Most scheduling tools publish your week. That is the wrong default for this work.
Hotline is made by B-59 Studio for civic and public-interest teams — the ones whose calendars are a public record, or opposition research.
Why it exists
Every mainstream scheduling tool works the same way: you publish your availability and people take from it. For a sales team that is fine. For a campaign, a mutual aid group, a small non-profit or a council office it is the wrong default, because those calendars are not neutral. They are a public record in some cases and opposition research in others, and either way they hold meetings, plans and people that are nobody else's business. Handing a stranger every gap in your week tells them who you are not meeting as clearly as who you are. So we built the opposite: you hand-pick two to five times, and those are the only times anybody sees. Everything else in the product follows from that one decision.
Who builds it
B-59 Studio, in Austin, Texas. The studio designs civic software for voter access, courts, administrative processes and public transparency — Hotline sits alongside ready2vote, which helps Texans complete a voter registration application and have it mailed to their county. Hotline is our own product rather than client work, which is why it can be opinionated about how scheduling should go instead of averaging out what everyone asked for.
What we are not doing
The studio does not advocate a political ideology, does not want to “disrupt” democracy for its own sake, and is not trying to build a flashy consumer app. That is worth saying plainly on this page rather than leaving it to be assumed, because a public body evaluating a vendor has to know the answer before it can use one. The work is meant to hold up: care, neutrality and technical competence, over a long enough period to be worth relying on.
How it grew
It started as one thing — hand-pick a few times, share one link, the other person taps one. Then the teams using it asked for the rest of the week. Shifts, coverage, who is on and who is owed time; the calendar they run everything else from, without paying by the person for the privilege of having it in one place instead of three. That is what the schedule side of Hotline is, and it exists because the people already using the first part asked for it.
Where it is now
In production and in active development, with signups by invitation while we work with early organizations. Nothing is billable yet. We would rather say that plainly than imply a scale we do not have — if you are evaluating Hotline for a team, that is exactly the sort of thing you need to know before you start rather than after.
Get in touch
Write to hello@hotlinecal.com — about using Hotline, about an organization that needs it, or about the product itself. The studio is at b-59.com.