Everything you need to know about how ECO works, what it costs, and how your family's information is protected.
EternalCurrent.Online (ECO) is a private family network platform. It lets you build a living record of the people, stories, languages, and migrations that make your family yours — on your terms, with your words, under your control.
Unlike a family tree, ECO is built around you as the center. Everyone in your network sees it from their own position. Nobody else can build it from where you stand.
Stop here if you're looking for a genealogy tool or ancestry database. ECO is something entirely different.
ECO is a cultural memory bank and energy conduit. It's a living archive of:
EGO is the view from your center. You are the protagonist. Your perspective. Your experiences. Your memories. What moves through you. Every member of your network is a node transmitting energy — into you, and out from you.
ECO is the view of your community. Everyone else who made you who you are. The ancestors, the elders, your peers, your children, your friends. The energy is reverberated and expanded and compounded through every member of the network. You don't exist in isolation — you are a node in someone else's network too.
The paradox: ECO is a learning site about how it's all about everyone else who made you who you are. Your story is only true because of theirs. The site is designed so you see it from your perspective (the ego), but what you learn is how deeply you are made by the eco.
A family tree app shows you who is related to whom. It answers: "Where did I come from?"
ECO asks: "Who made me who I am? What wisdom flows through our family? Where is our culture alive right now? How do I belong to this network, and how does this network belong to me?"
This is not genealogy. This is cultural integration. This is understanding that every person in your network is a transmitter of energy, knowledge, and belonging. This is a site for families who understand that their story is too alive, too complex, too sacred to fit in a tree.
Ancestry built a business from your family tree. 23andMe auctioned 15 million people's genetic data in bankruptcy. Facebook mapped your family connections and sold them to advertisers.
ECO is different by design. You are not the product. You never will be. No DNA. No government ID. No records required. No direct advertising. No data monetization. Your network, your stories, and your vocabulary are never sold or used to generate revenue for us.
Any family whose story is too complex for a tree. Diaspora families spread across continents. Blended families. Adopted families. Families where the formal names and the living names are two different things. Families where culture lives in the kitchen, not a document.
ECO explicitly includes every cultural and ethnic background — South Asian, African, East Asian, Latin American, Indigenous, Eastern and Northern European, and everyone else. If your family has a story, ECO is built for you.
Your Eternal is the record — the stories, migrations, relationships, and vocabulary that shaped who you are. The things that happened before you, that you carry whether you know it or not.
Your Current is this moment. Flowing into you from the people in your network, and out from you into theirs, simultaneously. You are always both — receiving and transmitting. What moves through you right now gets held, for everyone in your network, and the ones who come after.
Every page on the site has a ? button in the bottom-right corner. Tap it to open a help panel where you can describe what you need, choose a category, and submit a support ticket — all without leaving your current page.
You can also reach us directly from your account settings. Help tickets go to the ECO support team and are typically responded to within 24 hours.
Anyone can start their own network by visiting sign up and creating a Conductor account. You choose your own network name, type, and membership. There is no waiting list and no invitation required to become a Network Owner.
If someone has already invited you to join an existing network, use the invitation link they sent — it will walk you through creating your account and claiming your profile inside their network.
No. ECO uses magic links — you enter your email and receive a secure sign-in link. No password to remember or lose. You can set a password later from your account settings if you prefer.
Just your name and email to get started. No DNA. No government ID. No sensitive documents. Your network builds from stories, relationships, and the names your family actually uses — not from records.
Birth dates, if added, are stored as month and year only — never the full date.
ECO is a Progressive Web App (PWA) — which means it works on any device through your browser, with no App Store download required. On iPhone, open ECO in Safari and tap Share → Add to Home Screen. On Android, open ECO in Chrome and tap Add to Home Screen. The icon appears on your home screen exactly like a native app, and it works offline for content you've already loaded.
ECO is designed first for mobile — every page, every interaction, every visualization is built to work on a phone screen. A dedicated native app may come in a future version.
Once you have a Conductor or higher account, you'll see a Create Network option in your dashboard. You give the network a name, choose its type, and set the initial visibility and membership policies. You are automatically the Network Owner. From there, you can invite members one by one or in bulk.
ECO supports nine network types, each with its own vocabulary and features: Family, Tribal / Sovereign Nation, Collegiate, Community (including faith, cultural, and diaspora groups), Faith (LDS ward, Sikh sangat, or general), Village (with regional variants for India, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada), Intergenerational, Military / Veteran, and African Diaspora. The language you see in your network reflects your choice — because your relationships are unique.
Conductor Light is invitation only, and those accounts come with one pre-configured network — you do not create it manually.
If you receive an invite link but the profile shown doesn't match you — wrong name, wrong family — do not claim it. Contact the network owner directly and let them know. They can correct the placeholder record before it is claimed. Once a profile is claimed it is linked to your login, so it's worth resolving before you proceed.
The person who creates a network. You are at the center — not the oldest person, not the patriarch. You name your network, invite its members, and define how relationships are labeled. Nobody else sees the network from your position. Nobody else can build it from where you stand.
Yes. You can be a member of multiple networks — for example, your own family's network and a network created by a relative. Each network is its own view, centered on its own owner.
ECO gives you a set of tools to build and explore your network:
Network Map & Tree — visualize everyone in your network and how they connect.
