Mission

Quaive helps organizations and communities, to self-organize and manage knowledge.

Quaive is a secure, local-scale, social collaboration platform. It offers a European alternative, to American cloud-scale technology platforms. Quaive embodies key values of open source: autonomy, transparency, networked agility, technological excellence, and community sharing.

Our founding ethos permeates everything we do, and shapes our product.

Let's talk about core values

Quaive visual hero English - Stoere Binken Design

Digital Autonomy & Digital Sovereignty

Be in control of your own destiny in the digital realm.

Network technologies are always intrinsically political. ICT embeds structures of control, and configures dynamics of value flow. The question is not if, but how. For Quaive, the answer to that question is digital autonomy: local control, flexibly networked.

Clients like to work with us, because we fully understand and control the technology stack we’re offering them. You’re not dealing with some distant headquarters, that serves tens of thousands of clients. You’re talking to the actual people that envision and build Quaive as a product. We don’t build Quaive for anonymous shareholders. We build Quaive for our clients, and for the people in the organizations they represent.

We understand the importance to our clients, of full autonomy and complete control over their IT environment. Self-hosting on your own hardware may provide mission-critical security and privacy guarantees. That’s why we offer a self-hosted on-premise option, with an open source license, in addition to the convenience of our SaaS offering — which is hosted in Germany, and itself already offers a high level of certified security and privacy.

Networked Agility

The future is in networked, agile organizations.

The days of top-down, opaque command-and-control management are over. Quaive is a social platform that embodies and supports a paradigm shift towards transparency and networked agility.

We’ve been an agile, distributed organization from the get-go. Our team works from 7 cities in 5 countries. We’ve been in open source, our whole careers.

By its very nature, open source promotes collaboration, transparency, and rapid development. Being self-funded, and open source to boot, we’ve had to hit the road running, and be fast to pivot when needed. We’re helping our clients to embrace that same approach of being nimble, fluid, transparent and fast.

Technological Excellence

Relentless attention to quality, security and performance.

People easily underestimate, how strongly the open source community emphasizes an ethos of technological excellence. Much of the foundational infrastructure of the internet runs on open source. When your code is in the open and peer reviewed, it better be high quality.

We’re proud to be part of that tradition. Extensive test suites, continuous integration, in-depth code reviews, and a relentless focus on security are part of our DNA.

It’s not something you can easily see as a client. But in the long run, it makes all the difference.

Community Sharing

We’re not just building a product. We’re building a community.

At the heart of our business model is a crowdfunding community. A network of clients, partners, and developers that all share a common vision for knowledge work in the 21st century. A vision that is social and community-centric.

Clients fund new feature extensions, to solve their most urgent problems. We make sure, those extensions become generically valuable additions to the Quaive ecosystem. We directly invest in maintenance and new features ourselves.

We also actively contribute to Plone, both in volunteer effort and in direct sponsorships. We’re proud to be part of the Plone community of awesome people.

We created Quaive to enhance humanity’s collective intelligence, using open technologies.

Guido Stevens, Founder Quaive

Vision

Guido Stevens articulated the conceptual blueprint for Quaive in Systems of Intent – Digital Workplace Technology Roadmap. This document, published in 2013, presents a comprehensive framework for enhancing knowledge management within organizations through digital transformation. The roadmap emphasizes the integration of social and knowledge technologies to create dynamic, responsive digital workplaces that adapt to evolving business needs. By aligning technical infrastructure with organizational intent, Stevens advocates for systems that not only manage information but also foster collaboration and innovation.

Central to this approach is the concept of “systems of intent,” which focuses on designing digital platforms that are purpose-driven and user-centric. The digital workplace technology roadmap outlines strategies for implementing these systems, including leveraging open-source technologies and adopting agile methodologies to ensure flexibility and scalability. The roadmap serves as a guide for organizations aiming to transform their digital environments into cohesive ecosystems that support continuous learning and knowledge sharing.

Knowledge Flow

Knowledge management is not about managing document stores; it is about managing the process of knowledge sharing and optimizing the flow of knowledge within and between organizations.

In the knowledge-based view of the firm, knowledge is the most strategic resource of an organization Differences in knowledge capabilities between firms determine competitive advantage. These differences in knowledge capabilities in turn derive from differing values, purposes and visions.

Knowledge resides in the heads of individual people; organizations provide coordination in applying knowledge to the production of products and services. The significant point is, that information is not knowledge. You can manage information, capture it in a document and store it in a database. Knowledge, on the other hand, is fluid and cannot be captured.

Stacked Paradigms

A mature digital workplace layers multiple technology paradigms on top of each other. The more advanced paradigms build on, and extend the functionality provided by earlier paradigms. This provides an evolutionary perspective on realizing a digital workplace.

1.0 Systems of Record

The Web 1.0 paradigm centers on connecting heterogeneous technology resources into an inter-operable computing network, that performs as a single integrated system.

Systems integration is the key focal point, to connect the emerging Digital Workplace environment with the installed base of massive, mature, mission-critical, database-centric enterprise information systems. The goal is, to overcome fragmentation and access the wealth of information and process resources managed by such systems from a single, unified interface: the Digital Workplace.

web 1.0
systems integration
transactions
deterministic

2.0 Systems of Engagement

The Web 2.0 paradigm is all about conversations between people, conducted in the open and at scale. Social networking taps into a deep human desire to connect, to share, to belong, to engage with each other.

Social platforms provide simple, basic tools and affordances in the form of posting status updates and leaving a response. Yet from this simplicity emerges a highly complex conversational and social dynamic in the form of collective information behaviors. What you see (simple tools) is not what you get (social dynamic). It’s not the features that matter; it’s what people will do when given those features.

web 2.0
social networking
relations
emergent

3.0 Systems of Intent

Systems of Intent leverage AI, to anticipate your needs, before you even articulate them. In order to offer maximally relevant information at a specific point in time, information systems have to align with, hence predict, the user’s intent from her past history and present context.

AI-enhanced systems integrate a deep understanding of the information context a user is accessing, with a thorough model of a user’s preferences and behavior, in order to proactively and intelligently adapt themselves to a user’s current needs and goals.

web 3.0
artificial intelligence
knowledge
evolving

User Experience

Streamlined user experience design empowers employees.

This digital workplace roadmap outlines how organizations can integrate disruptive knowledge technologies in a consistent way, by connecting social and semantic web technologies with each other and with legacy systems. Integration is not achieved by focusing on technicalities and protocols connecting various applications. Rather, the starting point should be the user experience.

A mature digital workplace offers a wide array of specialized applications, each optimized for performing specific tasks. This poses challenges not only of synergy and integration — getting such systems to talk to each other can be a major challenge. There’s the additional challenge of providing a consistent user experience. As somebody going through your work day, you want to be able to switch between tasks, without losing your stride. That requires that the user experiences offered by software applications, should be well integrated.

In Quaive, we provide this cohesion through what we call pervasive affordances. “Affordance” is design-speak for something you can do as a user — something the system makes possible. Quaive consists of more than a dozen applications, that not only share a common visual language for the user interface. They are also connected at a deeper level, by all providing functionalities that cut across sub-applications, and that are available throughout the Quaive system as a whole: commenting, bookmarking, editing, search, tagging, subscribing to notifications, and most of all: embedding all information and interactions in a social context.

No matter where you are in Quaive, you can bookmark what you are working on, share it with colleagues using an at-mention, find it by keyword using search, and get notified of any changes by subscribing to notifications. Simple stuff, but transformative when applied consistently, and at scale.

Let's talk about the future of knowledge work