Outliners everywhere!

I've long felt that every operating system and web browser should have a great outliner baked-in.

If you were going to try to do that today, you'd release it under the GPL written in JavaScript.

That's exactly what Concord is.

Dave Winer, 9/16/13.

Concord is an outliner

An outliner is a text editor that organizes information in a hierarchy, allowing users to control the level of detail and to reorganize according to structure. Your notes can have full detail, yet be organized so a casual reader can get a quick overview. Outlining is a great way for teams to organize work.

Written in JavaScript

It's a jQuery plug-in that implements a full-featured outliner that you can drop into other applications with a minimum of work.

It's the core of Fargo

Fargo is our browser-based outliner that hooks into Dropbox.

Concord is the outlining engine in Fargo.

GPL-licensed

Concord is licensed under the GPL because outliners are an incredibly useful way to edit structured information. We want Concord to be able to fill every conceivable need for outlining technology.

Ideas include file systems, mailboxes, chatrooms, databases, documents, presentations, product plans, code, libraries, laws, systems of laws, contracts, rules, guidelines, principles, docs, manifestos, journals, blogs, etc.

The GPL is the right license for our goals. We want to encourage developers to add features compatibly, so that all outlines open, and can be edited in all environments. If commercial developers want to add private features to the outliner, we will try to work with them. We just want to be sure we can have a conversation about compatibility, and perhaps create revenue to fund development. If a non-commercial project emerges that breaks compatibilty, because the GPL is used, we will have the option of bringing their work into compatibility.

Example 0: The bare minimum

This example has the bare minimum to add an outliner to an existing app.

You can try it out here.

Example 1: Hello Outliner

This example is a functional outliner, with most of the capabilities of the Little Outliner app and the same basic approach. You edit a single outline, saved in local storage, so it's there when you come back to it, but only on that machine.

It has a simple menubar, with menus containing Outliner commands, links to OPML documents you can view and edit, and links to docs.

You can try it out here.

Inaugural blog post

Here's the post I ran on Scripting News when Concord was publicly announced. It includes a link to a podcast.

Community

We have a Google Group mail list for technical support.