THE GROVE

The School·The Convent·Greenpoint, Brooklyn

Tools and processes to catalyze and capture information between minds.

About

A non-profit R&D movement born out of a decommissioned convent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Researchers, builders, artists, and scientists share a building. The Grove is what happens when they share infrastructure too.

Communities coalesce here. From privacy and AI to arts and civic action. Everything built is used here first: the community is the test bed, not a market. The Grove builds tools and software uniquely accelerated by this feedback loop. Local-first, private-by-default, data owned by the people who generate it.

The garden is on the roof. The hardware is in the basement.

Ongoing Projects

I

Local Collaboration Tools

A portable research kit. From conference to pop-up city to living room.

A portable toolkit for collaborative research. Record conversations, capture whiteboard sessions, and produce linked artifacts, all running locally on your own hardware. No remote servers, no cloud dependencies. You own the data, you control the inference. Take it to a conference, a pop-up city, or a living room and start generating knowledge immediately. The end goal of this direction: every AI primitive in the Personal Operating System expected by 2030, running locally.

II

The Living Library

The shared body of knowledge. Not shelves of books, but a growing web of linked data.

As people use the collaboration tools, the library grows. Every conversation, transcript, and artifact feeds a shared knowledge corpus designed for consumption by both humans and agents. Psychomapping layers help contributors see their own reflection in the data: where thinking clusters, what gets avoided, how perspective shapes the whole. The data and context are what make everything else smarter.

  • Hermes: transcript-linking and knowledge-structuring software
  • Psychomapping and real-time conflict resolution generation, all running locally
III

Landscape Surveying

Benchmarking the stack. Mapping where donation moves the needle.

A systematic audit of local and open-source AI infrastructure: inference engines, model architectures, fine-tuning toolchains. We develop standardized benchmarks and evals to rank open-source language models against the specific workflows used at the school: transcription, knowledge linking, document analysis, local agent orchestration. The output is a practical donation map: where a dollar or an hour of work has maximum leverage, usable as input for various funding models such as deep funding.

  • Standardized benchmarks and evals for open-source LMs against school workflows
  • Practical donation guide for accelerating local AI infrastructure
  • Community meetups on local LLMs and personal AI assistants (Clowdbot++)
IV

Private Communication

Off the wire. Into the air.

We participate in the construction and operation of nodes in anonymous broadcast networks. Infrastructure that routes messages without exposing who sent them or where they land. In parallel, we explore nearby networking primitives: radio, mesh, optical, local-first protocols, as alternatives to routing everything through the open internet. The goal is communication that works even when the network is hostile.

  • Operating a FlashNet node: secure computation on a private overlay network
  • TorDash
  • ZCash supporting infrastructure