Docs does not do the task management part, but we use it at work to write basically anything (and we're selling hosting for it as well). And it's made by the French administration.

Have you considered Request Tracker https://requesttracker.com/. I last used it 20 years ago and if your workflow is ticket based it might solve your problem.

Also, you could maybe talk to Deltek about a possible solution: https://www.deltek.com/en/erp/vantagepoint

I hope these suggestions are helpful.

My recommendation:
1. Mailing lists with web archive (there is https://www.sympa.community/ but there are other options out there)
2. Spreadsheets to track progress and who does what (ethercalc)
3. Calendar for reminders
4. For file sync, syncthing

Once set up, this has been set it and forget it for us.

=== Why mailing lists with web archives? ===
1. new employees can reference past discussions with great search
2. reference a past thread/decision with a link in future conversations
3. everyone gets to use a tool and workflow they are comfortable with
4. offline first
5. "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can" a

=== Why spreadsheet? ===
Every project has a different structure.
A simple spreadsheet can accommodate all of them.
They are small and portable.

=== Why calendars? ===
1. internet standard
2. you can include people outside and inside your co in your reminders
3. offline first (just a file)
4. each individual can use whatever calendar ui they like

=== Why syncthing? ===
1. super light and stable
2. you can set things up so that your files are synced through both a server and team so that you have super high redundancy

In reply to グレェ「grey」.

Skimming the rest of these suggestions and my jaw dropping at how many of them were already suggested in the previouslys?

I guess what we can take from this is that everyone wants me to continue paying monthly software rent to the unhinged fascist.

In reply to AstraLuma.

Call me skeptical of anything using the term "Open Core" when opencores.org was there in 1999 and focuses on open hardware (e.g. OpenSPARC circa 2005/2006).

It's as already bad enough that the current round of the next so-called "A'I' Winter" can't come quickly enough techbros seem to have forgotten that MCP was a villain in TRON and named something stupid in their field after the same acronym in more recent years. Sure it was pop culture, but they've made sequels, plural!

I realize we seem to be in the dumbest timeline full of all sorts of stupid hash collisions, but ignoring the predecessors, who were doing the work in the field of libre/free open realms, decades before? Is an awful look which screams ignorance, perhaps even willfully in a post web search engines era.

"Sync with GitHub. Both ways." on huly's site is also a wtfh?

Don't get me wrong, I hate Git and GitHub (which isn't open source at all, and owned by Micro$oft, with their old "embrace, extend, extinguish" m.o. still in full effect) but: have I been using GitHub incorrectly? I was pretty sure, even from the CLI, with "git pull" and "git push" I was already syncing with GitHub both ways?

The whole thing screams: ignorance and stupidity to me. But I concur, Jira is awful! Please don't use that.

But, what do I know? Yesterday I had a job interview with someone who has a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and had never heard of Doug Engelbart (RIP, leader behind the Augment group at SRI that pioneered NLS [oNLine System] in the 1960s), or Bill English (inventor of the mouse), or Marshall Kirk McKusick (helped author the BSD TCP/IP stack while an undergrad at UC Berkeley in the 1970s) or NCP (Network Control Program, the protocol that the Internet ran on before TCP "flag day" circa January 1st, 1983). That person also has an MBA, and worked at HP/Agilent!

I only have a B.A. in Language Studies. Yet, somehow, I got to know Doug and Bill personally before they passed away and Dr. McKusick too (thankfully, still alive last I checked)!

Meanwhile, I went back to the huly website to check something and see this:

"Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

Reloading the page? Did not remove the error. Amazing! Truly a marvel.(/sarcasm)

Maybe I should try another browser?

Skimming the rest of these suggestions and my jaw dropping at how many of them were already suggested in the previouslys? sigh

In reply to dapphp.

Forgot links... https://github.com/fengoffice/fengoffice & https://www.fengoffice.com/

You may want to have a look at Feng Office. A few years ago someone I worked for used it for project and task management, issue tracking, and time tracking and it worked well for that. It's got a self hosted, open source PHP version and appears to support some document creation and organization, but I can't speak to that. On mobile so I can't give it a great look now, sorry, but it checks many boxes. Good luck.

In reply to jorge.

It is. But Redmine has been written on top of Rails since its earliest public releases that were like eighteen years ago. You also don't pay anything to that DHH jerk (or anyone else) to use it.

If being written on top of Rails is disqualifying, then okay, sure, no problem. I avoid things written on top of Rails for multiple reasons... one of which is that DHH is a huge jerk, but the specific complaint was about paying money to the guy.

In reply to George Nakos.

