Tool Recommendations - HeleneFi/The_Project GitHub Wiki

General platforms

  • Basecamp
  • Podio
  • Elgg

Knowledge harvesting

'Crowdicity is an Enterprise SaaS based Ideas Management platform that enables systematic capture, sharing and prioritisation of potentially high value business ideas. It can be open or private access and can be easily configured and customised to meet any organisation’s needs'.

Workflow, tasks

  • Workflowy quite cool. Blank page to organise tasks and thoughts in trees. Braking down in chunks
  • Planbox Agile project management. Intuitive UI (drag & drop, story board), regrouping of projects

Kanban

Conversations

  • Branch, grab stuff from the web, talk about it, publish
  • [CommentPress] (http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/), an open source theme and plugin for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with Commentpress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.
  • [Digress.it] (http://digress.it/), a WordPress plugin that offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. Digress.it is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length.
  • [Anthologize] (http://anthologize.org/), a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly.
  • [GroupCall] (http://groupcall.me/), allows you to connect to many people at once no matter what the group is. It's FREE! All you need is their email address or mobile number to send them a GroupCall Invite. Talk as long as you like its free for local or international.

Learning

  • Curatr, learners actively creating and curating content, using content from all over the web.
  • Knoodle, Social Learning Platform for companies
  • Saba, learning management systems

Mechanisms

Visualizations

Digital Publishing

  • [Open Monograph Press] (http://pkp.sfu.ca/omp), an open source software platform for managing the editorial workflow required to see monographs, edited volumes and, scholarly editions through internal and external review, editing, cataloguing, production, and publication. OMP will operate, as well, as a press website with catalog, distribution, and sales capacities.
  • [HP MagCloud] (http://magcloud.com/), a web service that empowers users to self-publish and distribute content—for business or personal use—as a professional-quality print publication or digitally for mobile and online viewing on today's most popular devices.

Security, Privacy, Anonymity

  • [Tor] (https://www.torproject.org/, free software and an open network that helps you defend against a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis
  • [Tails: The Amnesic Incognito Live System] (https://tails.boum.org/index.en.html), a live system that aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leave no trace using unless you ask it explicitly. It is a complete operating-system designed to be used from a DVD or a USB stick independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux.

##Various Tools: (evaluations and comparisons to come)

###Mind-Mapping, Visualization, Visual Thinking, Pasteboard:

###Note-Taking, Personal Information Management:

###Tools for Research:

###Content Discovery Engines:

###Todo apps, GTD, Productivity:

Task Management, Project management, etc.

Alex's reviews, shared in various conversations.

(Note by @AG: I'm editing this and slowly phasing it out, choosing to list tools instead, after which point I will find a way to add my evaluations & comparisons, so everything below this point is going the way of obsolescence)

  • You can host a wiki for free on wikihost.org, I think for most purposes a wiki is all you need, if people use it in an optimal way..

All of these are free, although maybe Pivotal Tracker and Planbox cost something if there are 200 people..

Personally, an option such as Nuxeo should be considered carefully.. the learning curve might be much higher, it might not be as user-friendly as many other options.. but the power you will get from it is not even close to being comparable.




  • My conclusion is Rizzoma isn't worth the trouble. I've been using Rizzoma and I can't even find anything. We've had an ongoing conversation and I can't find something that I read 2 hours ago. You may as well use Google Docs if you want to edit a document together. Rizzoma made big promises, so I was convinced to try it out, but it hasn't delivered on any of its promises.
  • You may as well use HackPad or something. The virtue of HackPad is it is as simple as can get, completely stripped down. Just communication, none of the useless eye candy.

(*Helene mentioned 'trip advisor' on FB, 28Sep12). - On the subject of the 'trip advisor' type service, in an earlier thread Harlan mentioned a service called Terms of Service; Didn't Read which compares the ToS of different services.

http://tos-dr.info/index.html

What I liked about it at first glance was that it used a transparent and peer-reviewed process, has different classes of ratings, from Class A to Class E - the ToS are broken up into small points, discussed, compared, and given scores with badges, and after enough data is collected, they are put into the different classes.

