About Kinkeep

What Kinkeep is

Kinkeep is a web application for looking after groups of animals. A group creates a record for each animal in its care and writes down what happens to it: a vet visit, a course of medicine, a weight, a photograph, a note. All of it lands on one timeline that every volunteer in the group can read.

It is built around how that work actually happens. Several people share the animals between them, somebody is always halfway through a course of treatment, and the person who knows the history is not always the person standing in front of the animal. Kinkeep is the part that stops depending on who is holding the phone.

The problem

The people who feed colonies, foster, rescue and run shelters work with paper, spreadsheets and group chats. Those tools were never built for this, and none of them survives a change of volunteer.

What is missing is not a feature. It is a record that belongs to the group rather than to a phone: one place where the medical history, the medicine somebody is halfway through, the weights and the photographs all live, and where every volunteer sees the same thing.

Groups, and who decides what they mean

Everything in Kinkeep belongs to a group, and whoever installs it decides what a group means: a municipality, a valley, an association, a shared interest. The software does not impose the axis.

This is the fediverse model applied to animal care. Some communities organise by geography, others by affinity, and whoever runs the instance is the one who knows which fits theirs. A group can be a colony, a family, or an "other" for anything that is neither.

Why self-hosted is not a preference

A group holds volunteer contact details and the locations of colonies. A colony location in the wrong hands is a risk to the animals, which is a sentence worth reading twice before deciding where that data should live.

So an association installs its own instance and holds its own data. There is no account with us and nothing on our servers, and the AGPL means whoever runs an instance can modify it while anyone they serve keeps the same right.

Who is behind it

Kinkeep is built by Javier López Úbeda, working with the associations and rescue organisations that use it. Everything is developed in the open on Codeberg: the code, the issues, the architecture decisions and the funding registry.