Autonomic launch docs.coop - Co-operativley hosted open source document editing

[kawaiipunk]

Hey folks, I’m just going to post our press release here:

Autonomic co-operative are thrilled to announce our new project:

Docs.coop

Docs.coop – Co-operatively hosted open source document editing

Building on the great work of Suite Numerique, we are offering an opportunity to be part of a new collaborative Docs platform as a service, that provides an ethical alternative to Google Docs, Office 365, Notion etc.

Docs is the result of a joint effort lead by the French (DINUM) and German (ZenDiS) governments which represents a paradigm shift in the way open source software is funded.

It’s early days and the project is still in beta but we have published an early version of a @coopcloud recipes (coop-cloud/lasuite-docs: A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. - lasuite-docs - Co-op Cloud Code) that makes it easier to deploy Docs for smaller organisations (the La Suite deployment has apparently approx 15,000 users).

We are offering managed Docs instances with full support provided by us. Hosted in the EU by a worker owned tech co-operative. Docs supports oauth for full integration in your existing infrastructure.

No bosses, no CEOs and we pay all our taxes.

There are some missing features as the upstream project is still in beta, however we feel with the sustainable funding model the project has, it’s only going to get better and better.

The main features that are coming soon that you need to know about are:

• No document import (you’d have to copy and paste)
• No sub-folders (it’s one big list of documents)

Here is their road-map: Docs - La Suite · GitHub

Here is our TODO list: https://git.coopcloud.tech/coop-cloud/

This is a fully open source and welcoming community.

If you are interested in testing a docs.coop instance, please get in touch: boop @ autonomic . zone

We can’t offer the same loss leader mega scale prices as the U.S. tech mega corps but we do offer full control and privacy over your tech services and a thriving co-operative and public sector partnership that is tackling one of the most pressing missing tools in the open source ecosystem.

Here’s a screenshot of the interface for those who want a quick peak:

[janbaykara]

This is great. Could you say more about your approach to security and the security measures implemented by this tool? Particularly with respect to political activists and groups looking for a reliable collaborative document editing platform.

[kawaiipunk]

Hi @janbaykara thanks for you questions.

We can host Docs on a variety of providers (including baremetal servers) to meet different security needs.

It’s a new software project that hasn’t been security audited as far as we know. However it is being used by the French, German and Dutch public sector so we can assume care and attention has been and will continue to paid to the code.

The app itself has thoughtful defaults for access controls. You can invite individuals to edit a document or use a share link for logged in users or a secure public link. Here’s a screenshot:

We haven’t tried this yet but it should be able to set up an instance of Docs using Single Sign On that doesn’t require emails as the identifier to add a layer of pseudo-anonymity. We’ve done this for other platforms such as Nextcloud.

Let us know if any more questions here or via email.

[gloria_d]

This looks really great. I was going to ask a similar question to Jan. I’ve used Cryptpad for activist stuff but it can be very clunky and un-intuitive so I’m looking for something better. Also looking for alternative to GDocs for work.

[kawaiipunk]

Cryptpad has end to end encryption (this is probably why it is so clunky, it’s a really hard technical challenge to achieve). Docs doesn’t have that on it’s roadmap, so it has a massive headstart in usability.

In Autonomic, we have a whole history of trying all the open source collaborative document editing apps and we’ve not found one that matches up to Google Docs. We’re hoping this will be it! Or at least not a constant frustration to use. It’s very much the missing piece of the puzzle.

[mhall42]

This looks really exciting!

[kawaiipunk]

Hi folks, we have received feedback about the pricing for our docs.coop instance hosting.

We have decided to drop the price to 30 GBP per month for a small Docs instance.

This comes with an Single Sign On oauth server (such as Keycloak or Authentik).

We think this represents excellent value and will hopefully be enough to support us making this exciting open source Google docs competitor available for the people.

We can offer additional paid support on top of this to integrate further into your existing infrastructure.

Unlock collaborative document editing without the oligarchs.

[da5nsy]

Do you folks plan to host a larger general purpose instance also (that people could pay for individual accounts on)?