Awesome Deployed Tools

A curated list of digital tools we use, ranging from project management, to artificial intelligence, to intelligence & knowledge gathering and content management. Commented, connected, by everyone and for everyone !

Introduction

Hello ! We are Connie & Benjamin Chow-Petit, members of a special hacklab called La Myne.

Being a part of La Myne's community means anybody - of whatever age, knowledge, coming with an organisation or not - can learn between peers, initiate, join projects, mutualize resources and so on. Each reciprocity agreement is unique. This leads to a wide array of activities, ranging from collaborative meals to international research programs and socio-economical ventures. With these experiences there came a lot of challenges, general chaos, and many experimentations with tools.

For this second curated list, (the first one, Awesome Curated Tools, is here) we focus on the tools we have selected to deploy for our IT framework. It represents our personal state-of-art and exploration in terms of integrated tools. They are meant to be collaborative and connected together. Key criterias in this selection are ease-of-use and low maintenance. That excluded a lot of powerful, but time-consuming and skill-dependant tools. We hope to deploy this IT framework as soon as possible, while sharing it with you.

As always, your contributions are welcome !

Peer training sessions can be organized, so please drop us a line if you want to know more !

*Some tool descriptions are from Wikipedia and linked website sources.

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• - Tools that are important to us and go beyond their categories.
• - Tools that are Open Source and/or linked to Open Knowledge.
• - Tools that we want or need to test
• - Tools we currently use but want to phase out

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Table of contents

• Project Management
• Participatory Democracy
• Automation
• Chat
• Non-Profit Management
• Financial Management
• Repositories
• Hosting Management
• Artificial Intelligence
• E-Mails
• Content Management Systems
• Cloud Storage & Document edition
• Static Web
• Intelligence / Knowledge Management
• Editorial Chain
• Social
• Security
• Audio/Video, Meetings, Streaming & Conferencing
• Other web related stuff
• Hardware
• Software on Computers
• References
• How to contribute to this list

Project management

• Trello - A dashboard, visual based project management. A Trello board is a list of lists, filled with cards, used by you and your team. It's a lot more than that, though. Trello has everything you need to organize projects of any size. Open a card and you can add comments, upload file attachments, create checklists, add labels and due dates, and more.
• ClickUp - ClickUp is an application that combines all your tasks, docs, chat, goals, timelines, reminders to provide an all-in-one place to improve your productivity and organisational needs.
• Taïga.io - Taiga is a project management platform for agile developers & designers and project managers who want a beautiful tool that makes work truly enjoyable.

Participatory Democracy

• Decidim - Decidim is an open source platform for all your particiative democracy needs.
• DemocracyOS - DemocracyOS "Change the tool" is another open source participative democracy platform.

We collaborate with our friends at Open Source Politics - an engaged company that is part of the Decidim ecosystem.

Automation

• Zapier - An online automation tool that connects your favorite apps (over 1,000). You can connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without coding or relying on developers to build the integration. Move info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your most important work. It's easy so that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks.
• IFTTT (If This Then That) - A free web-based service to get your apps and devices working together. Create chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within other web services such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, etc. In addition to the web-based application, the service runs on iOS and Android.
• Integromat - Seamlessly connect your apps/services, so you can concentrate on new tasks rather than repeating the same tasks again and again. Integromat works by linking together your favorite apps/services by their corresponding modules to create a scenario that will transfer and transform your data automatically for you. Create a scenario that will watch for new data in one app/service, set-up the proceeding modules for the desired end result and Integromat will execute the task for you.

Chat

• RocketChat - A leading open source team chat software solution. Free, unlimited and completely customizable with on-premises and SaaS cloud hosting.
• Matrix - Matrix is an open network for secure, decentralized communication for federating different communication channels (Telegram, Slack, RocketChat, etc...).

Non-profit Management

• CiviCRM - CiviCRM is a leading open source CRM that is used by more than 11,000 non-profits.
• HelloAsso - A French crowdfunding platform dedicated to associations. Manages memberships, ticketing too.

