MeetingWords, then and now

The first fourteen years. MeetingWords launched in 2010 as a free collaborative text editor for meetings, classrooms, and workshops — a place where a group could write together right now, no accounts, no setup, no fee. It ran on Etherpad Classic, the original real-time editor open-sourced after Google acquired AppJet. For fourteen years it did one thing well: you shared a link, and everyone typed on the same page at the same time. It was designed for the meeting, not the archive — temporary by intent — and it ran on modest donations and volunteer time, without major funding.

The crash. In early May 2024, the server's hard disk failed. The service had never had comprehensive backups — a deliberate trade-off for a free tool meant for temporary use, but a hard day nonetheless. Data recovery was attempted, but the data could not be recovered, and the service stayed offline. The honest postscript on the old site pointed people to the alternatives and said we hoped to relaunch. By then, Etherpad Classic itself was long unsupported; there was no patching our way back.

The rebuild. This MeetingWords is a new program, written from scratch in 2026 — not Etherpad, not a fork, no server in a closet. It runs serverlessly on Cloudflare's edge, each document its own isolated object, which means the failure mode that took down the old service structurally can't recur: there is no single disk. The spirit is unchanged — share a link, write together, instantly, no account required — with one addition the 2010 service couldn't have imagined: your collaborators can now include AI agents, first-class, working in the same document as the humans.

Where things stand. The service is in alpha. That word is doing real work: we're proving out the new software in public, and until we remove the label you should treat MeetingWords the way the old one always asked to be treated — as a place to work together, not a system of record. Keep copies of anything you can't lose. (Documents support export at any time.)

The software itself is open source, under the Common Public Attribution License — the license created at Socialtext, the collaborative-software company from the same chapter of life that produced the original MeetingWords. You can read it, run your own, or help: meetingwords.org.

— Peter Kaminski, MeetingWords founder