Migration Globe — see every migration arc: where people were born, where they landed, colored by cultural origin.
Stories & Share — share moments and memories with your network through an ECO Story Teller session.
Cultural Vocabulary — preserve the words your family actually uses — in any language, with meaning, context, and who carries them.
Photos — share and tag photos within your network.
Households — group members by household with their own profile.
Map Pins — mark locations that matter to your family's story.
Journey Replay — animate your network's migrations over time.
Network Quests — weekly prompts that drive heritage storytelling and cultural knowledge sharing.
Ask Your Network — a collective Q&A board where members post questions and the network answers them together.
Interest Matching — monthly discovery of shared hobbies, books, music, and passions across your network.
Private Messaging & Groups — direct and group conversations that never expose email addresses.
Events — create and share family gatherings, cultural celebrations, and milestones.
Future Arcs — encrypted messages sealed for delivery at future life milestones.
Every family has words that don't translate — terms of endearment, relationship names, food words, phrases that only make sense inside your culture. ECO lets you record these words in any language, attach meaning and context to them, and connect them to the people who carry them.
These words don't disappear when the people who knew them are gone. They stay in your network, for the people who come after.
From your network's Member directory, tap Invite Member and enter their name and email. They'll receive a magic link to join. If they're not yet ready to join digitally, you can add them as a placeholder member — their name and relationships appear in all visualizations immediately, and they can claim their profile later.
To invite someone who already has an ECO account, use their registered email and they'll be linked directly without a new sign-up.
Open any member's profile and look for the Journey tab. Add each location they've lived in chronological order — city, country, start date, and end date (or mark it as current). The globe and journey replay visualizations pick this up automatically.
Journeys are especially powerful for diaspora families — seeing three or four generations of migration animated on a globe tells a story that no list of names can match.
The globe shows every migration arc in your network — where each person was born, and where they are now. Each arc is colored by cultural origin. For the first time, you see your family not as a list of names but as movement across the earth.
ECO offers three paid tiers, each available annually (billed upfront) or monthly, plus Conductor Light — an invitation-only arrangement that is not a public sign-up. Annual pricing gives you a lower effective rate. There is no auto-renewal on any plan.
There is no auto-renewal on any plan. Every renewal is a deliberate choice. We earn your trust every single period.
ECO has four roles, designed to match how you actually use the platform — from exploring it for the first time to running a large cultural organisation.
Yes. ECO accepts payments from virtually any country in the world. All plans are priced in US dollars. Your bank or card issuer will convert the charge to your local currency at their current exchange rate — the same way any international subscription works. Because exchange rates fluctuate, the amount you see on your statement may vary slightly from month to month, but ECO's price in USD never changes.
Conductor Light is a free entry-level arrangement — not a public sign-up. It is offered by ECO on an invite or barter basis to early adopters, cultural influencers, and partner communities who want to explore the platform before committing to a paid plan.
Conductor Light gives you one private network of up to 30 members for 12 months. All core features are available: posts, photos, visualizations, journeys, the Energy Tree, the Globe, and the Connection Map. AI features (ECO Story Teller, Quests) unlock on upgrade to Conductor.
At the end of 12 months, your network enters Directed Dormancy — preserved intact until you choose to upgrade or export. Nothing is lost. There is no automatic deletion and no pressure to pay. If you continue promoting ECO during your Light period, the 12-month clock resets.
This depends on your tier:
Networks that have been closed or archived (such as completed class networks in the LMS) do not count toward your active limit. A Conductor member who completed a class last semester can still join three new ones this semester.
Directed Dormancy is what happens to your network when a subscription lapses — rather than deletion. Your network is sealed: all posts, photos, stories, relationships, vocabulary, and Future Arcs are preserved exactly as they were, indefinitely, at no cost.
Members of a dormant network can still log in and read everything. They cannot add new content until the network is reactivated by the owner upgrading their subscription.
This matters because ECO holds family history. The idea that a missed credit card payment could delete twenty years of your family's stories is unacceptable to us. Directed Dormancy means that never happens.
Complete, permanent deletion is always available — but it requires a deliberate, explicit choice. It never happens automatically.
Directed Dormancy. If your subscription lapses, your network is preserved intact — indefinitely, with no expiry. Your stories, relationships, and Future Arcs wait for you or the next generation. Complete deletion is always at your choice, at any time.
You can downgrade at any time. If you downgrade from Conductor Pro to Conductor, your active network limit drops to 3. If you currently have more than 3 active networks, the additional ones enter Directed Dormancy — they are not deleted, and you can reactivate them by upgrading again. No content is ever lost in a downgrade.
Yes. Everything in your network came from your network — it is not ours to hold. You can export your complete network data at any time from your Profile tab under All My Data. Your export includes posts, photos, relationships, journeys, cultural vocabulary, and stories — delivered as a structured data file. Your data leaves with you. Always.
Only members of your network can see network content. Your email is never visible to anyone in your network — it exists only so we can reach you. You control what others can see about you within the network.
No direct advertising to users. ECO carries no ads. Vendors cannot contact you directly — ever. ECO will build a network of vetted service providers that can help you turn your documentation or event needs into reality — yearbooks, family books, event photography, catering, and more. This is a strictly opt-in feature. Without you choosing to connect, a vendor will have no awareness of you as an individual user. Vendors pay ECO a flat monthly subscription for access to the system — not to your data. You choose whether to connect with any of them. If you do not opt in, vendors have no knowledge of the potential connection.
