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.