Great to see this on HN. fyi, La Suite is an umbrella project built by DINUM in France that started several years ago, mainly to enable people in the public administration to use more independent tools. It's built in-house, often on top of other open source technologies. E.g.: Matrix powers chat and LiveKit powers Visio (which was recently featured on HN as well when they announced it's rolled out to replace Zoom / Teams, etc [1])
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?
In our case, they started building on top of our project and then reached out, so not sure I can share any lessons on this. With that said:
- I think administrations in the EU are (slowly but steadily) adopting "Public Money, Public Code" policies and looking more seriously at open source
- Note that policy / strategy on this depends a lot per country / local administration / project etc. I think most governments don't actively develop in house - France is quite the exception in this
- There are a number of conferences that might be relevant (FOSDEM for example just finished)
- We also benefitted from EU grants (e.g.: NLNet) to bootstrap our work and the early research phases
I think it definitely depends on the country, there isn’t a one-size fits all answer to this for the countries in the EU.
Even in this example, the French are building this in-house, but the Germans are repackaging this into their suite. And the Netherlands is on their way to do the same.
So the approach would be different depending on which country you approached.
My advice to you would be to follow government events like Hackdays to get yourself in front of people who can point you in the right direction
Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?
The description of the Docs project, at least on the OP page, is interesting:
"A collaborative note taking, wiki and documentation platform that scales. Built with Django and React."
An office suite's 'docs' component is usually a word processor and people sometimes try to (mis)use it for the functions you actually list - i.e., you can try to use Word as a wiki, linking pages somehow, but it's not nearly as efficient as a purpose-built wiki.
Based on the quote description, it looks like your project inverted the thinking: Is word processing not a/the primary function? Are the other functions truly prioritized - e.g., is the wiki somewhat as efficient as MediaWiki?
“Content over form” so you don’t really need all the formatting options of something like Word when you are just trying to write meeting notes.
They are definitely trending more towards a wiki, but it is still early days for this whole experiment. Though, many of the municipalities in the French gov are using it for their day to day work so it is clearly useful in some capacity. I don’t have numbers, but it’s definitely respectable
Think of Docs more of a modern, kind of Notion-style collaboration tool. It's not meant to be a Word replacement for full-scale document authoring (I believe La Suite will work with LibreOffice for that, but might be wrong here). The product vision is that Docs should focus on "Content over Form"; i.e.: make it easy to create well-structured documents (content), as opposed to Word which makes it easy to change every little visual detail of your document (form).
In addition, there are some advanced integrations with other products in La Suite. For example, video calls made in Visio can be automatically AI-transcribed and presented in a Docs document, etc.
Thanks. I think your vision is much more useful for most day-to-day work for most people. It's interesting that a new office suite would aim in that direction.
I almost never use word for exactly that reason. I don’t want to spend half an hour normalising my headings and fonts and margins. I want to focus on content and logical structure.
I much prefer Google Docs over word for this reason too.
I was writing a datasheet really and it’s really surprising how there isn’t ia straightforward solution. Confluence wasn’t expressive enough, while getting Word to apply consistent styles across tables, margins, headings etc is such a pain.
Do these administrations still purchase licenses for software or do they just create open source maintained by government employees?
How much are they willing to pay?
Because people in Europe are notoriously paid less so I am curious of the financial aspect.
Also curious about the logistics of ownership and support...
I know that my city's administration has a quite active development department.
I don't know the current salary ranges,but they offer other values like vacation days, Work-Life-Balance (proper time tracking to avoid extra hours etc), part-time.offera, child care options and some other benefits, which most corporations won't give in addition to being the state, which means they won't go bankrupt, won't do reductions in force in the way companies do it, ...
Was referring to an actual hacker who does look for holes in systems not the 60s idealist version of a hacker as someone who plays nor the media evil shadowly character.
> Richard Stallman explains about hackers who program:
> What they had in common was mainly love of excellence and programming. They wanted to make their programs that they used be as good as they could. They also wanted to make them do neat things. They wanted to be able to do something in a more exciting way than anyone believed possible and show "Look how wonderful this is. I bet you didn't believe this could be done."
1.5 year ago DINUM (La Suite) and OpenDesk (Germany) reached out and started sponsoring quite a bit of our work which has really helped us accelerate the project
Do they have an impact on the roadmap?
Like special features for gov work or specific integration?
And I believe BlockNote uses tiptap/prosemirror, no?
Do they also contribute to those “primitives”? That would be a very nice gift to the OSS community
They're pretty mindful of sponsoring things that also works for us. I.e.: we try to align both our roadmaps as good as possible.