No. Your stories, your vocabulary, your network — none of it is sold, licensed, or used to generate revenue. We do not share data with advertisers or data brokers. Vendors in the ECO service directory pay a flat monthly subscription fee for access to the platform — not to your data. Your family's information is never part of that transaction. You are not the product. You never will be.
No. All network content is private by default. Nothing you post, share, or upload inside a network is indexed by search engines or visible to anyone outside the network.
The only public-facing pages ECO has are general informational pages — home, about, FAQ, and similar. Your family's names, stories, and photos never appear there.
Complete deletion is always available, entirely at your choice. Contact us through your account and we will remove everything — your profile, your stories, your relationships — permanently. There is no retention period after a deletion request.
Other members in your network see your full name, profile photo, cultural origin, current location, bio, and any information you've shared through Profile Pulse answers or Storytime sessions. They can see your journey entries on the Globe and your position in the Energy Tree and Connection Map.
They cannot see your email address, your login details, your birth date (only birth month and year are stored and shown), or any content you've marked private in your Privacy Circles settings. Members outside your network see nothing — your profile does not exist to them.
Every page in ECO has a ? button in the bottom-right corner. Tap it from anywhere to ask a question, report a bug, or describe an issue — without leaving what you're doing. Your message goes directly to the ECO team with context about which page you were on.
For billing issues, account problems, or anything you'd prefer to handle outside the platform, reach out directly through the support form on the About page. For urgent issues, network owners can also escalate through the admin panel.
Not currently. ECO is not a genealogy database and does not import GEDCOM files. ECO builds its network from living members who actively participate — relationships are added by invitation and connection, not parsed from a family tree export. This is by design: ECO is built around living energy in a network, not a historical record of names and dates.
If you have existing family data you want to reflect in ECO, the recommended approach is to add members as placeholders and build out relationships and journeys manually over time. This also ensures that every record in ECO carries the perspective of a real person, not a data import.
Yes — and this is one of the most important things ECO does. Alzheimer's and dementia narrow a window rather than closing it all at once. Inside that window, a person still has stories to tell, voices to recognize, and things they want the people they love to have.
ECO is built for the time that remains. The Reminisce feature surfaces memory prompts tailored to who a person is — their decade, their culture, their relationships inside the network. My Story captures personal memoir chapters. Future Arcs seal voice messages for a grandchild's eighteenth birthday. The Memory Player arranges photos and stories into a playback experience for reminiscence at home or in a clinical setting.
The interface is consistent and predictable on every visit — an important consideration for users with cognitive changes. Learn more about ECO for Memory Care families →
ECO is architected to support clinical research programs — biopharma-funded pilots, NGO dementia programs, and multi-country regulatory environments. Each patient gets one isolated private network. Family members join that network naturally. Researchers see aggregate engagement data only — never patient identity, never individual network content.
The platform supports IRB-ready consent, blinded aggregate reporting, multi-country regulatory configuration (US, EU/GDPR, UK, India, Australia), and a patient code system that ensures the biopharma sponsor never receives a mapping between study code and real identity.
If you are a clinical operations, RWE, or outcomes team at a sponsor organization, see the clinical program section →
Consent is handled at the point of enrollment via IRB-approved text stored per-site. The patient sees and agrees to the consent language before the network is created. The study layer — research roles, aggregate reporting, patient codes — is invisible to the patient and their family. From their perspective, it is a private family network. The study infrastructure exists above and around it, never inside it.
Whether family members are informed of the study context depends on country configuration. GDPR countries require family disclosure; others allow study-layer disclosure to be optional.
Yes — absolutely. The study/clinical layer is entirely optional. Any family can create a standard ECO network for a loved one navigating memory loss, invite family members, and use all the same features: Reminisce, My Story, Memory Player, Future Arcs, Migration Globe, Energy Tree. No clinical affiliation required. Standard Conductor pricing applies.
ECO is designed to serve as a living primary source for heritage language courses and Ethnic Studies programs. Networks built on ECO can surface real vocabulary, real migration patterns, and real family histories — not hypothetical examples.
We are actively developing partnerships with collegiate programs. If you represent an institution, reach out through the contact page.
Language belongs to the people who carry it. ECO gives tribal communities a private, sovereign space to preserve vocabulary, record oral histories, and document cultural knowledge — on community terms, with no outside access, no monetization, and no interference.
This is not a general diaspora tool repurposed for tribal use. Sovereignty over language and cultural preservation are built into how ECO works at the foundation.
An LDS network on ECO uses the Ward & Faith Community template, which adapts the platform vocabulary to match how Latter-day Saint families and wards actually talk: Eternal Family instead of family tree, Ward Family as the members label, and a Service Board for community service opportunities alongside the feed.
The platform is entirely private and invite-only — no outside access, no public profiles. Ward records, family histories, and life stories stay within the network you create. The energy globe shows migration patterns across generations, and AI-assisted biography chapters can document conversion stories, mission journals, and family heritage.
Ward leaders can manage member access, control visibility of sensitive events, and share a network invite link with ward families. Service items, genealogy connections, and scripture references can all be pinned and preserved within the network.
