The Maryland School for the Deaf PSA is the flagship deployment of 1891 Organizations. Any PSA, PTA, or member-run organization can start a deployment in 14 days at /organizations/enroll/.
The Maryland School for the Deaf PSA runs its member directory, family manager, dues, and board on 1891 Organizations — and runs both meeting modules on top of it. Parliamentarian carries the formal monthly board meeting under Robert's Rules. Town Hall carries the interactive sessions: budget input, committee brainstorms, open Q&A. One magic-link login covers all of it. Try the same screens below.
"I was on the board. I wrote it for us. Then I licensed it to the PSA and turned it into a platform every member-run organization can use."
— Anthony Mowl, founder, 1891 OrganizationsWhy 1891 Organizations
An organization officer's evening looks like this: open the spreadsheet to check who paid dues. Open the email client to send a reminder. Open the calendar to check the next meeting date. Open the shared drive to find the prior minutes. Open the chair's notes to confirm the motion. Open the captioner's window for the room. Open a stopwatch app on a phone.
1891 Organizations replaces those tabs with one. The roster, the family manager, the dues ledger, the board roster, the broadcast composer, the document library, the events calendar, and the audit log all live behind one magic-link login. When the room meets, the two meeting modules run from the same place: Parliamentarian for the formal board meeting, Town Hall for the interactive session. A member sees their dashboard. An officer sees an officer's dashboard. The chair sees the chair's screen. Nobody has to remember a password, install an app, or learn a new tool.
The underlying contract is the same on every screen: visible by default, audio is additive, plain English, channel sovereignty, procedural not chatty, accessible to published standards as the floor. That contract is what makes the platform usable by a Deaf-led organization first — and what makes it usable by every other organization second.
Two meeting modules, one membership base
A board meeting under Robert's Rules and a budget-input night with the whole membership are two different rooms. The PSA runs the first on Parliamentarian and the second on Town Hall. Both read from the same roster, both honor the same accessibility contract, both bill on one plan.
Parliamentarian — the formal room
Town Hall — the interactive room
Same members, same login, same contract. The PSA picks the module that fits the meeting — and the bill stays one line.
Before and after
The point of the platform isn't that it's clever. The point is that the seven-tool stack collapsed into one, and a volunteer secretary stopped doing four jobs on a Thursday night.
The room's numbers
90 minutes → 58 minutes, target.
Adjournment to PDF in inboxes.
Members signed in vs. votes cast on the highest-attended motion.
Every motion with a mover, a seconder, a tally, a result.
* Projected from the design targets. Replaced with measured numbers after a full semester of meetings has been run and timed. We don't put a number on this page without showing you how we got it.
A hands-on tour
These are the live components, not screenshots. The interactions you trigger here are the interactions the PSA officers trigger every month — the formal meeting flow, the interactive session, the dashboard, the broadcast composer, the captions stream. The data is anonymized but the components are the production build.
Sign in at 7:30 AM with the coffee still hot. The dashboard tells you what's late, what's pending, and who needs you. No menus to dig through. No reports to run. The counters animate from zero on every load — that's the real screen, not a screenshot.
Every number is a click into a list. Every list is a place to actually do something.
Members get a different dashboard — same data underneath, different surface. RSVPs they owe. Documents they're allowed to read. Their dues status. Their channel preference. Tabs across the top so the home tab stays short.
The hardest part of building this wasn't the code. It was deciding what not to put on this screen.
This is the Parliamentarian module — the formal board meeting under Robert's Rules. You are the member. Click Second this motion, then cast a vote — yes, no, or abstain. The rest of the room fills in. The motion either carries or fails.
The TV at the front of the room shows the same thing. Phones in pockets are the remote. No app to install, no account to create — sign in with the magic link from the email on file.
This is the Town Hall module — the interactive room. The PSA runs it for budget input, committee brainstorms, and open Q&A. The host opens a prompt; every member answers from a phone; the room sees the results build live. No raised hand gets lost because someone looked away.
Six session tools cover the night: poll, brainstorm, Q&A, quiz, request-to-speak, and a quick vote when the room just needs a read. The session exports to a record the officers keep alongside the minutes.
