Why I don't want to invite others to closed apps

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Continuing the discussion from How to best run a game online?:

That is correct. And I do use them, I just don’t want to promote them, such as by inviting others to play a game with me on them.

I wrote about how I am processing my email recently:

Now, on the other hand, this is horrible, because Trello is a closed
service that can’t be trusted. And I don’t, because I don’t use it for
anything that if it went away tomorrow, or leaked all my infos, I would
be in trouble. It is a stopgap solution until I’ve setup until something
better comes along.

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I know this is an exceedingly old thread – 327 days old! – but I saw the title and popped (back) in here because I had been thinking of asking y’all what “knowledge management” tools you’d used with all my thoughts about the 7439827498273987525 ones I’m trying for work. But then I realized all of them are closed apps. Of course.

I had been using Hackpad at work a long time ago, which was and remains open source, though we were using their served and maintained instance of it. It got bought by Dropbox and is now Paper, which is one of our top contenders for several reasons (it’s pretty, you can create new documents inline by typing like a wiki, we already have 2-factor auth).

Speaking of Trello, have you used Wekan? It’s one of the sample apps on Sandstorm’s home page, alongside Rocket.Chat (the open source Slack).

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No worries about adding to older conversations: we specifically do not close threads, because older conversations are still valid, and we have tools to mitigate the issues folks have with the practice of adding more after a long time (they can unsubscribe if they are no longer interested). That is actually relevant to your knowledge management statement, because I think Discourse is a prime candidate for a knowledge base and communications platform.

I would go into it here, but I’ve had a post planned for months, and am about to publish it because I am dog-fooding Discourse on a project. I will link to it here when I post it!

Since you are researching this, features that make Discourse good for knowledge management:

  • Wiki pages
  • Categories and groups for fine-tuning permissions
  • Mailing list functionality that allows for ambient social documentation
  • Terrific thread tools to keep the conversation on track (this very thread started as another, and I forked it which left a reference in the original)
  • Easy to maintain, scales super well, even has a ticketing plugin for marking threads as solved

I started using Trello again on someone else’s project. It is meh. I obviously get very excited about kanban, but I use it to replace what I used to do with index cards, and haven’t worked with others in a way that makes the tool really shine.

And yeah, I actually run a Wekan instance, but it is currently broken. I met with the dev at a Sandstorm meetup. But I broke the security cert in the underlying Dokku server, and apparently I don’t use it enough to fix that… I do recall that development had stalled for some time (well, stable releases, which is what I have the energy to track), and the mobile web experience was fairly broken. Meh.