Synnoia

Synnoia is an online workspace for group reading and discussion. Many online reading groups run on some combination of apps and social media platforms that were neither designed for active group reading nor built to work well together to this end. A common scenario looks like this: people searching their desktops or trying to download a PDF right before a meeting so they’re prepared to find referenced passages; scrolling through group chats trying to remember a point they made discussing a particular section the week before so they can present it to the group; and feeling generally unsure about their fellow readers’ ideas about the text since the last discussion. What this turns into is a book club meeting spent trying to reconstruct the threads of a conversation that has played out in fragments and is difficult to recover as a coherent whole. After all, the text itself is the one thing everyone is supposed to be gathered around, but it is the one place the conversation never quite lands. My goal with Synnoia is to put the discussion back on the page. You read inside a shared room built around one PDF document, and when a line or passage stirs an idea, you annotate it, create a thread anchored to the text, where your thoughts wait for whoever comes along to reply. Whether you’re reading at the same time or weeks apart, the margin keeps the conversation. And when you meet to discuss with your group, there is a structured set of notes available to everyone to reference directly alongside the text.