A Sikh network uses the Sikh Sangat template, which reflects the Punjabi cultural identity and Sikh values. The members label becomes Sangat, the events label becomes Diwan, and the philosophy anchor is Ik Onkar — the recognition that community and individual are inseparable.
The vocabulary bank can capture Punjabi and Gurmukhi terms for second and third generation members who grew up in diaspora. The migration globe is especially meaningful for Sikh communities spanning the Punjab, UK, Canada, and the United States — showing how a family moved from village to city to continent over generations.
Sacred events can be marked with restricted visibility using the Sacred Event toggle, so a Gurdwara ceremony or family religious milestone stays within the appropriate circle of trust.
ECO supports a general Faith Community network type for Christian congregations, Jewish communities, Muslim families, Hindu mandals, and any group whose bonds are rooted in shared spiritual practice. The vocabulary adapts to your tradition — you choose the labels that fit.
Core principles that apply to all faith networks: invite-only access (you control who joins), zero advertising, no data selling, and a complete export of your network data on request. Your community's stories remain yours.
ECO provides five interactive visualizations, each showing your network from a different perspective. All grow dynamically as members are added — nothing is static.
Energy Tree — a multi-generational family structure showing every person as a colored node, organized by generation from top to bottom, with spouse pairs and parent-child connections.
Our DNA — a rotating 3D double helix where males sit on a blue metallic strand and females on a pink strand, with spouse connections bridging across.
Global Network (Globe) — a 3D spinning globe showing migration arcs from birthplace to current location, colored by cultural origin, with journey paths animated chronologically.
Connection Map — a force-directed graph that reveals how every member connects to every other, including derived relationships like cousins and in-laws.
Ripple Effect — shows how your energy radiates outward through your network, visualizing the idea that you are not a leaf on a tree, but the center of a field of energy.
The Energy Tree arranges your network by generation — great-grandparents at the top, youngest members at the bottom. Each generation has its own color. Nodes show initials or profile photos. Lines connect parents to children and spouses to each other.
Use the Filters sidebar on the left to toggle generations on and off. When logged in, you also get Focus filters: My Family, Spouse's Family, and My Friends — each showing only the people connected to you through that path.
The tree reshapes dynamically when you filter. Spouse pairs stay together, siblings stay grouped, and the layout adapts to show only what you've selected.
Our DNA is a 3D rotating double helix built with the same family data as the Energy Tree. All males appear on a metallic blue strand, all females on a metallic pink strand. Great-grandparents sit at the top of the helix, youngest members at the bottom.
Each person appears as a black circle with their initials — or their profile photo if one is uploaded. Spouse connections appear as golden lines bridging across the two strands. Siblings sit across from each other without connecting lines.
The helix grows and shrinks dynamically based on how many people are visible. Toggle generations on the left sidebar and the helix rebuilds — shorter for fewer people, taller for more. The same Focus filters from the Energy Tree are available when logged in.
You can drag to rotate the helix, scroll to zoom, and hover over any node to see the person's name, generation, and cultural origin.
The Globe shows every migration in your network as an arc on a 3D spinning earth. Each arc connects a person's birthplace to their current location, colored by their cultural origin — amber for India, teal for Fiji, green for USA, and so on.
Connections shows relationship lines between family members across the globe. Journeys traces each person's life path chronologically — from birthplace through every place they've lived. You can toggle Journeys on or off with the pill button.
The flat map view below the globe shows the same data on a Leaflet map with clickable markers.
The Connection Map uses a force-directed layout where every person is a node and every relationship is a visible link. Nodes attract connected people and repel unconnected ones, finding a natural arrangement.
This visualization includes derived relationships — cousins, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, and in-laws are automatically computed from the nuclear relationships in the database. You don't have to enter them manually.
On mobile, tap the hamburger icon to open the filter sidebar. Tap outside the sidebar to close it.
Each generation gets a consistent color across all visualizations. The colors are assigned from oldest to youngest:
● Great-Great-GP ● Great-Grandparents ● Grandparents ● Parents ● Youngest ● Friends
Passed members appear translucent in all visualizations. The number of generation layers adjusts automatically based on how deep your family tree goes.
Yes. Every visualization queries the database live when the page loads. When a new member is added, a relationship is created, or a journey is recorded, it appears in every visualization immediately on the next page load. Nothing is hardcoded — your network grows and the visualizations grow with it.
Simplified View is a focused, easy-to-use overlay that opens automatically for every member when they sign in. It uses larger text, bigger tap targets, and a streamlined five-tab layout so you can do the most important things without navigating the full site.
The five tabs:
Closing Simplified View: tap ✕ to close it for the current session — it will reopen on your next visit. To turn it off permanently, open the Settings tab on your main page and toggle Simplified View off.
Theme picker: a 🎨 button in the bottom-left corner of the view lets you switch between the four color themes without leaving.
Return to full site: the bar at the top reads "Full site is behind this view — tap × to return." Tap × anytime.
Simplified View opens by default for every user. To turn it off permanently:
Once turned off, the view will not open automatically on future logins. You can re-enable it at any time from the same Settings toggle, or by clicking 🔡 Simplified View in the avatar dropdown menu.
Yes. ECO offers four themes available from the theme selector (the half-circle icon in the bottom-right corner of most pages):
Void — near-black background, high contrast. The default dark theme.
Deep Sea / Ocean — deep ocean blue tones, dark and easy on the eyes.
Grove — soft sage green, light background, natural feel.
