Organ is a decentralised platform for grassroots organising in development by Radical Directory. This repo is the source code for the web app which is live at organ.is.

Organ is essentially a client to the Matrix protocol extended with some custom events which describe calendar events, social media-style posts, and more.

As this project develops, the intention is to formalise and standardise these extensions to the specification, in support of the Matrix vision of an interoperable, open communications network. This repo uses simple-matrix-sdk to interact with the Matrix server.

Organ Web is a Next.js project using Typescript and Tailwind CSS. Next.js is a full-stack application framework based around React.

# generate a configuration file in the 'synapse-data' volume
docker-compose run --rm synapse generate

# run a setup script for appservice configuration
docker run --rm -v organ-web_synapse-data:/data -v $(pwd)/synapse:/as alpine /bin/sh -c "chmod +x /as/setup.sh && /as/setup.sh"

# start synapse
docker-compose up -d

# register a new user
docker exec -it organ-web-synapse-1 register_new_matrix_user http://localhost:8008 -c /data/homeserver.yaml

# synapse should be accessible at localhost:8008

# install dependencies
pnpm install

# run the development server
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

As well as being a Matrix client, Organ Web also operates as an Application Service, which is like a client which has been configured on a server to have special permissions. The live app is configured as an application service for the radical.directory Matrix server. This enables the server-side Next.js code to authenticate with an App Service Token (AS_TOKEN environment variable) rather than logging in and using normal access tokens. App Services can act as a client for users on the server which have a certain prefix on their user ID. In this case the prefix is _relay_. User accounts with that prefix can then operate as 'relays' to the web app server.