Financial Management

• Ibiza Software - Ibiza is an editor of open solutions, 100% full web, for accountants and their clients.
• Finacoop - First French cooperative of accountants, bookkeepers and CFOs, a breath of fresh air. They are socially engaged, innovative and have a modern approach.
• Louty - We inherited the use of this software through Oxalis. For Oxamyne, we would prefer something with a more modern approach, but it is going to take time to switch.
• Various tools fo co-budgeting - From collaborative spreadsheets to dedicated software.

Repositories

• Github - A web-based hosting service for version control using git. It is mostly used for computer code but also hosts non-code projects like a collaborative travel blog or recipe exchange. It offers all of the distributed version control and source code management functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. This is an absolutely crucial component of this tool list.
• Gitlab - The second big name in Git repositories. It integrates Continuous Integration as a standard function.

To discover what these are about, their similarities and differences: https://usersnap.com/blog/gitlab-github/

Hosting management

• OVH - We use it to have our own pre-configured Plesk server and to manage our domain names.

• Indie.host - An independant web hosting company, run by our a fellow MYNE member and all-around badass friend with an amazing cynical sense of humour: Timothée Gosselin. Access a wide range of applications to build your digital identity or build your information system for your organization and collective from our catalogue.

• Plesk - Plesk is a commercial web hosting platform with a control panel that allows a server administrator to set up new websites, reseller accounts, e-mail accounts, and DNS entries through a web-based interface.

Artificial Intelligence

• MonkeyLearn - Train custom machine learning models to get topic, sentiment, intent, keywords and more.

E-mails

• GMail - Gmail is a free email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on the web and using third-party programs that synchronize email content through POP or IMAP protocols.
• Protonmail - ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted email service founded in 2014 at the CERN research facility by Andy Yen, Jason Stockman, and Wei Sun. ProtonMail uses client-side encryption to protect email contents and user data before they are sent to ProtonMail servers.
• Roundcube - Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client.

Content Management Systems

• Wordpress - The most popular free and open source content management system (CMS) in the world, that can be enhanced with numerous plugins, extensions and designer themes. Allows us to create websites quick and dirty.
• Netlify CMS - Open source content management for your Git workflow.
• SeenThis - Short-blogging with no text limit. Curation and web survey. Cool automatic text layout. Forums under each post. Advanced and automatic thematisation.
• Medium - An online publishing platform, an example of social journalism, having a hybrid collection of amateur and professional people and publications, or exclusive blogs or publishers on Medium, and is regularly regarded as a blog host.

Cloud storage & Document edition

• Nextcloud - a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is functionally similar to Dropbox, although Nextcloud is free and open-source, allowing anyone to install and operate it on a private server. The open architecture allows for adding additional functionality to the server in form of applications and enables the user to have full control of their data.
  • With CODE - Collabora Online
• Google Drive - Google Drive and all Google apps like Google Docs have very good UX in general. They also have offline capacities.

Static web

• Gatsby.js - Gatsby is a free and open source framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps.
  • Gatsby Cloud - The best way to build and maintain Gatsby sites.
• Jekyll - Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs. That's the engine behind https://pages.github.com/, and what is currently generating this page.
  • Github Pages (Jekyll based) - GitHub Pages are public web pages for users, organizations, and repositories, that are freely hosted on GitHub’s github.io domain or on a custom domain name of your choice. GitHub Pages are powered by Jekyll behind the scenes, so they’re a great way to host your Jekyll-powered website for free.
• GoHugo - The world’s fastest framework for building websites. It is a static site generator, transforming your md in sites like lamyne.org.
• Netlify - One workflow. From local development to global deployment. Build fast, modern websites: continuous deployment, serverless functions, and so much more.