Live captions are on by default whenever audio plays — in both modules. They roll on the screen at the front of the room and on every phone. Speaker names appear next to their lines so the secretary can attribute later.
Audio is additive — captions are not. The room remains usable with the speakers muted, headphones unplugged, or no audio hardware at all.
Watch the draft assemble as the formal meeting runs. Motion, mover, seconder, vote tally, result, adjournment time. The secretary edits in place. The PDF lands in inboxes minutes after the gavel falls — not four days later.
The secretary still signs the minutes. The platform just gets them to a place where signing is the only step left.
Compose a broadcast. Pick an audience — everyone, officers, a committee, last meeting's attendees. Preview the message in the inbox style the recipient will actually see. Schedule the send.
Members pick their channel — email, text, videophone, text relay. The platform respects it. Nobody is forced into a channel that doesn't work for how they communicate.
Switch roles below. A public visitor sees the bylaws and the accessibility statement. A logged-in member sees agendas and committee decks. An officer sees the treasurer's report and personnel notes.
The document library reconciles against the roster every night. A member who leaves loses access tomorrow. No manual cleanup, no shared link a stranger could forward.
Type the email on the roster. Get a one-time link in your inbox. Sign in. The link expires in fifteen minutes. The session lasts thirty days. The platform never stores a password, so it never has one to leak.
The hardest part of running a volunteer organization is the password-reset email three days before the meeting. We solved that by not having passwords.
Search by name. Filter by role, by household, by dues status. Bulk-assign to a committee. Bulk-broadcast. Export to CSV when you need to hand a list to the school office.
One source of truth means one place to fix a typo, one place to mark someone as moved-out, one place that every other screen — and both meeting modules — reads from.
The contract on the floor
Every claim on this page is testable in a real meeting. A Deaf-led PTA is the hardest accessibility room in the country to design for — if the platform works there, in both the formal room and the interactive one, the contract is real everywhere else.
Every motion, every vote, every chair ruling, every poll result shows on the TV at the front of the room. Color, icon, text, and on phones a haptic. Audio is additive — never sole. A member who looked away never loses a vote.
Captions default-on whenever audio plays. The product remains fully usable with speakers muted or unplugged. Audio rides on top of color + icon + text — never replaces it.
"Motion carries." Not a celebration emoji. The platform doesn't try to be friendly with the procedure — it is the procedure, running. The chair stays in charge of tone.
Email, text, videophone, or text relay — each member picks; the platform respects it. Nobody is forced into a channel that doesn't work for them.
"We built this on a Deaf-led campus first, on purpose. If the meeting works for the room with the highest accessibility floor — formal or interactive — it works for every room."
"The minute book from 1940. The minute screen from 2026. The same artifact."— Anthony Mowl
Five generations on my side of the family have been Deaf. In 1940 my great-grandmother Gertrude Wilson was the first president of the Monongahela Valley Silent Club in Pittsburgh, founded so Deaf neighbors had a place to meet, debate, vote, and keep a record of what they decided. My grandmother Betty Mowl was its first secretary. The minute book she kept — motion, second, vote, tally, result, signed at the bottom — is the document this platform is descended from.
Eighty-six years later, the same record is being kept on a Deaf-led campus in Frederick. The tools changed. The discipline did not. That's why the product exists, and that's why it's built the way it is.
How the PSA runs it
The PSA's membership base carries the directory, the family manager, the dues ledger collected through the PSA's own payment processor, and the board roster with seats, terms, and committee assignments. Both meeting modules ride on top: the board meets formally on Parliamentarian each month, and the membership weighs in on budgets and committee work through Town Hall.
The audience is mixed: Deaf adults, hearing adults, ASL interpreters, hearing-aid users, screen-reader users, members with sensory-processing differences. If something doesn't work for one of them, the next release fixes it. That feedback loop — a real Deaf-led room, every month — is why every other organization gets a platform that was hardened in the hardest room first.
If you run a board, a PTA, a small nonprofit, a service club, or a community group — and you're tired of the seven-tool stack — we should talk.
The free tier is real and never expires. Paid plans are a flat rate with no platform fee on your dues — and you can run one meeting module or both. The 14-day onboarding starts the day you send the form.
No automated drip campaign. No sales sequence. A person in Frederick reads the form.