Hacker News Reader

Comment by virdev | Hacker News Reader

Hey everyone! I'm the PM working with the Docs team. Thanks a lot for the kind words, we're as excited as you to be working on such a cool project. We didn't expect to get posted so soon on HN. We still have a lot to do in terms documentation and reusability. But we'll be working a lot on that next week. We'll keep you posted here. Again thank you everyone!

View on HN

Not a Docs question, but I recently came across Grist and I see that Grist is actually listed as a project under la Suite Numerique. On the other hand, Grist Labs (getgrist.com/about) claim to be the developers, are based in the US (NYC), and I couldn't see any mention any EU collaboration on their website. What is the connection here? How does it differ from the governance and funding model of Docs?

I love that you guys are building a suite of next-gen tools rather than just recreating LibreOffice. Seems really smart to me!

AFAIK, there are lots of contributions from developers in the French government to the Grist open source repository. We also deploy it, we have instances running in various government agencies.

For Docs, we bootstrapped the repository ourselves on top of Django, Next.js, BlockNote.js, Y.js and many others. We welcome contributions!

Yes, there are lots of PR listed here : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core/pulls?q=is%3Apr+labe...

> The French government agency ANCT Données et Territoires has also made significant contributions to the codebase.

From the Grist-core readme : https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

Do you have plans to add structure to the document collection? E.g. group documents into projects, put documents into order and hierarchy (docs holding chapters, sections). I would really like a system that lets you have projects with a document per chapter or section and has a chapter/section outline on the left panel of the document editor.

Comments and custom styles would also be great.

Hey! Yes we do, we plan to release sub-docs before the end of the month. That will allow you to create trees of docs (with as many child / grand-child as you want) all inheriting the user rights of the parent.

One of the things that I rely on with a collection of docs is a usable "full text search". The demo atleast only searches on the titles which only goes so far. It would be very useful for this project to have a proper search solution.

Hi, thanks for the project and contributing a nice European alternative to Outline. I had a few questions relating to Docs as it seems a nice alternative I want to integrate in our company.

- Is it a project funded directly by the Governments or by the NGI funds?

- Is there an extensibility via plugins or other in the future thought for integrations ?

- Is the ProConnect the only way or can one use a self-hosted OIDC or another IdP to login?

Hey! Thanks for your interest. It's directly funded by the governments. BlockNotejs (the library doing the editor bit) received some funding from NGI. And now France and Germany are sponsoring the project (and also Yjs) No plugins plans for now. You can use your self-hosted OIDC, when you run the project locally you'll see a Keycloak as first screen. Let us know if you get it running docs@numerique.gouv.fr would love to hear your feedback as a reuser.

Great work by the Suite Numerique team!

Are you guys looking at adding localization support for languages beyond French as well (eg. English, German)?

It would be a great alternative to multiple disjointed OSS offerings like Mattermost or Appflowy.

Also, I found the DIPT to be fairly intruiging. How much inspiration did the org get from Gov.uk, and are there some resources, papers, or books you could point to about the DIPT initiative?

Indeed, Docs is already available both in English and German :)

AFAIK we took a lot of inspiration from Gov.uk and 18F/USDS (RIP), at least for digital services. You can look at https://beta.gouv.fr/

Hey! Thanks! Yes we do plan to support more languages, we want the project to be usable by the many. Translations are here : https://crowdin.com/project/lasuite-docs (just added turkish tonight ;)

Have you considered integrating Zulip into your chat solution? It's leagues ahead of any other product in the space.

Did you consider building on top of some existing open source solutions like Docmost, Appflowy, or AFFiNE?

Hey, we dedided to take an approach where we build on top of libraries like BlockNotejs, Yjs, HocusPocus but build our own wrapper around it in Django and Next.js. This allows to iterate really fast and to catter our own need (we are large organizations we don't have the same as startups or SMEs). Contributing and sponsoring allows us to make improvement that help the whole collaborative software category.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com