What it adds
Fairness you would have to be superhuman to manage.
- It chooses receivers so that everyone touches equally, in an order nobody can predict. Names are dealt from a bag rather than picked at random, so an unlucky run is impossible rather than merely unlikely.
- It rotates the caller too. Left to social negotiation, the confident child holds the phone and the quiet one never says a name out loud — which rebuilds picked-last through the back door of the very role meant to spread the practice around.
- It speaks the name to one person. In Relay — the format most circles use — the app tells whoever is calling, privately; they say it to the circle. One phone serves everyone, and the caller hears the approved pronunciation immediately before producing it.
- Or it calls the circle itself. In Call, nobody sits out to do it, so three can play. It never calls anyone in their own recorded voice: a call is somebody else saying your name, and your own name in your own voice is not an address. So each person's name is recorded by whoever joined before them, and that is what the app calls them with.
It never keeps a score for a person. No statistics, no rankings, no per-player anything — the level belongs to the circle, and handicaps go at the start line rather than into the stream. Those are properties of the sport, and the app is built so that it could not violate them even if a later version wanted to.
How a name gets recorded
Everyone adds themselves as the phone goes round. There are three ways to produce a pronunciation, and one rule over all three.
- Say it yourself.
- Have someone else say it — a friend, a parent, whoever says it right.
- Spell out how it sounds — SOH-kha rather than Sokha — and the phone reads it.
The rule: the owner hears it and nods. That is what makes a borrowed or a synthesised voice legitimate rather than the app anglicising a name on its owner's behalf, which is the exact thing this sport exists to stop.
Nothing in the app marks which of the three someone used — no badge, no list, no ordering, and nothing a later screen can read. While sey is in alpha the app does report which route was taken, so that the accommodations can be improved before the first classroom uses them. It is reported against a random code, not a name, unless a teacher has switched name sharing on for that circle; and it can be switched off entirely. Both controls are in Your circles.
What leaves the phone
No voices. No photographs. No accounts.
There are no accounts and no sign-up. Voice recordings and photographs are written to the phone that recorded them and are never uploaded — there is nowhere for them to go, and no version of this app has ever had a way to send one.
While sey is in alpha, the app reports how it is used: which formats and levels a circle picks, how joining goes, how often a recording fails, and how a round runs. Each is reported against a random code for a player — p_4f2a91c8 and nothing else — so we can see that the same person recorded twice without knowing who they are.
Names are not included unless you say so. That switch is per circle, off until a teacher turns it on, and there is a second switch that turns the whole thing off. Both are in Your circles, and both work with no signal like everything else here.
Deleting a circle in the app deletes its voices and photos with it. Deleting the app deletes them all. What was already reported is not on the phone and is not removed by either.
This is also why it works with no signal. Once the page has loaded once, the whole thing runs offline — school wifi, a park, one bar in a field.
In a classroom
The only device is the teacher's. Children do not have accounts, do not install anything, and do not appear in any record — the phone holds a list of first names, and a count of how far round the circle has got so the next session carries on instead of calling the same names again. That is the whole data footprint. Nothing is kept about a person: no scores, no times, no attendance, no dates.
Nothing needs to be provisioned, approved or connected. One teacher, one class, one sack.
Free, and not free
The app is free to use. sey — the sport, the rules, the name — is CC0 and belongs to everyone, including anyone who wants to build a better app for it.
B-Sey℠ is this implementation of it. That name is not free. The sport is. More on that.