
Agorakit, an open source groupware for citizens - philippejj
http://www.agorakit.org
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mxuribe
I 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!

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philippejj
Thank 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

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cabalamat
From 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?

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johnchristopher
No. Check it out, the workflow here has much less friction than a wiki.

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cabalamat
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?

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).

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johnchristopher
> 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.

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philippejj
Exactly. 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 :-)

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jiri
This 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.

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philippejj
This 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 :-)

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acomjean
As 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.

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jameskegel
What 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.

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vinceguidry
Groupware 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)

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johnchristopher
Oh 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/.

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philippejj
Belgian help (and from anywhere else) highly appreciated :-)

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antman
Would be nice if it had a docker setup

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jefurii
Or a .deb or .rpm.

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swsieber
Or was ported to Sandstorm.io

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philippejj
Sandstorms 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

