Comingle

Comingle is an open-source online meeting tool whose goal is to approximate the advantages of in-person meetings. It integrates web tools in an open multiroom environment, with the following key features:

• Subgroups of people can freely split off into separate discussions, by creating and jumping between rooms (something like physical tables). To facilitate e.g. deciding which room to go into:
  • Everyone can see who is in what room
  • Users can star rooms to (publicly) indicate their interest in topics
• Rooms have state, such as whiteboard, chat messages, or key web pages being discussed.
  • Anyone joining late instantly has access to this state, enabling them to catch up without others telling them what tools to open.
  • You can return to a room days or weeks later and pick up where you left off.
• Comingle can be the glue that binds together all of the disparate web apps you want to use in your meeting (even for small meetings with a single room).
  • Instead of sending links to the tools you want people to look at, you can add them directly to the room, and everyone instantly sees them.
• Support for the following web tools:
  • Jitsi Meet open-source video conferencing
  • Zoom video conferencing (most useful in Main Room only, because users must manually create a Zoom meeting and can only host one Zoom meeting at a time)
  • Cocreate open-source shared whiteboard
  • Coauthor open-source discussion forum / note taking
  • YouTube videos
  • Wikipedia pages
  • Any <iframe>-compatible web tool
• Each user can decide the best layout for their screen of each room's tools, by dragging tabs to be side-by-side or stacked atop each other.
• Persistent chat provided at the meeting and room level.
  • Chat messages can include Markdown formatting and LaTeX math (via KaTeX).
• Dark mode for light-sensitive users, automatically affecting Jitsi, Cocreate, and Coauthor tabs.
• Coop protocol automatically passes user's name and dark-mode preference to supported apps (Cocreate and Coauthor).
• Instantly create a new meeting and share the URL to meet with others. No accounts required.
• Secret admin password gives access to advanced/dangerous features:
  • Moving users to other rooms, or removing them from the current room.
  • Access automatic logs of user actions that enables attendance tracking.
  • API for querying and manipulating Comingle meetings, rooms, tabs, and logs from your own software.
• Free/open source (MIT license)

To see what's changed in Comingle recently, check out the Changelog.