How Docs gets built
Docs is an open-source project (the code is open and reusable) and a digital commons (a community contributes, and various stakeholders fund and decide on developments).
Today, it is mainly stakeholders who participate:
DINUM 🇫🇷 = Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (Direction Interministérielle du Numérique)
ZenDiS 🇩🇪 = Center for Digital Sovereignty (Zentrum für Digitale Souveränität)
MinBZK 🇳🇱 = Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties)
EC 🇪🇺 = European Commission (Commission Européenne)
Docs is built on open-source libraries, some of which are listed as "dependencies" in the feature list below because that is where development is needed to offer them to Docs users.
Our most important dependencies are:
Name | Origin | Maturity | ⬇️ / month | Funded by Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
🇬🇧 | Very mature, created in 2011, considered feature-complete by its maintainers, maintenance focused on stability and Django/Python compatibility | ~ 28 M | No | |
🇺🇸 | Mature, launched in 2016, maintained by Vercel, widely adopted in production, but rapid evolution (structural changes between major versions) | ~ 165 M | No | |
🇳🇱 | Young, recent project under active development, API still evolving, growing community. Maintained by a small team of 3 developers. | ~ 1.5 M | Yes (🇫🇷, 🇩🇪, 🇪🇺) | |
🇩🇪 | Mature, reference for CRDTs in collaborative editing, stable, production-tested by many products. Maintained by a single developer. | ~ 25 M | Yes (🇫🇷, 🇩🇪, 🇪🇺) | |
🇳🇱 | Emerging, very active development (v1.20.0 released late June 2026), but format coverage still partial. Maintained by a single developer. | N/A | Yes (🇫🇷, 🇪🇺) |
It is possible and desirable to work directly with these maintainers. This benefits the entire commons ecosystem because this is how we build commons (WeMakeCommons 🔗).
We presented at FOSDEM a playbook to do it right, you can view the conference video and read the playbook. Feel free to draw inspiration from it and share your feedback.
S1 = Semester 1 | S2 = Semester 2 | ✅ = Completed 🌀 = In Progress
An Issue is a ticket on GitHub, the platform where we work on the Docs code.
Contribute to Docs!
💡 We are seeking funding to develop the following features 👇
View, accept, or reject AI suggestions using the AI toolbar
Make the Docs editor fully accessible
Check document length with the word counter
Insert special characters using the "Symbols" menu
Automate edits with find and replace
Work offline without losing your changes
Publish a document on the web
Lock a document to a version by blocking edits
Embed interactive content (iframes) using embed blocks
Find your documents more easily with tags
Want to help shape what's next?
Open an issue, join the discussion, or fund a feature your organization needs.