We're discussing how to work best with downstream dependencies as well. So far they're actively sponsoring Yjs, but not prosemirror/tt.
fyi, here are some early thoughts by the PM of Docs on how to collaborate between public sector and OSS (companies): https://github.com/virgile-dev/playbook-work-with-oss-librar... (we surely don't check all the boxes yet, but it's good to have the discussion!). Feel free to jump in!
Yep! Docs is using our editor BlockNote (https://www.blocknotejs.org) which builds upon Prosemirror (and we're also proud to be sponsors of Marijn from Prosemirror who's done an amazing job, indeed)
Maintainer of BlockNote here (and contributor to HocusPocus). I can't speak for Docs as to why they chose BlockNote, but can answer some of your questions. BlockNote is actually built on top of Tiptap - but designed to take away the heavy lifting. As powerful as they are, to build a Notion-like editor on top of Tiptap (or Prosemirror) still requires quite some engineering firepower. We've built BlockNote to come "batteries-included" with common UI components and a simpler API to make it easy for you to add a modern, block-based editor to your app.
That's very cool, as a happy user of TipTap this is the first I've heard of BlockNote - excited to check it out. I've also built a few modest things on top of TipTap and felt a slight "tower of babel" unease, would you mind saying a bit about what BlockNote takes from TipTap which couldn't be accomplished with Prosemirror alone?
This comes from a place of pure curiosity, I don't actually believe this strata of editor packages is in any way inherently bad!
Congrats! I used PartyKit since the early beta; for the open source React rich text editor I'm working on (https://www.blocknotejs.org, the homepage runs on Partykit), and PartyKit was a breeze to integrate (ofc, big part because we both build on Yjs). Looking forward to seeing where Cloudflare wants to take this further!
Congrats OP on launching this, looking forward to dive further in! It's great to see people experimenting in the Reactive + Live Programming space as like you mention, I think it can bring a lot of improvements to how we build software. Did you run into any limitations adopting this model?
> A killer feature of Observable notebooks for me is that they provide the shortest possible route from having an idea to having a public URL with a tool that I can bookmark and use later
The code you write is pure Typescript (instead of sth custom like ObservableJS) which opens more paths to interoperability (aside from having a public URL). For example, I'm now working to make the code instantly exportable so you can mix it directly into existing codebases (or deploy on your own hosting / Vercel / whatever you prefer).
This article has been quite the inspiration for many projects and progress on this front. I think we're seeing more and more developments around CRDTs and local-first frameworks / applications.
I'm working on a few projects in this area:
- https://www.typecell.org - Notion meets Notebook-style live programming for TypeScript / React
- https://www.blocknotejs.org - a rich text editor built on TipTap / Prosemirror that supports Yjs for local-first collaboration
In my experience so far, some things get more complicated when building a local-first application, and some things get a lot easier. What gets easier is that once you've modeled and implemented the data-layer (which does require you to rethink / unlearn a few principles), you don't need to worry about data-fetching, errors etc. as much as in a regular "API-based" app.
Another interesting video I recommend on this topic is about Linear's "Sync Engine" which employs some of the local-first techniques as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2m3jaJixU
I took a look at the landing page out of curiosity, just an FYI but at first glance there's nothing that indicates to me that this is not a regular SaaS app.
Specifically, unless I'm missing something, nothing in the text jumped out at me indicating the app satisfies this condition stated in the article:
>for good offline support it is desirable for the software to run as a locally installed executable on your device
Might want to make this feature more prominent if you support it.
Although it's entirely architected on a local-first stack, I indeed haven't shipped the main benefit of this, a locally installable app. There's a WIP PR here that adds PWA support: https://github.com/TypeCellOS/TypeCell/pull/352. I'll highlight this more when this is merged.
Nevertheless, some of the benefits are already noticeable and come "out of the box" with building on a local first architecture, even if not shipping an executable yet:
- multiplayer sync
- speed: documents are loaded from local storage initially if they have been loaded before, and changes sync in after that
In the future (when there's an installable app), I also want to enable saving / loading from the file system, so that it's completely transparent where your data is.
If you're interested in this hybrid of docs and live coding, I'm building something similar for the Typescript / Javascript / React ecosystem @ https://www.typecell.org (open source). See https://twitter.com/YousefED/status/1677342430545301504 for a preview of the next version which will be more "wysiwyg" than the current notebook environment
I'm fortunate to be collaborating with them as their Docs product is built on top of our open source BlockNote text editor (https://www.blocknotejs.org).
Docs specifically started as an international collaboration with Germany [2] to explore how different EU countries can collaborate in building sovereign workplace solutions (several other countries including NL have shown interest as well).
They're actively supporting us, and related projects like Yjs (https://yjs.dev) by sponsoring feature development.
I'm sure many of the team members will follow along here as well! Happy to answer any questions.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873294 [2] https://www.zendis.de/en
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