About
An open workspace, built in the open
Piper is a workspace platform: your files, a search that reads them, and an assistant that answers from them. Around that sits a community that owns the infrastructure and a register that lets a company claim its own workspace.
What Piper is
At its centre is a workspace. You put files in; they are versioned, searchable, and shareable, and the built-in assistant answers questions about them from the documents themselves rather than from a general impression of the world. Plugins add apps to the workspace, and skills add know-how the assistant can use.
Two communities are built on top of that, and they are not alternatives — they stack. You join as a citizen: a verified person with a wallet, a balance in Cayso, and a share in the storage network that other citizens run. Then, if you are an officer of a company, you claim it, and the company gets a workspace of its own alongside its register facts.
Open source, and meant to stay that way
Piper is licensed under the AGPL. In practice that means three things. You can read every line of it. You can run your own copy — the whole stack, on your own hardware, answering to nobody. And if you run a modified version as a service, those modifications have to be available too, so improvements come back rather than disappearing into someone’s private fork.
There is no proprietary component in the path between you and your own data. The register mirror is built from the official Companies House APIs rather than scraped. The storage network is a community deployment, coordinated by the community, with citizens running the nodes. The assistant is grounded on your documents and shows what it drew on.
Who builds it
It is an open-source project, and the repository is the honest answer: the commit history is the list of people who have worked on it, and issues and pull requests are where the arguments happen. If you want to know who is behind Piper, that is where to look — and contributing is how you join the list.
Where it is going
Piper is early. The workspace, the citizen community, and company claiming all work today; plenty around them is still being built, and the parts of this site that are not real yet say so on their own pages rather than pretending. If something is missing that you need, the issue tracker is the place to say so.