Mangrove
Working together should not cost you your work.
Mangrove is a place to build the things a group needs and share them: a household budget, a list of chores, a company's chat and records. They run on the computers you already have, everyone holds their own copy of what they are allowed to see, and what passes between you does not have to pass through anybody else.
The Premise
A program on your own computer is yours, and it is solitary. The moment two people need the same list, the same accounts or the same conversation, the work moves onto machines that belong to somebody else.
Mangrove closes that gap. An app needs somewhere to keep information, something to do the work, and a way to reach people — and all three can be the computers you already own.
What You Can Make
Money, for a household
Both of you record what you spend as you spend it. At the end of the month you have a real set of accounts: what came in, what went out, what you own and what you owe. Set a budget, plan a holiday, follow your investments.
Money, between friends
Who paid for dinner, who owes whom, settled at the end of the trip. The same bookkeeping that runs a household runs a holiday for eight.
The jobs around the house
A list you both add to and tick off, which reminds you before a deadline arrives. Make it nag, make it a game, make it whatever actually gets things done.
Everything a company runs on
Chat, calendar, the employee portal, customer records, the systems that run operations. The same thing that holds a family's grocery money holds a company's ledger.
Or something nobody has built
Forms, views, charts, workflows, reminders, connections to software you already use. If you could lay it out in a spreadsheet you can build it here — and unlike a spreadsheet, other people can use it at the same time.
How It Works
Where it is kept
What you are allowed to see, you hold — on your own computer, not borrowed from somewhere for as long as you are allowed to borrow it. There is nothing to be cut off from.
Where work happens
The computers you already have do the work. Nobody is renting someone else's machines to keep a list of chores, and nothing waits on a connection to do what you just asked for.
How people connect
Changes do have to reach people, and the route is yours to choose: an office network, the open internet, Bluetooth across a table, a gateway you run yourself.
Sovereignty
A program on your own computer has always been yours. It answers to nobody, it keeps working after the people who made it have moved on, and nothing about it changes because a price went up. What it cannot do is let several people work on the same thing at once. The moment you need that, the answer has been to rent it — and renting means the information, the work and the connections all sit somewhere you do not control.
Mangrove keeps the first and adds the second. Ownership here works the way it works everywhere else: everything has an owner, and an owner is a person or an organization, or several of them together when something is genuinely shared. An organization owns in its own right, through an account of its own rather than one belonging to whoever set it up — the same separation that makes a company something other than its founders. Owners decide who may hold a copy and which parts they get, and a copy carries the terms it came with, the way a book or a piece of software does.
That is affordable because Mangrove is built on trust rather than suspicion. Some systems spend enormous effort proving that strangers cannot cheat each other. A group answered that question long before any software arrived: people are invited, introduced and handed the keys. Checking what someone is allowed to do is cheap. Proving that strangers cannot cheat is not. Mangrove assumes people who know each other, and spends the difference on being quick.
And because everything sits on the same ground, the things you build know about each other. The budget knows about the calendar, and the list of chores knows about the conversation. Nothing has to be joined up afterward, and the parts that do not fit the way you work are parts you can change.
Know when Mangrove is ready
One email, when there is something to use. Nothing else, ever.
Email us to be notified (opens your email app)Or write to adit.shah@kybernetic.systems
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Who Builds It
Mangrove is built by Kybernetic Systems.
We have written down what this company is for: who gets a say in a decision, how the people who build this are treated, and why you should never need us in order to keep using it. Mangrove is the first thing we have built, and that list is what it answers to.
Read what we value