Building Community Together: OpenMeet API Goes Open Source

The U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public health crisis¹, with nearly half of Americans reporting experiencing significant loneliness². The health impact of isolation can be as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day³. Behind every statistic is a person seeking meaningful connection. That’s why we’re taking a small but meaningful step today: we’re opening the source code of the OpenMeet API to everyone.

Why This Matters

Communities are the antidote to loneliness. Research shows that people who are more connected to family, friends, and community are happier, physically healthier, and live longer lives⁴. Whether it’s a book club, a hiking group, or a volunteer organization, meaningful in-person connections make us healthier and happier. Yet organizing these communities remains surprisingly difficult in our digital age.

We’ve been working on tools to make community organizing easier, but we realize we can’t solve this challenge alone. The problems of loneliness and disconnection are too complex for any single solution. By opening our API to the community, we hope to learn from others who share our mission and make our tools more accessible to community builders everywhere.

Building Together

Today, we’re sharing OpenMeet’s API with the community. You’ll find our initial services, database structure, and growing documentation at github.com/openmeet-team/openmeet-api. We believe that the best tools for fighting loneliness and building community will come from the community itself. While our documentation and features are still evolving, we’re excited to start this journey of collaborative development with other people who care about bringing people together.

Working Together

If you share our concern about loneliness and believe in the power of community, there are many ways to contribute. Whether you’re a developer who can help improve the code, someone with experience in community organizing who can share insights, or simply someone who wants to test and provide feedback – your perspective matters.

The most important contributions often come from unexpected places. Maybe you’ve run a community group and know exactly what features would make a difference. Perhaps you’ve experienced loneliness firsthand and have insights into what might help. Or maybe you’re a developer with ideas about how to make these tools more accessible and inclusive.

Current Focus

Right now, we’re especially focused on building chat and discussions features. We’re also interested in making group creation more inclusive, simplifying event planning, improving accessibility, and strengthening privacy protections. But we’re open to all ideas that could help communities thrive.

Join the Conversation

We want to build this together, learning from each other along the way. While we await our communications features, you can join our community on Zulip at OpenMeet Community, where we discuss everything from technical challenges to community building strategies.

Looking Forward

This is a small step toward a larger goal: helping people build meaningful connections in their communities. We don’t have all the answers, but we believe that by working together, we can help make a difference in fighting loneliness and building stronger communities.

If you’d like to be part of this journey, please visit our GitHub repository. Every contribution, no matter how small, helps build stronger communities.