Loomio
Mon 22 Jul 2019 11:18AM

My suite of tools working with Ouishare

MH Manel Heredero Public Seen by 133

Recently I have been making stock of the many digital tools I have been learning about and using intensively since I started my work with Ouishare in 2016. I thought it would be worth sharing here on Loomio with the hope that will give some sense to any new comers. It would be great if other Ouisharers shared their most useful tools here too :)

My Suite of tools

I am not making the case for one suite versus another suite. I am making the case for us choosing the best-of-type tools out there, and what "best" means changes from person to person and from team to team.
Here are the tools that make sense for me and in this particular period of time.

Loomio

Freemium
We use Gold [39 USD/month for up to 100 users]. This means as cheap as 3.9 USD/user/month…
I am not sure whether our network would even exist if it wasn't for Loomio, the platform we use for collaborative decision making. We are a distributed and emergent network, meaning there aren't bosses, so you can imagine how important it is for us to make decisions collaboratively, transparently and fast.

Google Docs and Slides

8 EUR/user/month for business edition.
At first I missed some of the functionality of Word and PowerPoint, but nothing beats how easy is to share and co-create reports or presentations with the Google Suite. To be honest with you, when I need a powerful spreadsheet (not very often), I still use Excel.

Microsoft Excel

Office 265 costs 8 USD/user month for businesses.
It has been around for a while, but MSExcel is still the industry standard. Long live the King of spreadsheets! But watch out, Airtable has been steadily displacing Excel in my work flow…

Typeform

Freemium (Free is more than enough for me)
I didn't realise this at first, but collecting data has turned out to be very important and useful. Here is an example to obtain feedback and this one to provide an experience.

MindMeister

Freemium. We use Business [13 EUR/user/month]
I am a big fan of this app to do our knowledge management. I use here the term 'management' for want of a better word. We generate, capture and share knowledge from the individual and share with openly with mindmaps, for anyone to explore and use at will.

Trello

Freemium - Free is enough for me.
Another tool that I could not live with. Agile team work on canvan is irrepleaceable. Full stop. By the way, in one of my projects we use Planner (the client is in the Microsoft jail) and it's just horrible.

Airtable

Freemium - Free is enough for me (so far)
This app totally blows my mind. It's something like a spreadsheet combined with a database, all in the cloud, very intuitive and it allows many integrations and automations. For now I only use it as a CRM, but I have big plans for building automations across our network.

Zapier

Freemium - Free is enough for me (so far)
I could not talk about Airtable without talking about Zapier, another amazing app which allows you to interconnected all these apps and automate the crap out of your workflow. I get notifications on Slack for stuff that matters to me and I create automations of the type "if this happens, then do this". I feel Zapier and Airtable are going to be very valuable to use in the near future.

Eventbrite

Fee per ticket, free for free events.
Organising events is complex enough on itself, so I really appreciate a tool like Eventbrite to simplify the ticketing part of it. Events could be something as small as an online workshop for 5 people. I find Eventbrite quite expensive for paid events (did it go up during last year?), but it's free for free events.

Pocket

Freemium - Free is enough for me
The flow of information is mind-boggling: great articles, ideas shared over coffee, people I follow on Twitter, tools people recommend, etc. I have an account with Pocket that allows me to save all those links on the fly - across devices of course. It is extremely useful for the monthly best-reads newsletter we send out.

Mailchimp

Freemium -I believe we have the Standard subscription at USD15/month
Dead-easy to use, Mailchimp is my mailing app of choice. I wonder how much longer will ti make sense to send out newsletters, but for the time being seems to be working fine. By the way, I was at a workshop the other day and one of the attendees, the youngest person of the group, told us that the only newsletter she reads is one that she receives on Whatsapp…

Slack

Freemium - We use standard [7.5 EUR/user/month]
In the last three years the number of emails received has decreased a LOT. I now communicate with a range of apps, and Slack is my prefered app for communications in a project. One thing I particularly like is that I can automate many important notifications on Slack channels, as opposed to by email.

Telegram

Freemium (I just discovered) - Free works for me
It's like Whatsapp but better. I use it for instant messaging and for light group discussions. Maybe it's becoming too popular in my network (meaning, there I some discussions that I think should be on Slack or Loomio instead).

Zoom

Freemium - We use the Pro version at £12 month/host
For me, the unrivalled platform for remote meetings. The free version was enough for a while but recently we had to admit we make intensive use of this tool, so we went Pro. Before buying the Pro subscription, we were also using Appear.in, which is very nimble and great for meetings with up to four people.

Inkscape and Gimp

Open Source
The open source equivalent to Illustrator and PhotoShop. Really really good tools!

Workflowy

Freemium - Free is more than enough for me
I use this tool to list my tasks. Dead simple and powerful. Before I was using Wonderlist for years but it was clear that Workflowy is better…

IDN

Isabelle Dubreuil Nayrac Mon 22 Jul 2019 12:30PM

Thanks Manel for sharing. As a new user of most of these tools, I can't add more. But I'm quite sure we'll have more. And I share your opinion about collecting data in our open organisations :ok_hand:

A

Alicia Mon 22 Jul 2019 8:44PM

OMG you forgot co-budget :laughing:

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Alicia Mon 22 Jul 2019 8:45PM

Maybe Miro one to be added soon?

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Alicia Tue 23 Jul 2019 12:56PM

...and sessionlab. Not relevant for most of our clients, but very useful for us.

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Ana Tue 23 Jul 2019 2:51PM

and google calendar :)))))
and framadate

DW

David Weingartner Fri 2 Aug 2019 2:35PM

Thanks @manelh ! Not a lot to add from my side, besides LastPass (password management), Evernote (my brain dump tool for diverse contexts, the search functionality makes it a killer app IMHO), Toggl (time tracking around various projects, clients, tasks) and Netflix (to decompress ;) )