Docs is a new open-source collaborative text editor, intended as an alternative to Notion, Google Docs, Outline, and other similar web-based services. Interestingly, the project is being led by the governments of France and Germany.
Docsis a web-based collaborative writing tool, with the ability for multiple people to view and edit the same page simultaneously. Apple Pages and Microsoft Word have simultaneous editing capabilities, but new changes can sometimes take several seconds to show up for all editors, which isn’t great for real-time collaboration. The base version of LibreOffice doesn’t support online document editing at all, though the LibreOffice-basedCollabora Onlinesuite does have it.
The site for Docs explains, “Docs offers an intuitive writing experience. Its minimalist interface favors content over layout, while offering the essentials: media import, offline mode and keyboard shortcuts for greater efficiency.”
you may create new documents, then share them with individual people or create public links for viewing and/or editing, just like other cloud services. Documents can also be exported to PDF, Microsoft Word format, or OpenDocument format (ODF).
You cantry out Docsin the public test environment, and it’sopen-source on GitHub, so you can spin it up on your own server using an S3-compatible storage service. Under the hood, Docs is powered by the popular Django, Next.js, and MinIO web frameworks.
Docs is a joint development effort between France’sInterministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs(DINUM) and Germany’sCenter for Digital Sovereignty of Public Administration(ZenDiS). Both agencies have the goal of funding and organizing digital projects that improve digital sovereignty, and Docs is built primarily as a tool for local agencies and companies.
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European countries and agencies have been some of the highest-profile users of LibreOffice and other similar free software projects, so it’s not a surprise to see more active involvement in that area. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein justmoved from Microsoft Office to LibreOfficeacross its 30,000 government computers, for example.
Support for European owned-and-operated tech services and infrastructureis growing, and we could see more projects like Docs over the coming months and years, especially in areas where American products and services are still dominant. Microsoft, Google, and Notion Labs are all based in the United States.
Docs is part of France’s La Suite numérique (“the digital suite”), which is also working on an open-source video conferencing service calledVisio. It’s alsoopen-source on GitHuband self-hostable, and claims “Zoom-level performance with high-quality video and audio.”