Parchment — warm off-white, the lightest theme — ideal for daytime or print-friendly use.
Your theme is saved to your account and syncs across devices and sessions.
Inside Simplified View, tap the 🎨 button in the bottom-left corner to switch themes without leaving the view.
Each member controls their own visibility within each network. Privacy settings are per-network — you can be more visible in one network and more private in another.
Profile visibility — control whether your full name, cultural origin, and bio are visible to other network members, or only your initials.
Photo visibility — choose whether your profile photo and tagged photos appear to other members or remain hidden.
Contact visibility — your email is never visible to other network members under any setting. It exists only for authentication and for ECO to reach you directly.
Location visibility — control whether your birth location, current location, and journey history appear on the Globe and other visualizations.
Story visibility — choose whether stories and share contributions are visible to the full network or only to you.
Birth date — if added, only month and year are stored — never the full date. You can choose to hide this entirely.
These controls apply across all visualizations — if you hide your location, your arc disappears from the Globe, your place posts disappear from the maps, and your journey is not animated. The node still appears on the Energy Tree and DNA helix (with initials only if photo is hidden).
If you see your name or initials in the network but haven't signed up yet, look for the blue banner at the top of the Energy Tree that says "See your name or initials? Tap here to claim your profile." Tapping it walks you through linking your email to your existing profile — your photo, relationships, and stories stay connected.
Your profile photo appears as a circular image on your node in every visualization — the Energy Tree, Our DNA helix, Connection Map, and Globe. Photos are stored securely and only visible to members of your network.
The ECO Story Teller is the primary way you interact with the site. It's a warm conversational companion built into ECO that helps you add stories, capture memories, build your profile, and explore your network — without needing to fill out forms or figure out where things go.
It's available to every member on every role, from Conductor Light through Org Admin. You don't upgrade to get it — it's the default experience.
The Story Teller asks thoughtful questions, listens, and turns what you share into something worth keeping. It never references religion or politics in generated output, and it maintains neutrality across all members of the network.
From your network home page, look for the Story Teller button or the conversational prompt at the top of your feed. Tap it and start talking or typing — the Story Teller will guide the conversation from there.
You can also launch it from your profile page to add to your own bio, or from a member's profile to capture a memory involving that person. Voice input is fully supported — tap the microphone icon to speak instead of type.
Quests are rotating story prompts that give members something specific to contribute — a favorite family recipe, a migration memory, a word only your family uses, a photograph from a specific era, or a question about a living elder. New quests appear regularly.
When a quest is live, it appears at the top of your network feed. Tap it to launch a Story Teller session centered on that prompt. Responses are shared with your network and become part of the permanent record.
Journeys trace the path of a person's life — every city and country they've lived in, chronologically. These appear as animated paths on the Globe visualization, showing how your family has moved across the earth over generations. Each journey point includes dates and location coordinates.
The Ripple Effect visualization shows how your energy radiates outward through your network. It starts from you (or any selected member) and ripples outward through connections — first to immediate family, then to extended family, then to friends. It's a visual representation of ECO's core philosophy: you are not a leaf on a tree, you are the center of a field of energy.
A Place post is how you mark locations that matter to your family's story — the village your grandparents came from, the house where you grew up, the temple or church your family attended, the restaurant where your parents met. Each place appears on the My Pins map and the Network Map, and connects to the people associated with that location.
To add a place: when composing a post, fill in the Location field. Posts with a location automatically appear as pins on the maps.
Note: The separate Map Pins feature has been retired. All location data is now stored as part of your regular posts, making everything easier to search, edit, and export together.
Yes, in two ways. Every text field in ECO has a built-in microphone button — tap it, speak, and your words appear. No setup needed.
You can also set up a voice shortcut on your phone so you can say "Hey Siri, ECO memory" or "Hey Google, ECO story" from anywhere — even with your screen off. ECO opens and the mic activates automatically. See the Voice Shortcuts guide for step-by-step setup on iPhone and Android.
After uploading a photo, tap on it to open the full view. Use the Tag People button to select members from your network and associate them with the photo. Tagged members are notified, and the photo appears on their profile and in the shared gallery.
You control the visibility of each photo — you can share it with the full network, keep it visible only to tagged members, or make it private.
Households group members who live together under one roof. Each household can have its own profile page with a name, location, and the members who belong to it. This is especially useful for diaspora families where multiple generations share a home, or for tracking how family units form and evolve over time.
Stewardship lets you manage another family member's profile, posts, life notes, and journey data on their behalf. This is especially valuable when parents or elders can no longer update their own profiles — a child or relative can step in as steward without needing account access or password sharing.
You don't join their household — you manage their profile from your own seat. Multiple family members can steward the same person, and every edit is attributed to the steward who made it.
Stewardship limits depend on your subscription tier. Conductor plans include up to 3 stewardships. Conductor subscribers can steward up to 6 members. Conductor Pro supports up to 10. Org Admin tier has no limit. You can see your current usage and available slots on your Household page.
Yes. ECO allows multiple stewards per member. For example, two siblings can both steward their aging parents. Every change is transparent — the platform records who made each update. If family members disagree about content, that is a family conversation — ECO records, it does not referee.
Contribution roles are special designations within a network that recognise the depth of someone's involvement:
These roles are assigned by the Network Owner and are specific to each network. A person can hold different roles in different networks.
