Most video tools give every gathering the same shape: a grid of rectangles, everyone equally loud, everyone equally visible, the middle empty. It works for a status meeting and quietly ruins everything else. A circle where people take turns, a room where small conversations form and dissolve, a talk with an audience that can be felt — none of those are a grid, and pretending otherwise flattens them.

So Many Rooms starts from the opposite end. Choose what the gathering is for, and the room arranges itself accordingly.

Not decoration. Where people are placed, who they can hear and how loudly, whose face grows when they speak, what sits in the middle, and what anyone is allowed to do without asking. Move somebody across an Open Space and the people near them get louder while the rest fade. Pick up the talking stick in a Circle and everyone else’s microphone closes.

Underneath, every room is the same set of adjustable parts in a different arrangement — which is why new ones can be built without new software each time.

On our own servers in Europe rather than somebody else’s platform. There are no advertising trackers, no behavioural analytics, and nothing to dismiss when you arrive. Meetings are not recorded unless it is switched on deliberately and everybody agrees first.

The reasoning is written down rather than asserted: what we keep and the terms.

So Many Rooms is early and free while that is true. Meetings can break, and when they do we would rather hear about it than not — write to contact@somanyrooms.com.