What is Karrot?

Karrot is a free and open-source tool for grassroots initiatives and groups of people that want to coordinate face-to-face activities on a local, autonomous and voluntary basis.

It is designed in ways to enable community-building and support a more transparent, democratic and participatory governance of your group.

Independent groups

Every group on Karrot is completely independent and can have their own logo, processes, rules and agreements.

Yet they are all displayed on the map so that people can find and connect to other groups in their location and even globally.

Distribution of tasks and activities

Activities with a specific time and place, like meetings, food pickups, community events, or whatever your group needs can be entered in the software.

Each activity has a number of slots which members of the group can sign up for – this way everyone knows who goes where and when, and feedback can be given later.

Share things

Create an offer of whatever you want to share or give away.

Offers are visible to everyone in the group and people can show their interest on the offer's chat.

Democratic and participative development

Karrot is made by its users: a free and open-source software developed with the feedback and participation of the people who use it. It is mainly developed by a small core team that is constantly in contact with people in different groups, in order to make sense of their diverging and converging needs and thus guide the development. We abide by the ethics of integrity and non-commercialization of data.

Developers and designers are obviously welcome to participate in its development.

And more...

• Communication in the right context: Write a message that everyone in the group will see or a private message to someone. Everything related to a single activity or place can be discussed in their respective chats.
• Democratic and trust-based group management: There are no admin superpowers in a Karrot group. People who receive enough trust-carrots from their peers will be able to edit and change settings in the group. When new people want to join your group they need to apply and answer questions your group can set, which anyone with editing rights can decline or approve. Likewise, if there is the need to review someone's membership, the group can enter a voting system to resolve it in a communal way.
• Maps and lists: You have a map of where the places and the people doing the activities are located. You have a nice list of upcoming activities and can sign up for them online.
• Transparency: The history shows who did what and when. Everything from participating in an activity to creating and editing places is logged here.
• Notifications: You get notified about empty activities, new messages and new people wanting to join your group. But you can also turn it all off if you wish more peace!
• Multi-language: Karrot is fully translatable by the community and many languages are already added. To contribute more translations just visit the project on Transifex.
• Open source: Everything is transparent and possibly changeable. We encourage groups to host their own instances of the platform, if they have the ability to do so. Still, we also provide access to a hosted version on karrot.world.
• Responsive team: You can easily talk to the people developing Karrot, either on our community forum, on GitHub or in real-time on our team chat.