Just as a note, I noticed that the project site says "Written using the Ruby on Rails framework".  Isn't that the framework created by the same guy Jamie is complaining about in this post.

https://vikunja.io/ should fit your task management requirements. I use it mostly on the desktop and only occasionally on the phone but it gets stuff done without excessive clicking and acking stuff. Written in go / js, doesn't import half a gigabyte of js libraries afaict. And it has documentation that at least looks maintained (didn't need much of it though).

after a decade away, I ended up installing trac.edgewall.org again to manage some housework. It's the software equivalent of a Brother printer: winning by not changing. The mobile interface is ugly but usable.
* There are tickets, with milestones, due dates, and components
* Basically every page supports attachments for PDFs and the like
* The wiki has a wysiwyg editor
* It can be locally hosted and dgaf about the rest of the tech stack. You can use the builtin webserver and sqlite, or wrap it in anything that speaks WSGI and point it at half a dozen SQL implementations

In reply to Steven.

I’ve never seen Etherpad with attachments. Just text and links to things.

How well does it handle them?

In reply to jwz.

I have some suggestions; these are things I'm well experienced with (or have been up to a year or so ago) and can recommend.

For the task tracking and nothing else category, I can recommend Taiga.  It is free software, was sponsored for a while by Red Hat and friends.  There are probably lighter alternatives (I have one that I made myself), but Taiga is well trodden territory.  It worked very well on mobile when I used it last. https://taiga.io/

For document editing, etherpad.  Also free software, easy to host.  I've mostly used it for short lived shared documents, so you might need something more robust.  https://etherpad.org/

If you need something more robust, I have had success with xwiki (it is infinitely robust, with work, possibly overkill), and I am currently enjoying Outline for that  kind of thing.

(I recently retired my last Nextcloud instance because it just doesn't deliver.  Which is a shame, I think there is a lot of need for a free and open self hosted Google Workspace alternative.)

Wow, not only is the OpenProject RPM for RHEL 9 over 500M in size, the "Source" field in the package  metadata is set to "None".

$ dnf --refresh repoquery \
> --repofrompath=openproject,https://packages.openproject.com/srv/rpm/opf/openproject/stable/17/el/9/x86_64/ \
> --disablerepo='*' --enablerepo='openproject' --latest=1 --info openproject
Added openproject repo from https://packages.openproject.com/srv/rpm/opf/openproject/stable/17/el/9/x86_64/
openproject                                                                                    3.3 kB/s | 3.7 kB     00:01    
Name         : openproject
Version      : 17.2.3
Release      : 1774941508.bcee06c.el9
Architecture : x86_64
Size         : 510 M
Source       : None
Repository   : openproject
Summary      : OpenProject
URL          : https://www.openproject.org
License      : GPL
Description  : OpenProject

Redmine https://www.redmine.org/ is quite serviceable: Fast, efficient UI, Wiki, and everything from your list AFAICT.

We've been using it at the office for >10 years, still pretty happy with it, even though/because they haven't done much "modernization".

So I’ve been kicking the tires on Affine Pro, and it seems like a reasonable alternative to Notion and other DIY project/wiki/knowledge management stuff. I wanted to ditch Notion for something self-hosted and it fit the bill. https://affine.pro

Downsides: Clear embrace of “AI”, VC backed, probable open-source license rug pull in the future.

I was hoping that someone would come up with something better than what I kludged together for this job, and, well, nope, so here goes. Actually, it works fine- I just don't know that it would scale to something like your use case

I use Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) to keep some folders in step between machines and phones. Runs on everything, seems to be open and as low-bullshit as can be. Setup is not zero-thought but nor is it command line +++.

Then we use Logseq (https://logseq.com/) to keep work coordinated- it's really a notes or 'knowledge management' app (it does parse Markdown, which I know was on the no list, but really that's just a fast way to make links and nest stuff in this case, so I thought I'd be brave and still mention it- double brackets make a new linked document, and there's the whole thing) but it has project management functions like scheduling and deadlines and assignments, can link and annotate other files and documents, etc.. It's a pretty open-ended framework, which has its ups and downs, but at the start of a week we'll just make some shared to-dos, assign some tasks, those tasks can be nested into lists, etc. Everything is in real text files on your machines.

Now, we have fewer people that I suspect are more often doing the same sort of work versus a club, but it's where we came down went asking similar questions.

I did not set this up, so I can't speak to this side, I just used it as a user - the thing was called Planka and it was essentially a knockoff Trello, I used it in a bike repair shop so: assigning tasks to workers, lots of details within the tasks, due dates, and in fact multiple due dates, we used it in a bit of a strange way, "due date" was repair finish date and we used task buckets to organize customer pickup and shipping dates, but that was more to do with what visually made sense on the screen to staff/mangement, not limitations of the software.

