Welcome to Initiative¶
Initiative is where your group's projects, tasks, documents, and plans live together. It's made for small businesses, clubs, committees, event teams, families, and anyone else coordinating work with other people — without needing to learn project management first.
Start small; it grows with you¶
You can get real value on day one from a single board with tasks on it. Later, when your group needs a shared calendar, or a place to write things down, or a way to report on how the work is going, those are waiting — and until then they stay out of your way.
New here? Start at the beginning¶
If this is your first time, Getting started covers creating your account, finding your way around, and joining or creating your first workspace.
Find what you need¶
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Getting started
Create an account, sign in, take the tour, and join your group.
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How Initiative is organized
Guilds, initiatives, projects, documents — what they are and how they fit together.
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Using Initiative
Day-to-day how-to guides for projects, tasks, documents, the calendar, and more.
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Apps & the marketplace
Add ready-made dashboards and apps built by other groups like yours.
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Sharing & access
Decide exactly who can see and edit each project and document.
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Security & privacy
What "secure" means for you, and how your group's data stays separate from everyone else's.
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For administrators
Installing, configuring, and looking after your own Initiative server.
You choose who sees what¶
Nothing in Initiative is visible to "everyone" by default. Your group's space is separate from every other group's; inside it, each effort is visible only to the people you add to it; and individual projects and documents can be narrowed further still.
That means a business owner can keep payroll planning away from the seasonal staff, and an event team can work on next year's programme without the volunteers seeing it — in the same workspace, with no extra setup. How that works →
For the technically minded — what Initiative is, briefly
Initiative is a web application you can run yourself. The interface is a single-page web app; it talks to a Python service backed by a PostgreSQL database. Each group ("guild") gets its own database schema, so a request in one guild can't address another guild's tables at all; the finer layers inside a guild — which effort, which role, which item — are enforced by the database's own row-level security rather than by the app alone. There's a companion mobile app (iOS and Android) for notifications and on-the-go use. More in Security & privacy and the administrator guide.
The tools come from people like you¶
The thing your group needs has usually already been built by another group with the same problem. Initiative's marketplace lets you add ready-made dashboards and apps to your workspace in a couple of clicks — no developer, no custom build.
It's curated, not a free-for-all: your marketplace holds what ships with Initiative plus what the person running your server has approved. See Apps & the marketplace.
A note on the words we use¶
Initiative borrows a few everyday words and gives them a specific meaning. The two you'll meet first:
- A guild is a workspace — one separate space for one group of people. Your book club and your work team would be two different guilds.
- An initiative is a folder for a big effort inside a guild. It gathers related projects and documents in one place.
There's a full glossary if you ever hit a word you don't recognize.
Built in the open¶
Initiative is developed publicly, and the feedback of the people using it shapes what gets built next. If something here is unclear, wrong, or missing, that's worth telling us about — the project on GitHub is where it happens.