For solidarity economy practitioners, it offers powerful organizing, collaboration, and stewardship tools that put people first in your work and aid; as well as hosting and infrastructure for custom software applications. 

This frees solidarity innovators up to focus on building dual power rather than keeping digital infrastructure secure and up to date.

Even better, Convene is licensed permissively to people and worker-directed organizations, so you’re not locked into Zinc as your hosting provider. Don’t like our privacy policy or terms of use? Don’t trust us with your community’s sensitive social data? That’s great! Host it yourself and set the policies that reflect your values. You can still receive our regular bug fixes, enhancements, and security patches 

Since our last update, we’ve added more examples of Furniture and clarified the underlying architecture to support the comfortable development of new functionality.

Check out our live instance at https://convene.zinc.coop/, or poke at our code and open issues at https://github.com/zinc-collective/convene.

We’ve gotten into a consistent release cadence with Shake It Photo, merging in small bug fixes and enhancements to support modern devices and releasing every 3~9 months. Over time, we hope to learn how to hit that cadence with our other apps.

We acquired Moment Park when the original developers were no longer interested in maintaining it as an experiment in liberating proprietary software into a non-extractive digital commons.

If you’re an iOS developer hoping to nurture the non-extractive Digital Commons and maintain production applications used by tens of thousands of users, hit us up! 

Almost every Wednesday at 6 PM PT, Ana and Zee host a Stream where we ship features or bug fixes for Convene as we talk about its trajectory as a product and service. We also frequently discuss the praxis of a digital socioeconomic system that nurtures healthier relationships with ourselves and others, rather than simply maximizing profits for shareholders. If you’d like to join the discussion, reach out!

Every other Sunday, a gaggle of folks ranging from staff engineers to pre-career folks get together and collaborate on Convene as an ensemble. We don’t stream these, because we want to make it easier to show up and be brave, but if you’d like to join, just reach out!

We’ve been a bit lax at updating our expenses to the Open Collective, but we just went through and logged all our expenses from Q1 2022. Q1 is generally our “most expensive” month because it covers tax season. Feel free to peruse our expenses, as transparency is critical to trust.