1891 Parliamentarian: the meeting itself,
in plain sight.

Robert’s Rules, enforced in software. Motions on the TV at the front of the room, votes from every phone in the room, and signed minutes in the secretary’s inbox before the chair stands up. Built for the Maryland School for the Deaf PSA — where I’m an officer — and engineered from day one to run any PTA, board, HOA, or conference floor. The three demos below are the actual product surfaces, restyled to live on this page.

What this is

1891 Parliamentarian is the gavel, the minute book, and the room screen at the front of the meeting — rendered into software that any officer can run from a tablet. It is not a chatbot. It does not answer questions about Robert’s Rules. It enforces them. A motion can’t be voted on until it has been moved, seconded, and debate has been opened. The chair has a gavel. The members have phones. The room has a TV. The secretary has nothing to write down, because the minute book writes itself.

Three surfaces share one source of truth. The officer console on a tablet is the only thing in the room that can issue commands. The TV display at the front shows the motion, the timer, the threshold, and the running tally — readable from the back of the cafeteria. The phone in every member’s pocket is the remote: a second button, a vote, a request to speak, a point of order. Everything stays in sync because the meeting server is the one and only thing that gets to call a motion carried.

We don’t replace the chair. We give the chair a working room. — Anthony Mowl

Who it’s for, and who built it

The first customer is the Maryland School for the Deaf PSA. I’m an officer there. Anthony recuses from any PSA vote about the platform — the PSA gets the same product everyone else gets, on a free Pro tier for the duration of active use, and the PSA gets to be the customer that taught the product what a real Deaf-led meeting actually needs. The beachhead beyond that is other PTAs and PSAs, Deaf community organizations, small nonprofit boards, HOAs, and conference floor votes. The product was built for a room that couldn’t hear the gavel. Turns out that makes every other room better too.

It is also the first 1891 product where the building credentials sit on the admin’s side of the table. My great-grandmother Gertrude Wilson was the first President of the Monongahela Valley Silent Club in 1940. My grandmother Betty Mowl kept the minute book by hand. The minute book from 1940 and the minute screen from 2026 are the same artifact. 135 years Deaf. We just stopped doing it by hand.

What we built

One product, top to bottom — the three meeting surfaces, the engine that keeps them honest, the auto-minutes pipeline, the marketing site, and the signup flow that spins up a new organization in about ninety seconds. No React. No build farm. No dependency that can break a release window the night before a school board election.

• Officer console Tablet-first split pane: agenda left, active motion right. Introduce, second, open debate, open vote, close vote, point of order, recess, adjourn — all reachable by keyboard. Built like a piece of working software, not a kiosk.
• TV display Light-on-near-navy, never scrolls. State band across the top color-codes the room state. Big motion text. Bigger vote bars. Closed captions on by default, ASL slot reserved bottom-right. Cursor hidden. Nothing on the TV listens; it only renders.
• Phone-as-remote Magic-link join, no app to install. Three pill buttons sized for a thumb (Yes / No / Abstain), each with a check / X / dash icon — color is never the only signal. Request-to-speak, point of order, withdraw-second — all on the same surface. Drops offline, recovers automatically when wifi comes back.
• Meeting engine A motion state machine that walks every motion through introduced → seconded → debate → voting → carried or failed, in that order, with no shortcuts. The chair commands; the engine decides; the surfaces render.
• Auto-minutes When the chair adjourns, the engine replays the meeting into a clean minute book draft — quorum, attendance, every motion with mover, seconder, and tally, the chair’s rulings, and executive-session markers. The secretary reviews, edits, and signs off; the PDF goes out to every present member.
• Onboarding One signup form, four fields. New organizations get their own subdomain, their own brand color, and a sample meeting to practice on. The first real meeting is usually inside a week. The free tier exists for that reason.

The shape of it, in one screen

Five tiers, each doing one job. The phone never decides; it only reports. The TV never listens; it only renders. The console never guesses; it only commands — and only when the engine says yes.

Try the meeting engine.

Below is the actual Robert’s Rules motion state machine, lifted out of the product and dropped onto this page. Walk a motion from introduction to verdict. Watch the TV change color band as the state advances. The product enforces the same transitions in the same order in the actual app — you can’t open a vote until debate is open, you can’t open debate until the motion has been seconded, and the second window times out after fifteen seconds whether anyone is paying attention or not.

Cast a vote.