A passed member's profile becomes a permanent, read-only memorial within the network. Their stories, photos, posts, journey entries, and vocabulary contributions remain visible to the network forever — they become part of the network's historical record.
The Network Owner or a designated Steward can mark a member as having passed, which updates their profile status and adjusts how they appear in visualizations (the Energy Tree shows passed members in a distinct style). No content is deleted. Their voice stays in the network.
If you steward a passed member, you can continue to add memories, photos, and notes on their behalf — preserving their story as others share it with you.
Yes. Pets are part of the family. You can add a pet profile to your network — name, species, photo, and their own story entries. Pets appear in the network directory and can be tagged in posts and photos. They don't appear in the Energy Tree (which is for human relationships) but they're fully part of your network's living record.
The weekly digest is an optional email summary of activity in your network — new members who joined, stories shared, vocabulary added, and quests responded to. It's designed for members who don't log in every day but want to stay connected to the rhythm of their network.
You can subscribe, unsubscribe, or change the frequency (weekly or monthly) from your Prefs tab under Stay Connected. The digest never includes private content — only activity visible to the full network.
Every ECO network can have its own private podcast — a curated collection of audio stories, interviews, and recordings shared only with the people you've invited in. It's not a public podcast. No one outside your network can hear it.
There are three ways to add an episode:
The Network Podcast is built for the voices that don't get recorded anywhere else — a grandmother's stories about partition, an elder's account of migration, a family's oral history in their own words. These recordings are preserved permanently as part of your network's living archive.
Yes. If your family has been sharing stories, photos, and memories in a WhatsApp group, that history is already a memory archive — it just lives somewhere that will eventually disappear. ECO's WhatsApp Import moves it somewhere permanent.
Export your WhatsApp chat history from the WhatsApp app (Settings → Chats → Export Chat), then upload the file to ECO. Photos, captions, and conversation threads are imported and stored inside your private network — searchable, preserved, and no longer dependent on a platform you don't control.
The import is one-directional and one-time. Your WhatsApp group is not connected or synced to ECO — you're moving a snapshot, not linking accounts.
My Story is your personal memoir inside the network — a structured, growing record of your life told in your own words. It's organized into three sections:
My Story grows over time without requiring you to sit down and write a memoir. Answer one question today, another next week. Over months and years, a comprehensive picture of who you are accumulates — the kind that usually only exists in someone's memory, and disappears when they do.
The Memory Player arranges your network's photos and stories into a continuous playback experience — a living slideshow of your family's history. It's designed for reminiscence: sitting with a loved one and moving through their life, one memory at a time.
The Memory Player is particularly valuable for families navigating memory loss — the consistent, calm playback of familiar faces and stories provides a predictable, comforting experience that can be used at home or in a care setting. Photos can be filtered by person, time period, or theme, so you can tailor the experience to what's most meaningful for the moment.
There is no clicking required during playback — it advances automatically, making it accessible for users who cannot navigate independently.
My Story (found at My Story in your profile navigation) is a dedicated page that brings your personal memoir together in one place. It's different from writing individual posts — it's your life organized as a complete, searchable record.
The page has three tabs:
The My Story page is yours alone — other network members cannot browse it directly. But the answers you choose to share become part of your network profile, and the ECO Story Teller draws on what's here when generating your biography or suggesting relevant quests.
Start by answering one question. Come back next week and answer another. In a year, you'll have something worth keeping.
My Podcast is the management console for your private network podcast. It's where you set up, publish, and organize your network's audio archive — and where you record or upload new episodes.
What you can do here:
The difference between My Podcast (your studio) and the Network Podcast page (where members listen) is the same as the difference between a recording studio and a listening room. Your network members hear published episodes in the feed — you manage everything from here.
Reminisce (found under My Photos in your network) turns your network's photos and posts into a full-screen memory experience. It's not an album you browse — it's a curated playback that you set up with filters and then watch.
Before you press play, you choose what to include:
Once you press Play Memories, the experience advances automatically — no clicking required. Each card shows the photo or content alongside the person it belongs to. It was designed to be used with someone, not alone: sit with an elder, a grandparent, a parent navigating memory loss, and let the network's collected photos do the work of bringing the past forward.
For memory care families: the automatic advance, the familiar faces, and the ability to filter to a single person make Reminisce particularly well-suited to reminiscence therapy at home or in a clinical setting.
They look similar but serve opposite purposes. My Content is for editing. My Data is for reviewing.
My Content is where you go when you want to find and fix something you've posted. It shows all your posts, journeys, milestones, and map pins in one place — filterable by type and sortable by date or location. If you posted a journey entry with the wrong year, or a milestone you want to reword, or a pin you want to remove, this is where you do it. Think of it as your personal edit desk.
My Data is where you go to see the full picture of what ECO holds about you — both what you've entered yourself and what others have contributed about you. This includes your profile, career history, education, passions, Story Teller session content, and anything that feeds into your generated biography. Each item shows its source: whether you entered it yourself or it came from another member's post. You can also mark items to exclude from your biography if you don't want certain facts surfacing in auto-generated bios.
In practice:
Both pages are private — only you can see them.
ECO uses Claude (by Anthropic) as its AI engine, accessed through a secure proxy. The ECO Story Teller powers conversations, quest generation, and bio generation. All interactions happen within your network's context — no data leaves your network for training purposes.
