dokieli needs your help
- Published
NLnet and the NGI programme have supported dokieli since early 2024, and that support changed what this project could do. We're genuinely grateful. Not in the obligatory-acknowledgements-section way, but in the “this is why the thing works now” way.
Here's what that funding made real:
- Replaced ageing core libraries and modularised key components so dokieli's building blocks (annotations, notifications, sharing) can be reused by anyone.
- Improved the UI and expanded test coverage, including accessibility tests. Usable and accessible for all isn't a tagline, it's a test suite.
- Better offline support, security audits, and a rewrite of the browser extension on modern standards.
- Real-time collaborative editing, internationalisation, and end-to-end encryption work for private collaboration.
- And throughout: implementing open web standards and feeding implementation experience back to the standards bodies, so the whole web benefits, not just dokieli.
All of it free and open source. All of it storing your content where you choose, in open formats you can walk away with.
Thanks to that funding, the project is healthy and the work ahead is clear. But the funding will soon run its course, and to keep going and keep paying the bills, we need additional support.
Imagine publishing the way the web was meant to work: you write in your browser and publish at an address you own, on storage you control, under an identity that is yours. Your articles, annotations, and conversations live where you put them, in open formats any application can read, and they outlive every app that touches them. Switching tools costs you nothing, because nothing of yours lives inside the tool. Two projects get us there:
- A decentralised content management and knowledge organisation system. If you publish on the decentralised web today, your articles, annotations, and social interactions end up scattered across storages with no unified way to manage them. We want to build a dashboard that brings them together: browse and organise resources across your own storages, tag and link articles, explore them as a visual knowledge graph, publish with feeds and announcements, export a static site, archive, and search across all of it, with accessibility checking built into the writing process, not bolted on after. Everything on open standards, everything in storage you own. (Roadmap: knowledge organisation.)
- Social fact-checking. The web has no built-in way to trace a claim to its source or judge that source's credibility. Building on dokieli's annotation and notification plumbing, we want a browser extension that offers contextual insights on any page: flagging missing citations and unsupported claims, cross-referencing trusted open sources like Wikidata and the Nanopublication network, and letting readers request reviews from domain experts, with humans making the final call, out in the open, on the record. We presented an early demo at the W3C Authentic Web Workshop. We don't think we need to explain why this matters in 2026. (Roadmap: credibility assessment.)
We think this work is necessary, and we intend to build it: publishing on the web you own shouldn't require sysadmin skills, and checking facts shouldn't belong to platforms.
We're also working on a business model, because grants and donations alone won't sustain this work forever. It's taking time, on purpose: we believe it is possible to run an honest company, with a business model that doesn't exploit people, lock in their data, or sell their attention. Getting that right matters more to us than getting it fast. Stay tuned.
So we're asking directly: if dokieli matters to you, as a person, a project, or a company that builds on the open web, support us on Open Collective. Recurring contributions help most; they're what turn “keep the lights on” into “build the thing.” Companies/organizations/institutions: reach out, we'd love to talk.
NLnet got us this far. Help us take it from here.
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