This stood out to me as a really great way of doing things, and it's what I would do with collaboration platforms: Break them down into features that can be discussed, rated, classified, and also each service/platform could have the list of features it has, with ratings etc., and the features it doesn't have and maybe should have.. that way there could be an ongoing updated list of "ideal features" that maybe every paltform of Type X or Type Y "should" have..

So you rate and classify services for the purpose of highlighting the best features and functionality that the "ideal" services should have, something like that. Another service that came up recently in another thread (sorry I forget who originally posted the link) is Top Ten USA: The point is to find products that are energy efficient, again by evaluating them in terms of their "greenness" I guess you could say.. Again the same thing can apply to collaboration platforms, you can list them and grade/evaluate them but not just on their features.. you can evaluate them on how much time they help you save, you know? In terms of ROI or whatnot, i.e. value-added.

http://www.toptenusa.org/

The point is not to make an endless list of products and review them. There has to be some bigger agenda to help people get shift done as we say. So you could have a simple recommender system where people can vote for the best platforms, but also add annotations or comments.. not just arbitrary comments, but specifically annotations of the "best practises" kind. For example, I could recommend Rizzoma but add where I think it fits best, what types of projects I had success with using this app, and so on.

There could be a section devoted especially for features, just features nothing else. In general, how does a group of peers rate the feature of being able to add tags, to documents, to websites, to whatever you want. What is the rating for the Tagging feature/functionality? You know, like in and for itself, Tagging in general, what's it good for, what types of best practises are there, use cases, and so on. That can then feed back into the other section of product reviews..

***Also we could classify programming languages in the same way. One of the features of collaboration software/suites would be the languages, environments, frameworks that they use or were written in. We could then keep a list of programming languages and the kinds of projects they are best used for, with resources for the different languages, documentation, and use cases/best practises. Resources already abound across the web for this sort of stuff. What I'm thinking is for people like me who are in the beginning phase of learning to program. Over the last year I've had to scour the web hour upon hour trying to find what I need to learn to do what I want to do. I want to develop software and let's just say the learning curve is pretty steep. Before learning to code, though, I think it would be useful for someone to know the absolute minimum they need to learn. You might not even learn to code at all for certain projects. It depends on the project. So in the same vein as the 'trip advisor' for collaboration suites, you could have a 'programming advisor' knowledge base that categorizes languages, environments, frameworks, etc. and shows as simply as possible what you need to learn to do whatever it is you want to do.

Imagine, you have some menus or whatnot, you select the kind of thing you want to do and it queries the knowledge base and filters down to a list of best frameworks, best practises, use cases, and links to resources. All in one simple read-out, almost like a table. There could be a section with highlights like "Did you know???" where you could have someone write up a "Did you know that Twitter was built with x y z?", "Did you know that Google uses x y z?" and so on.

Like I said, one of the features of collaboration software, or any software, is what tools were used to build it. This is important for open source collaboration suites, obviously. You need to know what the dependencies are. For free software that is proprietary, it helps to know how it was built, to me anyway it's useful information. You start to see trends. There are languages/frameworks for example that are great for rapid prototyping. If you are in the algorithm design business, you might write up your first draft in something like Octave or MATLAB, just the skeleton if you want. You'll have a working algorithm you can run tests on much quicker than you would if you did it in, I don't know what language, Python or something. After you've got the skeleton down, you can rewrite it in whatever language/environment/framework you want, you have all the time in the world after that.

The point is making it faster to get to what you could call the 'Omega Point' for knowledge and learning. You don't want to spend 12 days looking at collaboration tools, or curation apps, or what have you. You want to query a knowledge base and get the information right away. If you can connect directly to people using the tools or who have used them, that's already a big plus.

Ping me if you want to talk architecture. Disclosure: I am an interested party.

(Another website with a similar kind of 'trip advisor' look & feel: [http://www.tapor.ca/] (http://www.tapor.ca/))


Thanks Alex. This is very useful. I've added the talk of Max Ogden on How collaboration works in a large open source community. He points to Github and a few sites that help find things more easily. I didn't understand everything... Probably the main issue to deal with as underlined by the Terms of Service guys is that the modules features change regularly...