Announcing Fractale

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I am happy to announce Fractale (https://fractale.co), an open-source self-organization platform, with a frontend powered by Elm GitHub - fractal6/fractal6-ui.elm: Frontend for Fractale.

Fractale is part of the “productivity” or “asynchronous communication” tools family. As a developer, I am satisfied with the organization and collaboration tools built around Git, such as Github/Gitlab/Gitea. But for human beings who are not developers or strangers to these tools, they remain too complex and ill adapted. Hence the question: “Can we reach the levels of organization and large-scale collaboration obtained with free and open source software in projects that go beyond simple software development?”

There are of course a multitude of tools that try to answer this question, such as Trello, Asana, Clickup, Basecamp and other open-source initiatives like OpenProject for example. There is always an element of subjectivity in assessing these tools, but so far none of them have satisfied me in practice, and all of them have left me with this feeling of dissatisfaction, especially for organizing open collaborative projects or communities. On the other hand, I had the opportunity to discover tools such as Glassfrog and Holasprit, which are designed for so-called “self-organization” and “shared governance” approaches, based in particular on Holacracy or Sociocracy. I was seduced by these approaches of an “operating system for humans”. However, the user experience remains poor, and these products are sometimes restrictive in terms of the governance model to adopt, and are expensive, in addition to being locked-in by the vendors.

These reasons, plus the desire to have a free, open source, and quality tool (at least that I like to use) for self-organization led me to the development of Fractale. The organization of Fractale takes place on Fractale, providing a practical usecase of the platform: Fractale: Self-Organization for Humans

Now that the tool is released, the question remains: “Can it meet the needs of the rest of us to organize and self-organize? And if not, why not?”

I would welcome any feedback from the Elm community.

Kind regards,
Adrien

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Interesting concept and of course always nice to see something new in Elm. :clap: :clap: :clap:

I am curious to know if your idea was inspired/influenced by Sociocracy? Particularly the organization in circles concept made me wonder about this. Sociocracy - Wikipedia

(Sorry, didn’t read your post fully - I see you mentioned Sociocracy as an influence :+1:).

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Thank you @rupert :slight_smile:
Yes, it was definitely inspired by Sociocracy as well as Holacracy.

Organization in circles seems to be common to both approaches. When I discovered the “graph packing” representation of an org I thought that was something interesting to quickly get insight of an organization, and navigate into it. I also kept the concept of “decentralization of power” in the following sense: Atm, you can create two kind of role, Peer or Coordinator. When a circle has coordinators roles, only them have the authority (rights) to modify it (edit its description, mandate, adding new roles and sub-circles). If a circle has no coordinator, It will delegate authority to the “above” coordinators.

Note that you have also the more common “Tree view” for organizations (move the cursor near the left border).

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Really cool project. Looks polished from a ui perspective. Improvements I could see:

  • The circles aren’t styled as the rest of the app (background, 3d shade, text outlines)
  • The “Authentication required” colors should change with dark theme.
  • background colors that are (a lot) darker to improve readability, so maybe remove some blue and green tones.
  • In tensions list view, having an add button at the top just like in circle view would make sense (?).
  • Just a (bad) suggestion: The “show/hide the circles view” button is really useful in tensions view. How about making the column headers in circle view clickable to filter for only those?
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Thanks @lue-bird, your feedback is much appreciated.

Yes, I agree it could be improved. But styling the “graph packing” is not easy; finding the right color variations for encapsulated circles, fading the outside circle when zooming, Naming the circles without hiding things. For example, having the background of the map equal to the page’s background doesn’t render well, so I ended up with this kind of blue-sky background… I am open to any suggestion you think could improve it, if any.

The point is that there is already an add button fixed positioned at the bottom-right of the screen. So to see if having both does not burden the interface.

I agree, this will be done in the next release.

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Very pleased with this app! I have worked in this space and as a developer/data scientist, so I’m super happy to see someone else with the same mix of interests doing something super cool and releasing it!

In terms of thinking about circles and stuff, did you hear of Maptio? www.maptio.com. The tool is open source and it’s been through a few iterations of organisations benefiting from it. It’s based on Source principles (workwithsource.com), which provides a nice counterbalance to Holacracy principles and such. While Holacracy/Teal orgs tend to focus on group leadership at the expense of personal responsibility, Source stuff makes sure that project leads are actually empowered to lead.

Best of luck!

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Thank you. This is interesting! I’m going to dig into that.

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