About – frogbook

In May 2026, Hampshire College will close its doors. It is a place that has changed tens of thousands of lives that dared to imagine education differently, and soon it will be gone. The campus will go quiet. The email addresses will stop working. If nothing is done, the institutional memory will scatter to the wind.

Yet even as the institution ends, the community Hampshire built need not disappear with it. The stories, the photographs, the Div III projects, the commencement posters, the zines, the late-night debates, the campus traditions; all of it is still alive and still worth preserving. Right now, it exists in fragments: a Facebook group here, a WhatsApp community there, an Instagram account run by an unknown alum, a hard drive no one has opened in years. We invite you to help us gather and preserve these fragments by joining the Frogbook effort and sharing your memories, materials, and ideas.

To address this fragmentation, Frogbook is not competing with Facebook, Instagram, or similar platforms. It is building something Facebook structurally cannot be: a permanent, community-owned, ad-free home for Hampshire’s history — a place where the community controls what remains, what is seen, and who can access it.

In this way, Frogbook offers a digital third space for Hampshire people. It does not aim to replace social media or to ask anyone to abandon the platforms they already use. Instead, it provides a single, shared room where the whole Hampshire community across every generation, every digital habit, every corner of the world, can exist together.

Frogbook’s origins are deeply rooted in the Hampshire community. A group of Hampshire alums had been researching and planning an independent Hampshire Online Image Archive — a collaborative photo and media repository for the community. Their work, documented through shared notes and WhatsApp discussions, covered platform options, feature requirements, community management, and content policy in careful detail.

Recognizing their shared purpose, that group’s research and Frogbook’s infrastructure work were solving the same problem from different angles. This project now brings them together as a single, unified effort. Their platform evaluation, archive expertise, and feature thinking are now foundational to what Frogbook is. Frogbook provides the community infrastructure, technical foundation, and operational framework that their archive vision needs to move from planning to reality.

The Long-Term Archive Vision: The Div III Library
The Div III was the most Hampshire thing about Hampshire. Every student who completed one spent at least a whole year (if not more) on a project entirely of their own design — no grade, no rubric, no template. Thousands of those projects exist only on hard drives, in filing cabinets, or in memory. Building a virtual Div III Library would be the most meaningful archive Frogbook could create — a testament to what independent learning looks like when it is taken seriously.