We build the layer underneath community coordination.
Convocant Systems is a North Carolina software company. We build coordination infrastructure for the social sector: public health, the courts, housing, treatment and recovery providers, funders, and the people those systems are supposed to serve.
There are five products in the plan and one of them is in the field. That ratio is stated plainly on every page of this site, in the sentence next to whatever is being described, because the alternative is a reader who leaves believing four things exist that do not.
The rooms already exist. The infrastructure under them does not.
Communities are not short of meetings. A county in the middle of an overdose crisis will convene a task force, a recovery coalition and a behavioral health planning body, and the right people will show up to all three. What happens next is the problem.
Three hours of expert judgment leaves the room as flip-chart bullets and one person’s memory. The coalition that just spent a morning mapping exactly what somebody needs still cannot find out which bed is open tonight. The years of documented need it has accumulated sit in a folder while somebody writes the grant application from memory. And nobody carries one individual across the fragmented system the coalition just finished describing.
None of that is a discipline problem, and none of it is fixed by running better meetings. Each one is a missing piece of software that nobody has built because the market for it is counties and coalitions rather than enterprises. That is the gap this company exists to close, and it is why there are five products rather than one.
We are not trying to make meetings better. We are trying to make them count for something afterwards.
Six rules we hold ourselves to
These are not values. Each one is a constraint that has already cost us something: a feature held back, a claim softened, a page rewritten to be duller than it could have been. That is the only test that tells a rule apart from a slogan.
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status before descriptionEvery capability on this site says how far along it is before it says what it does. A roadmap item described in the present tense is the most common untruth in this industry and the easiest one to tell by accident, so the order of the sentence is fixed rather than left to whoever is writing that week.
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nothing publishes itselfNo model output reaches a participant, a display wall, a funder or a filing without a named person releasing it. There is no path through any of our products that publishes on its own, and there is not going to be one. It is the single constraint we would refuse a customer over.
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a mechanism or nothingA promise with no mechanism under it is a policy document. Every privacy claim we make is written as the thing in the running system that keeps it, with the identifiers a technical reviewer can go and look for. The whole of the trust page is that rule applied twelve times.
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done is a build resultA milestone is complete when its automated evidence checks pass in the build. Not when somebody says so, and not when a demo goes well. The status table on the Agora page reads from that result, which is why it is duller and shorter than a roadmap usually is.
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we gate our own featuresAutomated barrier detection could ship at a precision we have not proved on real deployments. It does not ship until we have proved it and until a named person records the decision to release it. An analyst does the classifying in the meantime, which is slower and correct.
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order, not datesWe publish the sequence we build in and the gate in front of each step. We do not publish dates. Every one of those gates is a fact about other people’s behavior, and a date would be us pretending we can schedule that.
We would rather the system refuse than rely on someone remembering the rule.
Design principle
Why everything is named in Greek
Partly because the words are precise and partly because a name that means something is harder to quietly repurpose later. If a product stops matching its own name, that is a signal worth having.
- ConvocantOne who convenes. The company is named for the act, not the room.
- AgoraThe assembly place. Where a community meets to work out what it is going to do.
- PhragmaA fence. The taxonomy of what stands between a decision and a result.
- PorosA way through. The registry of which doors are actually open tonight.
- PhoreoTo carry. Case-level navigation, for one person at a time.
- OikosThe household. The organizations doing the work between the meetings.
The taxonomy carries the same discipline. A Phragma code is immutable: a retired barrier class is deprecated and never renumbered, so a record written in one year still means the same thing when somebody reads it three years later.
What we are not
We are not a transcription service. The transcript is an input, and a meeting that only produced a transcript has not produced anything a coalition can use.
We do not practice law and we do not issue judgments about anybody’s regulatory position. Agora supports the documentation of a process. Whether that documentation satisfies a particular requirement is a question for the county and its counsel, and we would rather be in that conversation early than be quoted in it later.
The software does not decide anything. It derives, it drafts, it flags, and then it waits for a person. A facilitator keeps or discards every signal. A named reviewer publishes every report. An analyst confirms every barrier finding before it is attributed to anyone.
We are not selling five products. One is available. Two exist as specifications, and two are commitments with a reason behind them and nothing else yet.
Nothing on this page is legal advice.
If this sounds like your problem, tell us the shape of it.
The most useful thing you can send us is a meeting that is already on your calendar, with its agenda, its sectors and whatever you have to report afterwards. The second most useful thing is an explanation of why we have the build order wrong.