I believe everyone had an account, but due to the nature of the work it was mostly accessed from a few shared computers within the same workshop.

Not sure what if anything it can do on the shared document side, but I think a decent task tracker is harder to find.

I do use Nextcloud, but it's bloatware and its interface is atrocious and terribly slow. The WebDAV part (calendar and contacts) is mostly okay.

I'm fully aware that redmine has been mentioned in the past, but I'm going to make a quick case for it:

• Create and organize sets of documents.
  • This is the only part that I'm unsure about. If by "document" you mean "using its built in WYSIWYG editor to write stuff" (https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/RedmineDocuments) then yes
• Create tasks and assign them to people.
  • Yes
• Sometimes with due dates.
  • Yes
• In both of these things, edit text, with basic styling and inlined images, WYSIWYG, including from a phone.
  • Yes (see above)
• Attach things like PDFs.
  • Yes
• 100% locally hosted.
  • Yes
• Not paying a monthly fee to an unhinged fascist to keep my files on their computer.
  • Hell yes

I've used it last year to keep up with issues in a game project. VCS setup is optional and not front centre. It is not web 2.0 with fancy js widgets etc: you mostly get clickable links and then it does stuff when you click on them. I have not tried it on phones extensively but it seems functional. I'm running it locally on a rpi 5 and after some fiddling with ruby it now runs as a service on boot. It really is 0 maintenance for me - I might upgrade it yearly just for the sake of it but it really is not necessary for my workload.

Finally, you can try an online demo here.

This is so fucking infuriating. Tech has disappeared up its own arse fucking about with home automation dashboards and bots to read your email for you because you’re too “busy” spelunking in your colon to bother. Making good tools for people so they don’t have to give money to fascists? Nah, we all love the fascists too much for that kind of shit.

Software ate the world? Maybe. (More like finance didn’t John Perry Barlow-esque libertarians sure did eat software.

If your implicitly stated requirement that all this is one piece of software might be soft: I can heartily recommend "planka" for the task assignment/tracking part.

https://github.com/plankanban/planka

In reply to Mark Shane Hayden.

If there were two separate packages -- "document editing and nothing else" and "task tracking and nothing else", it might be worth my time to try and shoe-horn them together.

But I doubt either of those things exist.

Because I have waded near business-brain waters, the people who build such things seem temperamentally incapable of building tools that do not aspire to be operating systems in themselves.

In reply to Niels K..

I wish you well on your quest @jwz you might not be asking for much but considering the lack of useful replies suggests otherwise I dunno. I've been on a quest for something similar but so far what I've tried is infected with one or more of your "do not wants" so you have my sympathies.

@nielsk Odoo is a somewhat problematic flavour of "open core" rather than proper open source. The better alternative is the @tryton project that forked from it many years ago.

That said suggesting an ERP platform such as either of these for a fairly narrowly defined scope of task and document management functions seems like a mismatch to me. I am a long time Tryton user and its Project modules mostly fit the bill I would be reluctant to recommend it unless it was part of a broader system involving accounting, sales, inventory etc. Same goes for Odoo, as self hosting it could get quite involved too.

nextcloud is one of those things I use (for file sync only) because it's the least bad option I've seen, including the commercial services. It does seem like we're back in the "groupware" fad from 20 years ago, and the CADT mess still hasn't really improved, and if anything the corporates realised that was the bar and lowered their standards.

In reply to Niels K..

Red flags on the main site:

* "smart AI"
* "Open Source + AI = :heart:"
* "Native AI across your entire business"

Ive been using Nextcloud since it was Owncloud. For the most part I do in fact use it as infrastructure for other stuff. So contacts and calendar is accessed through Thunderbird or my phone (using Davx5 on android), and files are accessed by the desktop sync app syncing my Nextcloud folder to a folder on my desktop/laptop.

I dont use to do lists through it but I guess that'd work through Thunderbird and some to do app on my phone.

Delays of 20 seconds to respond is abnormal also.

In reply to Brian Campbell.

I guess technically open core.

Here's the comparison of the community (open source) edition vs the enterprise: https://www.odoo.com/page/editions

In reply to AstraLuma.

I mean, these days its more common to find projects that haven't at least dabbled in it, so I don't personally take it as a blocker, but more of a smell depending on how much it's relied on

In reply to jwz.

It is actually open source (LGPL). Their website just emphasized the paid SaaS version they offer. But it looks like the core and at least the vast majority of the apps that run on it are all in the open source repo: https://github.com/odoo/odoo