About Cairn
A 34-person cooperative, an AGPL licence, and a foundation that holds the trademark so none of it can be quietly sold.
Built by the people who had to run the last one
“An institution should be able to leave a platform in an afternoon. If it cannot, the platform is not a supplier — it is a landlord.”
Cairn started in 2014 as a shared project between three polytechnics that had all been through the same bad procurement. Between them they had four incompatible gradebooks, a quiz bank nobody could export, and a renewal quote that had tripled in five years.
We are a cooperative of 34 people. Every one of us has either administered an LMS, taught on one, or been marked by one, and most of us have done all three. There are no outside investors, and there is no growth target that requires us to make leaving harder.
The code is AGPL-3.0. The trademark sits with a foundation whose trustees are appointed by member institutions, not by us. That combination is the only real guarantee we can offer: even if this cooperative failed tomorrow, what you are running would still be yours.
Three commitments we have written down
They are in the member agreement, not just on this page.
Export is a feature, not a favour
A full data extract is one command, available to every customer at any time without notice or negotiation. We test the restore path into Moodle and Canvas quarterly, because an export you cannot import is a bluff.
One codebase, no enterprise fork
There is no paid tier that unlocks features. What you pay for is operation and response time. Anyone can read the whole system, including the parts we are not proud of.
Say which parts are unfinished
The standards page marks things partial when they are partial, and the accessibility report is published with its open defects listed rather than summarised. We would rather lose a tender than win one on a vague claim.
Who to talk to
Four people, four different conversations. Writing to the right one saves a fortnight.
Solveig Brandt
Procurement, tenders, consortium agreements and anything with a deadline attached.
solveig@cairnlms.orgFemi Adeyemi
Sample imports, what will and will not survive, realistic timelines for your specific mess.
migrations@cairnlms.orgRhiannon Pryce
Conformance reports, VPATs, procurement questionnaires, and the open defect list.
accessibility@cairnlms.orgJonas Iversen
Penetration test reports, hosting regions, data processing agreements, incident history.
security@cairnlms.orgRead the member agreement before you talk to us
It is four pages, it is in plain language, and it contains the exit clause we would rather you read early than late.
See pricing and terms