Author of Monica/Chandler here.
Thanks for posting this.
As others have pointed out, we are rewriting Monica from scratch, codename Chandler: https://github.com/monicahq/chandler
I would really encourage you to push forward with OfficeLife. I believe the HR space is primed and ready for a decent open source offering. For what it's worth, APIs would be super useful, e.g. in the recruiting world there are hundreds of different background checks etc. that anyone serious needs to integrate with.
I am not too sure about officelife, but i think there is a market for internal relationship management at middle and large companies - often a mark of success is managing the internal network.
This has been badly damanged during lockdown - just walking past someone's desk and being reminded I need to speak to them was useful. And just saying hi kept the "relationship" fresh
I've never heard of this software category before. For decades, I've managed this info with an online calendar (annual reminders for birthdays, for example), and online contact/address book (notes section heavily levegered). This is pretty cool - thanks for bringing it to my attention!
First, thank you for your work. I must admit though I was hoping that the rewrite would be in Go (or Rust) for the simple use case of a dead-simple binary deploy with a built in sqlite or rocks/level database that can handle as many users as you can throw at it on a $2-5 VPS instance.
In terms of simplicity, nothing beats PHP. It's easily deployable everywhere, everyone knows how to use this simple language, and the Laravel ecosystem is fantastic. But I understand what you mean.
You can self host. We highly recommend that you self host. We prefer if you self host.
If you use our own version, it’s not as safe, obviously, even though we do our best to keep it secure.
No. It's a codename in reference to Monica and the Friends tv show. Chandler being the one who dates Monica (no spoiler).
Right now we have two repos on Github, but we have to find a way to merge Chandler to Monica in the future so we don't lose those precious stars :-)
I usually despise comments that point out that two pieces of (almost always unrelated) software share the same (or a similar) name. That doesn't apply in this case—
Chandler has not only already been used for another piece of software, it has been used for something in what is roughly the same space. The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago, but I had to double check and triple check to suss out whether or not your Chandler is actually a reboot + a rewrite. And I'm still hedging (but I think the answer is "no, they're completely separate"). That's a confusing amount of similarity.
EDIT: it looks like this has been pointed out. Even though it's "just" a codename, I'd recommend changing it to something like "chauncey" or "bingaling" or "miss-bong" or "skidmark" or something.
Author of Monica/Chandler here. I didn't know that existed, thanks for pointing that out.
That being said, Chandler is the codename. It'll be renamed to Monica once it's ready.
> [...] Monica is an old code base now. Old in the sense that it’s 7 years old and it has been touched by hundred of contributors. There are some concepts in the code that we let through, because we either didn’t know any better back then or because we didn’t want to piss off contributors, that we don’t want anymore. The project has way too many dependencies, and maintaining the code has become harder than it was before. Changing something is riskier, and takes more time. Also, we’ve seen how people use Monica, what they want to do with it, and the current code limits us way too much if we want to support what people want to use Monica for. Finally, Monica is still a side project for us. We are extremely passionate about it, and we want to also have fun building it. And the current version wasn’t that fun.
Have been using https://clay.earth for this and like it so far, a bit less manual work to keep it updated - but have used Monica and Evernote for this in the past with good success too.
Not the person you asked, but I came to leave a similar comment. I was curious about Monica, but for a variety of reasons it didn’t click for me.
I use obsidian for tracking meetings, people, and documents in a civic engagement sphere. So hundreds of entities and a few meetings a week.
I have folders for interpersonal meetings (calls, coffee dates, one on ones), public/group meetings, people, and a few other things. Every individual gets a top-level entry in the people folder. Every meeting or personal meeting gets a page in folder; folders are organized by year, then month. E.g meetings\2022\november\public forum with x on November 15, 2022.md
I use templates for each document type; that helps me keep things consistent so I’m tracking the same information for meetings. For meetings I run, I have special templates that help keep me organized.
When I take a note about a person saying something or attending a meeting, I type [[, then I get a list of people to choose from that autocompletes. I use the alias feature on people notes to track things like job titles, name variations, and acronyms.
The approach is more flexible than Monica, and it lets me grow and change the data I collect over time. The tool is a super power. Obsidian tracks all the back links so if I want to find out which meetings a colleague was in, it is very easy to do that.
I used to use OneNote but Obsidian is much more scalable. I’m putting 10x as much info in it as I ever did in OneNote and I expect to put 10-100x more before I move on to something else.
Bonus notes:
Obsidian plugin system is great and has a pretty robust, if not super well documented API. I’m working on plugins to automatically improve records and already have plugins that have saved hours on some special-purpose tags
You can embed pdf documents like images and have a preview show up as an embed. Amazing for meeting agendas.
If you have standard fields for notes, you can surface those in a table using dataview.
Todoist integration is pretty cool if you want to make a “Dashboard” note for project management.
The iOS version keeps the synced files on the file system. That means if you refer to a PDF, you can mark it up with a dedicated app (e.g. PDF expert) in place and keep it synced in your vault.
You can create links before creating a matching note. This is great for fast moving meetings, and then you just need to click into the link to create a matching document.
This is the type of software I would really prefer not to have on a server. The only part of this I would want not on my device locally would be an encrypted backup.
It's self hosted, so you could just run it on the local machine. It's a pity it uses MySQL because pgcrypto could enable you to make the database publicly visible.