Now the member’s half. Below on the left is the member’s screen — the same view a PSA member would see during a real vote. On the right is the room TV, rendering the running tally. Three demo voters are already at the meeting. Cast your vote, and the room updates instantly — bar widths animate, the threshold pill changes color when the motion crosses simple-majority, and a verdict appears once everyone’s in. The product handles the same back-and-forth at the meeting; the only difference here is that the other three voters live in your browser instead of in the room.

Walk a meeting. Watch the minutes write themselves.

The third surface is the one that historically never existed: the minute book that’s already done when the chair adjourns. Click through the meeting steps below in order. The minute book on the right fills in line by line. It isn’t a chatbot summarizing what someone said — it’s the record of what actually happened, written from the meeting itself. Same record the secretary reviews, edits, and signs before it goes out.

The event log is the minute book. There is no LLM in the loop. We’re not generating a summary; we’re rendering a record. That distinction matters because the minutes are the legal artifact of a parliamentary meeting — the thing that gets read into the record at the next meeting, the thing a board attorney audits, the thing a tax-exempt org may have to produce on subpoena. The secretary is still the person who signs off. We just do the typing.

Why this fits 1891’s pitch

The page you’re on right now — 1891’s main demonstration — argues for systems built end to end, in Frederick, under one roof. Cameras instead of microphones. Hardware, firmware, gameplay, and set design from the same workshop. Parliamentarian is that argument in pure software. The same workshop that designed the brand wrote the rulebook, drew the gavel, and made the build. When a PTA secretary calls on a Tuesday night because something looks off in the minute book, the person who answers the call is the person who wrote the part that drew it.

It is also a universal-design product where the universality isn’t a feature; it’s the shape of the thing. Every state change is four signals at once: a color, an icon, plain English text, and a small buzz in your pocket. Audio is a fifth, additive channel — an opt-in chime, a captioned voice announcement — and the whole product remains fully usable with audio muted, headphones unplugged, or no speaker on the device at all. Captions are on by default whenever audio plays. The TV at the front of the room is the source of truth, because a Deaf room can’t use a chair’s voice as the source of truth.

Audio is additive, never sole. Every state change still carries color, icon, text, and haptic. The product must remain fully usable with the speakers muted. — Anthony Mowl

One small choice that matters

The microphone is treated as a regulated path, not a convenience. Maryland is a two-party-consent state. Most of our customers run mixed-hearing rooms where someone is signing, someone is speaking, and someone is reading captions on a TV. So every session that captures audio announces it verbally and visually at the call to order, captures explicit per-attendee consent at check-in (default unchecked), renders a high-contrast RECORDING indicator on every shared screen, and offers the chair a one-tap PAUSE RECORDING for executive session, personnel matters, or any member-in-crisis discussion. Non-consenting members’ lines are flagged in the transcript and held out of any public output.

The live captions themselves are a small, narrow job done by a streaming caption service we can swap if a better one comes along. The phones, the TV, and the minute book don’t notice the difference. The point of that boring engineering decision is that the meeting outlives the vendor.

What changes for the room

Before Parliamentarian, the MSD PSA — like most PTAs and small boards — ran meetings with a print agenda, a hand-raised count for votes, a treasurer reading off her phone, and a secretary trying to listen, sign, and write at the same time. Motions got dropped on the floor because nobody seconded fast enough and nobody noticed. People in the back of the cafeteria couldn’t always tell what was being voted on. Minutes landed in everyone’s inbox a week later, written from memory, with at least one sentence somebody wanted to argue about.

After: every motion is on the screen at the front of the room and on every phone in the room. The second is a green button with a 15-second clock. Debate is moderated by a speaker queue with optional time limits. The vote is three pills the size of a thumb. The result is a full-screen banner with the threshold, the tally, and a gavel strike. The minute book is signed before the chair stands up. Members who can’t hear the gavel can still read it, sign it, or feel it. Members who can’t see can still hear it — the chime is opt-in, but it’s available. The meeting is visible by default, audible on demand, and procedurally honest because the rules don’t allow shortcuts.

The minute book from 1940 and the minute screen from 2026 are the same artifact. We’ve been keeping minutes for five generations. We just stopped doing it by hand. — Anthony Mowl

What we’re making next

Two-mic stations — podium plus interpreter, or speaker plus the person voicing for ASL — so a mixed-hearing room gets clean per-speaker captions without overlap math. The interpreter window on the TV: a small picture-in-picture for a remote ASL interpreter, sized to read at ten feet. A public-meeting export for school boards and city councils whose minutes have to live in a sunshine archive. And a founding-member program for the first orgs to come aboard. The product page on madeby1891.com is the standalone landing.