Intelligence / Knowledge Management

• Hypothes.is – In theory, it is a "sentence-level peer-review tool to provide commentary, references, and insight on top of online content". In practice, it is awesome ! You can annotate the whole web publicly !
• Zotero.org - A free, widely used open source tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. The interfaces and the integrations are not modern, but the community is impressive.
• Feedly - A news aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android, also available as a cloud-based service. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others. We use it to manage our RSS feeds.
• Airtable - Database meets collaborative spreadsheet. Quick and easy way to have a collaborative, personnalized database that can both integrate with other tools and be usable by normal, non-tech, humans.
• Diigo - Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows signed-up users to bookmark and tag Web pages. Additionally, it allows users to highlight any part of a webpage and attach sticky notes to specific highlights or to a whole page. We tend to prefer hypothes.is for annotations, but Diigo has a massive community and saves content, so here are they.
• Paper.li - An online newspaper creator using natural language processing, machine learning and social signals to analyse and extract relevant stories from social media and the web. Its engine learns from your curation and reaches a subjective 70-80 % of quality, compared to you being there.
• Evernote - A cross-platform app designed for note taking, organizing, tasks lists, including a web content clipper and archiving capabilities. Evernote Web Clipper, used with tags and Zapier, is a very powerful automation tool.
• Pocket - Ideal for future reading and consultation, Pocket puts articles, videos (or pretty much anything) into a dedicated space for easy reference. Save directly from your browser or from apps.

We also use Nextcloud.

Editorial chain

• CodiMD - Realtime collaborative markdown notes on all platforms.

• Prose.io - A content editor for GitHub.

• Dillinger - Dillinger is a cloud-enabled, mobile-ready, offline-storage, AngularJS powered HTML5 Markdown editor.

• Stackedit.io - In-browser markdown editor.

• PSNotes - PNotes is light-weight, flexible, skinnable manager of virtual notes on your desktop. It supports multiple languages, individual note's settings, transparency and scheduling. Absolutely portable as well - no traces in registry.

• MDWiki - MDwiki is a CMS/Wiki completely built in HTML5/Javascript and runs 100% on the client. No special software installation or server side processing is required. Just upload the mdwiki.html shipped with MDwiki into the same directory as your markdown files and you are good to go!

• Raneto - Raneto is an open source Knowledgebase platform that uses static Markdown files to power your Knowledgebase. Looks like a Wiki.

• Editoria - Efficiently produce format-flexible, standards-compliant books with Editoria, the open source, web-based editing & production workflow tool. Built by publishers, for publishers. From the Coko (collaborative knowledge) Foundation.

  • It uses Paged-js - an open-source library to paginate content in the browser. Based on the W3C specifications, it’s a sort of polyfill for Paged Media and Generated Content for Paged Media CSS modules. The development was launch as an open-source community driven initiative and it’s still experimental.

• Paper.li - Collect great content to share and engage with your audience wherever they are - compatible with Twitter, Facebook and more.

• OSF.io - Open Science Framework is a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration.

Social

• Communecter - Citizen social network.
• Twitter - An online news and social networking service where users post and interact with messages, known as "tweets." These messages were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, the limit was doubled to 280 characters for all languages except Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
• Telegram - Telegram is a non-profit cloud-based instant messaging service.
• Facebook - A social networking website and service where users can post comments, share photographs and links to news or other interesting content on the Web, play games, chat live, and even stream live video. Designed to be highly addictive. A lot of people just use the Facebook Messenger, without ever going on the platform itself.
• LinkedIn - A business- and employment-oriented social networking service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. As of April 2017, LinkedIn had 500 million members in 200 countries, out of which more than 106 million members are active.
• Instagram - A mobile, desktop, and Internet-based photo-sharing application and service.*
• Discourse - A modern forum software for your community. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more !

Security

• Lastpass - a freemium password management service that stores encrypted passwords in private accounts. LastPass is standard with a web interface, but also includes plugins for many web browsers and apps for many smartphones.
• Keepass - KeePass Password Safe is a free and open-source password manager primarily for Windows. It officially supports macOS and Linux operating systems through the use of Mono.
• Wordfence - Wordfence includes an endpoint firewall and malware scanner that were built from the ground up to protect WordPress. Our Threat Defense Feed arms Wordfence with the newest firewall rules, malware signatures and malicious IP addresses it needs to keep your website safe.