Monica is quite different though - it's primarily for personal relationships, rather than professional ones. The tagline on the linked homepage is "Monica helps you organize the social interactions with your loved ones."
I prize all FLOSS effort, but try to observe a thing: here is a "PRM" (CRM), there a webmail, there something else, ALL not integrated AT ALL. It's not possible to integrate them since they are different applications.
Now try looking at classic model: anything is a single application, from the OS to user-programmed simple automation. That's true for Smalltalk workstations to LispM. This is so effective that I found today far simpler and power using Emacs than any other modern software, even if modern Emacs just run on top of something else, lacking a LispM underneath, and even if it's development lag in many areas for modern usages.
So to say: all FLOSS authors, instead of trying competing with commercial tools their way, do your best to resurrect the old way. Please choose to learn classic languages like Lisp (CL or anything else) or Smalltalk (see Pharo as an example) to rediscover the idea that there is NO APPLICATION but just one with various bits of code plugged is as needed. So for instance a PRM can include a mail system, a complete agenda/calendar system, ... without trying the Greenspun's tenth rule way, and fail as usual.
Readit News
We've also written OfficeLife, an open source tool to manage your employees: https://github.com/officelifehq/officelife, yet to be released.
I think we have too many ideas and side projects :-)
This has been badly damanged during lockdown - just walking past someone's desk and being reminded I need to speak to them was useful. And just saying hi kept the "relationship" fresh
Edit: should have scrolled down more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33612776
Chandler has not only already been used for another piece of software, it has been used for something in what is roughly the same space. The other Chandler was discontinued >10 years ago, but I had to double check and triple check to suss out whether or not your Chandler is actually a reboot + a rewrite. And I'm still hedging (but I think the answer is "no, they're completely separate"). That's a confusing amount of similarity.
EDIT: it looks like this has been pointed out. Even though it's "just" a codename, I'd recommend changing it to something like "chauncey" or "bingaling" or "miss-bong" or "skidmark" or something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends#Cast_and_characters
Deleted Comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850155
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547
Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270001 - Dec 2020 (198 comments)
Monica: Open-source personal CRM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21850155 - Dec 2019 (129 comments)
Monica – Personal CRM, Remember everything about friends and family - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18318547 - Oct 2018 (45 comments)
Show HN: Monica, an open-source CRM to manage friends and family - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14497295 - June 2017 (568 comments)
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271873
> [...] Monica is an old code base now. Old in the sense that it’s 7 years old and it has been touched by hundred of contributors. There are some concepts in the code that we let through, because we either didn’t know any better back then or because we didn’t want to piss off contributors, that we don’t want anymore. The project has way too many dependencies, and maintaining the code has become harder than it was before. Changing something is riskier, and takes more time. Also, we’ve seen how people use Monica, what they want to do with it, and the current code limits us way too much if we want to support what people want to use Monica for. Finally, Monica is still a side project for us. We are extremely passionate about it, and we want to also have fun building it. And the current version wasn’t that fun.
I use obsidian for tracking meetings, people, and documents in a civic engagement sphere. So hundreds of entities and a few meetings a week.
I have folders for interpersonal meetings (calls, coffee dates, one on ones), public/group meetings, people, and a few other things. Every individual gets a top-level entry in the people folder. Every meeting or personal meeting gets a page in folder; folders are organized by year, then month. E.g meetings\2022\november\public forum with x on November 15, 2022.md
I use templates for each document type; that helps me keep things consistent so I’m tracking the same information for meetings. For meetings I run, I have special templates that help keep me organized.
When I take a note about a person saying something or attending a meeting, I type [[, then I get a list of people to choose from that autocompletes. I use the alias feature on people notes to track things like job titles, name variations, and acronyms.
The approach is more flexible than Monica, and it lets me grow and change the data I collect over time. The tool is a super power. Obsidian tracks all the back links so if I want to find out which meetings a colleague was in, it is very easy to do that.
I used to use OneNote but Obsidian is much more scalable. I’m putting 10x as much info in it as I ever did in OneNote and I expect to put 10-100x more before I move on to something else.
Bonus notes:
Obsidian plugin system is great and has a pretty robust, if not super well documented API. I’m working on plugins to automatically improve records and already have plugins that have saved hours on some special-purpose tags
You can embed pdf documents like images and have a preview show up as an embed. Amazing for meeting agendas.
If you have standard fields for notes, you can surface those in a table using dataview.
Todoist integration is pretty cool if you want to make a “Dashboard” note for project management.
The iOS version keeps the synced files on the file system. That means if you refer to a PDF, you can mark it up with a dedicated app (e.g. PDF expert) in place and keep it synced in your vault.
You can create links before creating a matching note. This is great for fast moving meetings, and then you just need to click into the link to create a matching document.
Now try looking at classic model: anything is a single application, from the OS to user-programmed simple automation. That's true for Smalltalk workstations to LispM. This is so effective that I found today far simpler and power using Emacs than any other modern software, even if modern Emacs just run on top of something else, lacking a LispM underneath, and even if it's development lag in many areas for modern usages.
So to say: all FLOSS authors, instead of trying competing with commercial tools their way, do your best to resurrect the old way. Please choose to learn classic languages like Lisp (CL or anything else) or Smalltalk (see Pharo as an example) to rediscover the idea that there is NO APPLICATION but just one with various bits of code plugged is as needed. So for instance a PRM can include a mail system, a complete agenda/calendar system, ... without trying the Greenspun's tenth rule way, and fail as usual.