The Story Teller does not store conversation history beyond the current session. Each session starts fresh. Generated content belongs to your network, not to the technology provider.
Network Quests are weekly prompts that give your network something specific to share — a migration memory, a family recipe, a word only your family uses, a childhood photograph, or a question about a living elder. A new quest appears every seven days and stays live for the full week.
Seven quest types rotate through the cycle: heritage, memory, connection, values, migration, milestone, and knowledge. Responses are shared with the network and become part of the permanent record. The response count is visible so members can see how many people have contributed.
Network Owners and Moderators can create custom quests from the admin panel — for example, a quest tied to an upcoming family reunion or cultural holiday.
Storytime is a guided memory capture system built into your Share tab. The ECO Story Teller asks you a personalized question about a significant moment, relationship, or childhood experience — and waits for your answer. It never asks the same question twice.
Stories you share through Storytime become network posts, creating a living narrative archive that accumulates over time. The more you share, the more the Story Teller learns about what you have and haven't covered — so the questions stay fresh and personally relevant. This is one of the primary ways oral histories get preserved before they're lost.
Ask Your Network is a collective knowledge board on your Share tab. Any member can post a question — "When did Grandpa arrive in Fiji?", "What's the family recipe for sooji halwa?", "What's the real story behind the family nickname?" — and leave it open for the network to answer.
Unanswered questions stay on the board, where they prompt engagement every time someone opens the tab. When a member answers, the Q&A is posted to the network feed as a shared moment, building your family's institutional knowledge over time. Questions only you can answer are the most valuable — they disappear when you do.
Interest Matching runs once a month and looks for network members who share similar passions — hobbies, books they love, music they listen to, sports they follow. When the system finds a meaningful match, both members receive a private notification. Neither person knows who the match is until both choose to connect.
If both members opt in, the ECO Story Teller generates a warm, personalised introduction email connecting them around their shared interest. If either member passes, nothing happens and privacy is fully maintained. It is never visible to the broader network.
To participate, navigate to the 💝 Passions tab in your network dashboard and add interests in any of the available categories: hobbies, books, music, sports, food, and travel.
Profile Pulse is a set of rotating enrichment questions that appear on your Share tab. Each question asks you to share something about yourself — your career history, languages you speak, foods that remind you of home, places you've lived, or values you carry. Answers are saved directly to your profile.
The questions rotate through categories so your profile grows gradually without requiring you to sit down and fill out a form. Profile Pulse never repeats a question you've already answered. Every answer you give becomes part of the living record your network sees about you.
The bell icon in your dashboard header shows unread notification count. Tapping it opens a panel showing recent activity — when someone tags you in a post, replies to a question you asked, sends you a direct message, or when an interest match is found.
From your Prefs tab, you can control which events trigger email notifications: new direct messages, tags in posts, and replies to your questions. You can also subscribe to the weekly network digest — a summary of new members, recent stories, and cultural vocabulary added to your network.
Yes. The Messages tab inside Simplified View lets you send and receive direct messages without leaving the view. Tap the tab, then tap + New to start a conversation — type a name to search for a member and tap their name to open the thread.
A red badge on the Messages tab shows how many conversations have unread messages waiting for you. The count updates automatically as you read conversations and as new messages arrive.
All messages sent from Simplified View are the same as messages sent from the full Messages tab — they appear in both places and your full history is preserved.
The red number badge on the Messages icon shows how many of your conversations have at least one unread message. It counts conversations with unread messages, not individual messages — so a conversation with five unread messages adds only 1 to the count.
The badge disappears for a conversation as soon as you open it. The overall count decreases to reflect the remaining unread conversations. If the badge shows zero or no badge, all your conversations are up to date.
Yes. Every member can send direct private messages to any other member in their network. Messages are delivered inside ECO — your email address is never exposed to the recipient, and theirs is never exposed to you. All communication stays within the platform.
To start a conversation: open the Messages tab, tap + New, search for a member by name, and tap their name to open the thread. You can also start a conversation directly from a member's profile page.
Yes. From the Messages tab, tap New Group, enter a name for the group, and add any members from your network. All group members can send and receive messages in the shared thread. Groups are private — only invited members can see them, and non-members have no awareness the group exists.
Group chats are especially useful for coordinating family events, keeping a sibling group in touch, or running a sub-community within a larger network.
Yes. From the Events tab in your network dashboard, you can create family gatherings, cultural celebrations, anniversaries, and any other milestone event. Add a date, description, and optional location, then invite specific network members or the full network. Invited members can RSVP. Events appear in the network feed so everyone stays informed.
ECO does not automatically delete message history. Your conversations are retained in your account for as long as your network is active. You can delete your own messages. If a network enters Directed Dormancy, all messages are preserved alongside everything else — sealed but intact.
ECO includes a lightweight Learning Management System (LMS) built specifically for ethnic studies, cultural heritage programs, and diaspora education. It is embedded directly inside ECO — students and instructors use the same platform where the living family histories and cultural data already exist.
The LMS supports courses, section templates, term-based scheduling, assignment tracking, and student progress reporting. Students read real family narratives and cultural records as part of their coursework — not textbooks alone.
The Org Admin account is the program coordinator. Each class they create is its own ECO network — for example, "ETHN 101 Fall 2026" is one network, "ETHN 201 Fall 2026" is another. The coordinator links all their class networks into a single Program from the LMS Coordinator Portal (/admin-lms.html).
