MantaDocs

What it does

MantaDocs is a decentralized knowledge workspace that lets you create, organize and collaborate on rich documents. From planning your next vacation, to sharing ideas across your team. MantaDocs has you covered.

Create beautiful documents and organize them in workspaces of your own where you can keep private or make them public so others can join in and collaborate. Discover interesting public workspaces that you can join to see, learn and contribute.

Features

• Intuitive user experience makes setup, creation, and discovery easy.
• Compose and style documents on a modern rich text editor.
• Workspaces keeps your documents well organized.
• Control access through private and public workspaces.
• Accessible on both desktop and mobile web browser.

Inspiration

The project was inspired by Confluence, an enterprise platform for teams to manage work. We loved the idea of collaboration through documents and being able to keep ideas and work documented all in one place. At the same time, we also wanted to be able to safely store our private notes that only we can see and access and is available throughout our lifetime regardless of which organization we are attached to. We came up with MantaDocs, a simplified and focused platform that supports both private and public spaces so we can have the best of both worlds. We went further to make workspaces not just accessible to who we invite, but to everyone on MantaDocs through a discovery feature.

How we built it

MantaDocs is built for the Internet Computer blockchain and consists of two canisters: a frontend application for the UX and the backend for managing the applications core storage. The frontend is developed with React, and the backend modules are written in the native Mokoto language. On the storage, we keep three key-value store segments which are Documents, Workspaces and Members. The documents and workspaces store are self-explanatory, and the members store is used to keep track of workspace members and is updated whenever people join or leaves a workspace.

Challenges we ran into

As this is the first time developing for Internet Computer, we had no knowledge on Mokoto and had to learn from the start. Fortunately the learning curve was not very steep with the help of documentations and resources. However, we had hoped that more of the showcase projects were open source and had Github links so we could learn more by examples which would have reduced some trial and errors. Nevertheless, we were able to complete the MVC in time and were really happy to learn a new language.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

At first we set out to make something really simple, just a tool that lets you write rich documents and save them privately. Then we added the concept of Workspaces for better organization. Later we introduced visibility on workspace where we can set them private or public and finally made it possible to discover public workspaces across the application. While working on this project, we were so passionate that we kept working to make the project better than we initially intended or thought we could achieve. We are proud with of being able to produce a prototype that has all the features we imagined.

Built With

• mokoto
• react