I'm starting a tradition of #FossFriday where I shout out a favorite free/open source project. (Yes, I'm aware it's Saturday, so it should be #OssSaturday but damn it I want to do Fridays.)
Oh jeez, I completely forgot last week. Gonna set a reminder.
This week's #FossFriday#FlossFriday shout out is a three-for - three open source projects for knowledge management that I've tried out over the last year or so: MediaWiki, Outline, and Logseq.
#MediaWiki - the software that runs Wikipedia. A huge community ecosystem offers lots of help and customization. Great for collaboration & versioning, though both UX and devX have significant learning curves: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
Outline is a pretty and easy to use collaborative note-taking app that I've tried out recently: https://www.getoutline.com/ (thanks @boris for the help trying it out!). Sort of similar to Appflowy, in that it's an open source alternative to Notion, but I tried Outline because it seems to have better support for collaboration. Outline would be the perfect app for me if it had 'second brain' features. What are second brain features?
Time for the third part of this shout-out...Logseq.
Loqseq is an open source knowledge base, like MediaWiki & Outline, but unlike MediaWiki which prioritizes collaboration and Outline which prioritizes UX, Logseq prioritizes the knowledge base.
It's a block outliner, which means you can cross-reference knowledge at a very fine-grained level. It has bidirectional links allowing you to see what references a given block in context. Block outliners have been an absolute game changer for me, highly recommended
Which of these tools you use depends on what matters most to you - collaboration at scale, a good UX, or advanced knowledge management tools. The holy grail for me is something that combines all three, but alas I haven't found it yet. Let me know if you have, and happy #FossFriday!
I used to develop with #Django regularly but drifted away from web dev. This week I had reason to build a website and Django has made it so easy! Like riding a bike (except less scary - no city traffic 😂😭)
Today's project is #Zulip. Zulip is an open source chat client similar to Slack or Discord but IMHO better: it has a threading-first design philosophy that works great for following many conversations at once. They also offer free access to the paid cloud plan for small non-profits, researchers, and open source projects. I don't use Zulip a ton bc of network effects. People don't want to use yet another chat tool. But it's such a great tool!!
Licensing of #Outline is pretty unfortunate. Interpreting the text of "Additional Use Grant" as: you cannot use software with third parties (other than your employees and contractors), hence teams formed with external contributors that use Outline together with you are risking a legal action from General Outline, Inc.
@shauna@cassidy Unfortunately, as is often the case, some useful features are not available in the community version (such as team calendar management). And recurring events are identified as available in a caldav-based configuration (I hope it will be fixed soon) :(
Otherwise, excellent software that I've been using for months.
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