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Agorakit, an open source groupware for citizens
- jiri 9y agoThis is useful description from their github readme: "In other words : an organized Facebook for the paranoid inside any of us." I guess for most people who use facebook probably not too interesting project.
- philippejj 9y agoThis sentence was a bit a joke. But not completely, because in activists circles some people will definitely not want to be on facebook, so giving them a more neutral tool you manage and host might help gather more users. The contrary is true too, since almost everyone is on facebook. I also wanted to put "Even your grandma can use it". I know for sure that my grandma would not have had a facebook account :-)
- cabalamat 9y agoFrom the website: > Each groups has a file repository where you can store nice pictures of cute kittens, meetings summaries, links to shared documents, etc... Wouldn't this be better managed as a wiki?
- johnchristopher 9y agoNo. Check it out, the workflow here has much less friction than a wiki.
- cabalamat 9y agoSo how do you make one of your shared documents point to another of your shared documents? How do you have people collaboratively create and edit shared documents? How do you view the history or one of your shared documents? I do not see what advantage there is in having a list of files over a wiki (since wikis can of course contain files of files, among other things).
- johnchristopher 9y ago> So how do you make one of your shared documents point to another of your shared documents? How do you have people collaboratively create and edit shared documents? How do you view the history or one of your shared documents? Why would that be a priority for small group of people getting together to manage a local exchange service, a collective of local food buyers, etc. ? Sharing file is already cumbersome enough, if you add the whole wiki fest you are scaring people away when they just want to 'put that file online so everyone can have it'. If they want collaborative features point them to google docs or something alike. Wiki aren't user friendly. Let's say I am in a group, my local townhall puts out a PDF of the next roadwork, bus line modificatins, whatever... it's way easier to just `post it` with the submit button that going through the whole html/wiki syntax to transcribe the doc. I played a bit with interface. It's clear, concise and to the point. It maps to what people know of the web and files. > I do not see what advantage there is in having a list of files over a wiki (since wikis can of course contain files of files, among other things). That's because that's not the use case the site seems to try to handle.
- philippejj 9y agoExactly. Although adding some kind of wiki feature might be an interesting idea. I'd like at least to add shortcodes/mentions everywhere so users can insert links to users, discussions, events and files (in every text field). It's a hard to find a balance between ease of use and features. Grandma vs geek :-)
- jameskegel 9y agoWhat is a groupware? Is there a reason this isn't called what it appears to be, an independent social network? edit: unfortunately, after browsing OP's profile, I realize I may not get an answer to this.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- vinceguidry 9y agoGroupware is a somewhat well-defined category of software that's somewhere in-between a social network and a wiki. You typically see it deployed to support enterprise activities. Here's a wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software
- philippejj 9y ago(main agorakit dev speaking) I decided to use the term groupware because it reflects better -imho- what agorakit is. Problem is, it seems no one knows what a groupware is :-) There are almost no "social" features in agorakit, so I'm not sure it qualifies as social network. It's more "get work done" oriented and less "let's rant about something on the internet" like social networks usually generate (which is useful as well). So a groupware as I see it, is a tool that allows group of people to work together on stuff (discussions, agenda, documents etc...) and also meet in real life. I hope that clarifies
- antman 9y agoWould be nice if it had a docker setup
- jefurii 9y agoOr a .deb or .rpm.
- swsieber 9y agoOr was ported to Sandstorm.io
- philippejj 9y agoSandstorms looks very interesting! I will check it out. In the meantime, for devs, there is already a working vagrant config file. After all it's just php/mysql
- evolve2k 9y agoI'm sure they'd be happy with a volunteer to help with adding Docker ;)
- antman 9y agoWould be nice if it had a docker setup
- mxuribe 9y agoI like wikis, but i feel this is a step up from them; mostly because this includes dashboard, communications, forum-type, and file storage-and-sharing features. We NEED more of these types of platform in the open source world. I might install this and play around. Kudos to the developers!
- philippejj 9y agoThank you for the nice feedback! The goal was to exactly to reduce complexity for non technical users so I'm happy to see that we succeeded at least partially. I'm the main developer btw :-) I'd like at some point to add wiki functionality, but I'd like to avoid the "do it all a little, fail a little at everything" problem. Since users can add links and files, it is always possible to add a link to an etherpad or google doc (yes...) If you need help to set it up or anything, github issue queue / mail are your friend
- johnchristopher 9y agoOh hey ! > Agorakit has been used successfully since 2015 for several citizen initiatives such as Tout autre chose, Hart boven hard and other intitiatives. It's from belgium \o/.
- philippejj 9y agoBelgian help (and from anywhere else) highly appreciated :-)
- acomjean 9y agoAs someone who volunteers with an organization, this looks really fantastic. Our current stack is google docs/ with some dropbox, google calendar, email by our website host, constant contact and postmark. Its a little bit of a mess. having everything together is great.