Academic terms (Fall, Spring, Summer) are created once at the program level and shared across all class networks. Students can be enrolled in multiple classes concurrently — their enrollment history and completion records are tracked across the full program, not just one class.
This depends on the student's subscription tier, which counts active (non-closed) networks:
Closed class networks — those where the term has ended — do not count toward this limit. A student who completed ETHN 101 in Fall 2026 can enroll in three new Spring 2027 classes without needing an upgrade.
When a term ends, the program coordinator closes the class network from the LMS Coordinator Portal. Closing a class:
A closed class can be reopened by the coordinator at any time — for example, to continue a course, review submissions, or allow guest access for a follow-on cohort.
The LMS Coordinator Portal has a dedicated Transcripts tab. Search for any student by name and see their full course history across every class in the program — which classes they were enrolled in, which term, assignment completion rate, and whether the class is still active or closed.
The Roster tab shows a cross-class view of all enrolled students for the entire program or filtered by term — including how many active class networks each student is in, and whether any student is approaching the Conductor tier limit of 3 concurrent classes.
Yes. Closed class networks appear in the student's Courses tab under Completed Classes. The student can view everything — assignments, posts, stories shared during the class, cultural vocabulary contributions, and their completion record — in full read-only mode. Nothing disappears when a class closes.
The LMS Coordinator Portal and program management tools require an Org Admin account. Instructors within a class network use the standard coordinator tools available to Network Owners and Moderators. Students access the Courses tab available on Conductor and Conductor Pro tiers. Conductor Pro is recommended for students enrolled in more than 3 classes concurrently.
A Future Arc is an encrypted message — text, voice, or video — that you create inside your private family network and set to be delivered to a named recipient at a specific future milestone: an 18th birthday, a wedding, a graduation, the birth of a child, or upon your passing.
Unlike email-based alternatives, Future Arcs are never delivered to an external inbox. Your recipient must log into the network to receive the message — so it arrives alongside the full context of your lineage, not in isolation.
Future Arcs are designed for cultural and emotional content — the things only you can pass on:
Future Arcs are not a secure credential vault. The following are strictly prohibited:
Future Arcs carry meaning, not mandates. They are not a will, trust, codicil, or legally binding document of any kind. Your legal advisor handles that — ECO carries the cultural context alongside it.
All Future Arc content is encrypted in your browser using AES-256-GCM before it reaches our servers. We cannot read the content of your messages. The message remains sealed — invisible to everyone, including administrators — until a Keeper or Moderator verifies that the designated milestone has arrived and unlocks delivery.
Your network enters Directed Dormancy — a state of intentional preservation. All your Future Arcs remain sealed, encrypted, and intact alongside all other network content. Nothing is deleted. The archive waits until a verified family member reactivates the network. There is no time limit on Directed Dormancy.
See Terms of Service Section 5 for full details.
Yes. Future Arcs are designed to complement estate planning — not replace it. Legal documents handle the "what." Future Arcs carry the "why" — family history, cultural vocabulary, and the emotional context that helps heirs understand and honor the decisions behind an estate.
Future Arcs are non-legal, non-binding, and contain no PII or financial identifiers. They work alongside a will, not in place of one.
The ECO Files is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation founded by Isaiah Bakshi. Its mission is to bring EternalCurrent.Online to communities that cannot afford a subscription — senior living programs, tribal historic preservation offices, immigrant services organizations, veteran family programs, and others holding stories worth preserving but facing financial barriers.
Where EternalCurrent.Online is a private subscription platform, The ECO Files is the grant-funded program that extends access to it. The foundation receives grants from federal, state, and private funders, and covers the cost of ECO networks entirely for qualifying communities.
Fiscal sponsor: Non Profit Accounting Service (EIN 88-3445197).
Possibly. The ECO Files funds ECO access for organizations that serve communities who cannot afford a subscription. If your organization works with seniors, Indigenous communities, immigrants, veterans, or other underserved populations and you believe ECO would serve them, reach out to discuss eligibility.
Grant-funded networks are fully functional ECO networks — the same features, the same privacy protections, the same permanent storage. The difference is that The ECO Files covers the subscription cost rather than the organization or its members.
Contact us: Admin@eternalcurrent.online with subject line "The ECO Files — Grant Inquiry."
Yes. The ECO Files is a 501(c)(3) organization fiscally sponsored by Non Profit Accounting Service (EIN 88-3445197). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Contact us for donation instructions and acknowledgment letters.
ECO Reflections is The ECO Files' podcast — hosted by Isaiah Bakshi. Each episode features diaspora storytellers, cultural scholars, and community keepers talking about what families carry, what communities preserve, and what gets passed forward. Episodes are free and publicly available.
ECO Reflections is separate from Network Podcasts — which are private, per-network audio archives available to every ECO network. ECO Reflections is a public-facing show produced by The ECO Files foundation.
The ECO Files welcomes partnerships with community foundations, federal and state agencies, corporate social responsibility programs, and individual donors who want to fund cultural heritage preservation for underserved communities.
Current programs include grant-funded partnerships with diaspora communities in Fiji, senior living facilities, and tribal historic preservation offices across the United States.
To discuss a partnership, grant, or donation: Admin@eternalcurrent.online