Audio/Video, Meetings, Streaming & Conferencing

• Appear.in - An online video collaboration tool that lets you have video conversations effortlessly. Create a room with no required registration.

• Google Hangouts - Google Hangouts is a communication platform developed by Google which includes instant messaging, video chat, SMS and VOIP features.

• Jitsi - A free and open source multiplatform voice, videoconferencing and instant messaging application for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Android.

• Skype - A popular telecommunications application software product that specializes in providing video chat and voice calls between computers, tablets, mobile devices, the Xbox One console, and smartwatches via the Internet and to regular telephones.

• Zoom.us - Modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems.

• OVH Telecom - OVH has a free phone conference tool.

• Livestream.com - A video live streaming platform that allows customers to broadcast live video content using a camera and a computer through the Internet, and viewers to play the content via the web, iOS, Android, Roku, and the Apple TV.

• Periscope - A live video streaming app for Android and iOS.

• PeerTube - PeerTube is a free, decentralized, federated video platform powered by ActivityPub and WebTorrent, that uses peer-to-peer technology to reduce load on individual servers when viewing videos.

• SoundCloud - SoundCloud is a European online audio distribution platform and music sharing website based in Berlin, Germany that enables its users to upload, promote, and share audio.

• Youtube - Allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to favorites, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users, offering a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. Available content includes video clips, TV show clips, music videos, short and documentary films, audio recordings, movie trailers, live streams, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.

• Vimeo - Vimeo is an ad-free video platform headquartered in New York City, providing free video viewing services as a competitor to YouTube.

Other web related stuff

• Matomo - A powerful web analytics platform that gives you and your business 100% data ownership and user privacy protection.

Hardware

• Atelier Soudé - Refurbished and upcycled computers and electronics reparation and sales.
• Commown - Commown offers you several ways to take action. The first of these is the economics of functionality. Indeed, contrary to the sales model, in the case of a serviced rental, the company offering the service has an interest in providing durable and repairable products, since breakdowns and breakdowns are at its expense.

Software on computers

• Linux Manjaro - Manjaro is a professionally made Linux based operating system that is a suitable replacement for Windows or MacOS. Multiple Desktop Environments are available through our Official and Community editions. We also work with manufacturers to design dedicated hardware.
• Lubuntu - Lubuntu is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, using the LXQt desktop environment in place of Ubuntu's GNOME desktop.
• Brave browser - Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. The browser blocks ads and website trackers.
• Qwant - Qwant is a search engine that respects your privacy and eases discovering and sharing via a social approach.

Qwant Causes and Brave Reward are programs that can allow you to finance a NGO and/or a content producer by sharing a part of the revenue of the ads you elect to display in your browser or your searches. We plan to use it for la MYNE.

References

• Awesome Curated Tools, our list that contain a wider selection of tools, whereas this list only contains the ones we actually use.

• Awesome lists - A list of awesome lists.

• Connected Researchers Tools list - Online tools For researchers

• KD Nuggets - Knowledge Discovery portal

• Sharestack.io - Share your technical stack and discover others.

• IDEO labs - Digital Tools for Design Research.

• Hybrid Insights - Where the quantitative meets the qualitative.

• The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT - Data journalism tools

• Global investigative journalism network - Data journalism

• Data Driven Journalism - Data journalism tool kit

• Poynter - Digital tools reference.

• Dataviz.tools - A curated guide to the best tools, resources and technologies for data visualization.

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How do I contribute to this list?

Have an idea of a tool that should be on this list? Here's how you can add it:

• Familiar with github? Send a pull request with your suggestions. If you're not sure how to do that don't sweat it. See below.
• Not familiar with github? You can leave a comment on this page by clicking on the Issues tab on the right and adding a New Issue (that's just like a comment). FYI you'll need to create a github account. Thank you Drew Wilson for this part.

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This document is under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.