What is orgware

What is orgware?

orgware is the platform that runs waccamaw.org. It's a product of hatcher.ltd, built to give a tribe or member organization the kind of software a large institution has — a secure member portal, an authoritative record, transparent operations — without the cost or complexity.

waccamaw.org is the first orgware instance, run by and for the Waccamaw Indian People.

What it gives the tribe

• A member portal — members sign in (no password) to a private area with their record, the tribe's knowledge library, and tools that match their role.
• The Tribal Record — a verifiable library of the tribe's governing documents: resolutions, the constitution, offices, decisions, timeline, biography, datasets, and findings — each traceable to a primary-source scan.
• A meeting archive — recovered and ongoing meeting minutes and transcripts, members-only until reviewed.
• A contact directory — for leadership, a role-scoped view of the roll and contacts.
• API access — members and builders can get a personal API key to query the record programmatically, and the same corpus is available to AI assistants over a standard MCP endpoint.
• Cost transparency — leadership can see exactly what the platform costs to run, in real time.

The pieces

orgware is composed of small, independent services — each a single Cloudflare Worker — so any one can fail or be replaced without taking down the rest:

Service	Lives at	Does
members-service	members.waccamaw.org + waccamaw.org/members/*	The member portal, the library, API keys, the roll book, the cost console
contact-service	contact.waccamaw.org	The contact directory + the public contact forms
meetings-service	meetings.waccamaw.org	The meeting archive
corpus-mcp	mcp.waccamaw.org	The record as a remote MCP endpoint for AI assistants

The public, tourist-facing site (the history, the museum, the pauwau, the blog) is a separate Hugo site — orgware only takes over the moment you cross into /members.

The rings of access

Everything in orgware is gated by ring. A ring is who you are, not which page you're on — the same address shows different things to different people:

• Public — anyone on the internet. The waccamaw.org site, the museum, the pauwau, public library records, public meeting minutes.
• Member — a signed-in tribal member. Adds: the member portal, the member ring of the library (records the Council has cleared), a personal API key.
• Leadership — elected leaders. Adds: the entire library including the leadership ring (banking, legal, membership records), the roll book, the contact directory, engagement tools, and the cost/usage console.

The important guarantee: nothing gated is ever sent to someone who hasn't signed in. The private pages aren't hidden with CSS or JavaScript on a public page — they are rendered by an authenticated Worker that returns nothing until it has verified your session. If you're not signed in, you get sent back to the front door.

How records become visible

A record in the Tribal Record has a classification (public, member, or leadership) and, for member-ring records, a clearance set by the Council.

• Leadership sees every record, always.
• Members see a record only once it is classified member (or public) and the Council has cleared it for member viewing.

So a freshly added record is visible to leadership immediately but stays out of the general member library until the Council reviews and clears it. This is by design — the record is the tribe's, and the tribe decides when each piece of it is shared.

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Next: Getting started — how to sign in.