Rhizome

1What this is

Rhizome is for groups: a residents' association, an allotment society, a food co-op, a street, a village. Groups that need to decide things, keep track of money and favours, look after shared stuff, and deal with it when someone falls out — without handing the whole thing to a company, and without one person ending up in charge of the software.

It's a set of ordinary web pages. Each one is a single file that runs on your own phone or computer. Nothing is sent to us, because there's no us to send it to: this website is a convenient way of handing the files out, not a service the files depend on. Save a page and it keeps working with the site gone.

You need a phone or a computer with a browser, and a few other people who want to do something together. That's it. There's no account to make — Vouch makes you a key on your own device, and the other apps find it there. If you'd rather check the thing before you trust it, Witness is built for exactly that, and the start-here page shows how to check that the file you got is the file that was published.

2How it fits together

Think of a notebook that every member of the group has a full copy of. When someone writes in it — a proposal, a vote, an IOU, the loan of a drill — the entry is signed by the person who made it, and every other copy picks it up the next time the phones are near each other or share a connection. That notebook is Rhizome, the substrate. Your device holds the whole of it; nobody's copy is the master copy.

The nine apps are nine ways of writing in the same notebook. Vote writes decisions, Tally writes what's owed, Share writes loans, and so on — but it's all one record, and each app can read what the others wrote. None of them keeps anything of its own, so you can swap one for another that reads the same record, or leave with your copy, and nothing is lost.

The apps never decide anything. People and groups do; the app writes it down in their name and says so — ratified by the allotment society, recorded by Vote. Where something needs the group's say-so, the group's own rules decide, and an entry that breaks them fails validation on everyone else's copy: nobody has to refuse it, because no honest copy will take it.

3The applications

Each application is one file — follow a link to open it, or save the page to keep a copy that works offline and travels by email or memory stick. Under each one is what its mark shows, so you know the tile when you see it again.

• Vouch(identity)

  You’re you. Friends can help you back in if you lose your phone.

  The mark — three arcs, two of them closing a circle. A threshold: others hold you up.

• Vote(decisions)

  Talk it through, then decide together.

  The mark — a circle filled to a line, with the quorum mark outside the fill. A decision measured against a rule.

• Federate(bodies)

  Work with the group next door, on terms you both agreed.

  The mark — two equal rings joined by a level bar. Peers, level, joined by agreement.

• Tally(obligations)

  Keep track of what you owe each other. You both sign it.

  The mark — a notched stick split lengthwise, the notches still lining up. Written twice, alterable by neither alone.

• Clear(settlement)

  Everybody owes everybody. This sorts it out in one go.

  The mark — three arrows in a closed cycle, collapsing to a point. The circle nets to nothing.

• Share(commons)

  Borrow the drill. Bring it back.

  The mark — a square with an arrow leaving and returning, the loop closed. Borrowed and brought back.

• Tend(ecology)

  Somebody has to speak for the river.

  The mark — the contour lines of a watershed, one mark at the low point. A place, and the long view of it.

• Resolve(repair)

  Something’s gone wrong. Let’s sort it out properly.

  The mark — a broken line across a circle, mended with a visible seam. Repaired, and the repair not hidden.

• Witness(verification)

  Don't take our word for it. Check.

  The mark — a wax seal with a small tick impressed in it. Checked, by anyone, against the record.

4What this can't do

The maths underneath this is sound, and it still has edges. These are the ones that matter. None of them can be fixed by us, and none by anyone else either.

• If someone can watch the whole network, they can work out who's talking to whom. We can't fix that and nor can anyone else.
• If your phone or computer has been got at, so has everything on it. Every promise here assumes your own device is sound.
• A court can order a person to hand over what they hold. Nothing here stops that.
• If someone in your group decides to publish what the group said, they can. Keeping things inside a group is an agreement between people; the maths supports it and does not enforce it.
• A secret ballot is secret because of how the ballot is built, not because of the connection it travelled over. If the connection is watched, the ballot is still secret; if the ballot were built badly, no connection would save it.

5Part of the Rhizome family

The ten marks, in their fixed order. Every application shows this same strip, with its own tile ringed in ink, so you always know which one you're in.