Overview and Goals

Why Rhizo exists

Rhizo was created to solve the problem of secure decision-making and organizing at scale.

When groups are small, everyone knows everyone else, and it’s easy to take part in and make decisions together. As groups grow, two things get harder at the same time: decision-making becomes more complex, and trust becomes harder to maintain.

Both are necessary for effective collaboration.

A group can have great decision-making tools but leak sensitive conversations to the wrong people, or it can offer a secure environment but struggle with untracked decisions and chats.

Rhizo is built to handle both: people can chat, share, and make decisions knowing their data belongs to them, private things stay private, and there’s a clear record of what was decided and by whom.

Our goal is for Rhizo to be the default choice for groups that have outgrown messenger apps to organize, but can’t or won’t use software tailored for businesses or corporations because it’s not secure, private, or trustworthy enough for them.

Where Rhizo is useful

A few examples of how Rhizo can be useful in real-life scenarios:

• Groups and organizations scaling decision-making can use it to avoid wasting time on things nobody actually decided to do, reducing scope creep through clear, documented decision boundaries.
• Newsrooms can separate their editorial channels from those they use to talk to sources, never allowing a source-facing channel to leak into general editorial chat, paired with lightweight approval log tracking who signed off on publishing something, and org-level offboarding so a departing or compromised member’s access disappears without anyone able to rebuild the org’s chats.
• NGOs and other civil society or advocacy groups can run day-to-day processes and turn casual chats into formal decisions they can document as they go, so institutional knowledge survives staff turnover.
• Multi-city or multi-chapter organizations like clubs and associations can coordinate securely across locations, keeping local chapters autonomous while staying connected to the broader organization.
• Ad-hoc groups like emergency first responders can use Rhizo to coordinate their response, easily adding new members to specific channels and allocating members to important initiatives.
• Tenant or homeowner associations can run democratic votes on contract proposals, with a transparent record of who voted and when.

Rhizo enables any group to scale up or down while maintaining secure records of their work and discussions.

How Rhizo is organized

Rhizo is based on local-first architecture. All clients store encrypted copy of the state and exchange messages through the server to synchronize it.

In the first part of the book we describe how the core of the application works. Here’s a birds-eye view on all the parts:

• Server - Deployment of the application that is setup to facilitate the exchange of messages between clients.
• Spaces - The name used for a space shared by all members inside a group or organization. Clients can be part of many spaces. In most groupware apps it’s called either workspace or organization.
• Admins - Users with special privileges who set up Rhizo for their group and configure Spaces for others to join. They may also set up the server on their own infrastructure.
• Users - People within organization who are invited to join the space by an admin.
• Channels - Public or private parts of the spaces that space members can join or be invited to. Used to exchange messages - currently both as threads and chat.
• Documents - Abstraction that represents any persistent artefact. Documents can have many types, from text document to a kanban board. They are underpinned by CRDTs.

In short: admins set up Rhizo servers and spaces, users join the space to take part in discussions and activities. They talk in channels belonging to those spaces and collectively produce documents and other artefacts as part of their collaboration.