Collectives

• Collectives
• Getting started
• How to onboard your team
• Access Markdown files

Collectives

Your space to collaboratively write and organize. Collectives is designed for groups and communities to structure shared knowledge.

• Getting started
• How to onboard your team
• Access Markdown files

Getting started

Think of Collectives as your space to take notes together and collaborate online. You and your peers can write documents collaboratively and structure your shared knowledge. You can even embed task boards, whiteboards and calendars. Collectives emphasizes horizontal and non-hierarchical workflows.

Why use Collectives?

• You need a tool to collaborate, cowork or organize with others.
• You want all your shared knowledge in one place.
• You want a quick and easy overview of your pages and subpages.
• You want to share parts of the knowledge with external people.
• You already use Nextcloud.

First steps

You will create your first collective with two pages and a link from one to the other. It expects that you open Collectives in a desktop browser (i.e. not on mobile).

1. Select the Collectives app in the app menu on the top:

   

2. Click on “New collective”.

3. Enter the name My first collective and choose an emoji (or keep the preselected one).

4. Select “Create without members”. We’ll learn how to add other members later.

5. In the page list on the left, click the ➕ button next to the landing page. Congratulations, you just created a first page in your collective. 🎉

6. Give the page a title by typing My first page.

7. Now press Enter and the cursor will jump to the (still empty) page content.

8. Type ## My first heading to insert a second-level heading. Alternatively you can open the headings menu in the editor toolbar, select “Heading 2” and then type My first heading. You just learned that there’s more than way to format text 🎉

9. Create a subpage of “My first page” by clicking the ➕ button next to “My first page” in the page sidebar. The button will only appear once you hover the mouse cursor over the entry in the page list.

10. Give the subpage a title by typing “My subpage”.

11. Add a link from to the first page by opening the 🔗 link menu in the editor toolbar and selecting “Link to page”. A dialogue to select the page will open. Type first in the search field and “My first page” will appear. Click on it and it will be added as a link preview to the subpage.

Congratulations, you learned two important basics when working with Collectives: how to create and link between pages and how to format content in a page.

What's next

• To learn how to use Collectives in your team, see How to onboard your team.
• For an overview over features, see here.

How to onboard your team

Our first project: Introductions

Step 1: Create an “Introductions” parent page 📃

1. Click on the ➕ button next to the collective name in the sidebar on the left hand side of Collectives.
2. A new page is created. We can use this page as a parent page for our introductions! Let's fill it with some nice introductory words for visitors and give it the title Introductions.

Step 2: Create an “Introduction”-template together 👥

1. It can be nice and more accessible, when all introductions follow the same format! Everyone should add a picture, a brief description and answer what they like about collective organizing. Collectives makes this very easy. We quickly create a template with exactly this content, so that everyone who onboards can answer easily.
2. Click the … button next to your collective. Choose "Manage templates", then "Add a template". Collectives now adds a page for you to fill, which later can be easily and accessibly copied for everyone who wants to create an introduction.
3. Give your template the title Introduction. Now add your fields as simple text to your document - don't forget to decide on them collectively! By pressing on the Tt button in the formatting toolbar, you can format your new text as headings!
4. When you're finished, just press the Close button - your template will be automatically saved and you should be back in your template manager.
5. Let’s add a fun emoji for our new template last. Click the … button next to your new template and click choose emoji…. Afterwards you can close the template manager.

Step 3: Everyone creates their own! 💫

1. This is where the magic happens 🪄! Everyone on their own computers now! Click the ➕ button next to your "Introductions" page that we created in step one. Select the "Introductions" template. Title the page with your name or nick and fill out the fields your decided on!
2. Wow! We just quickly created a cohesive and unifying "Introductions" page in our collective. Becoming part of your collective will be much less scary now for new members! Congratulations! 🎉

Access Markdown files

The pages of your collectives are stored in Markdown files. You can access them via the Files app. Per default, the folder is hidden as it's called .Collectives (or a translated version of it). To access the hidden folder, enable "Show hidden files" in the Files app settings.

You can also change the name of the folder in the Collectives app settings. The setting is located in the Collectives app at the bottom of the collectives list. If you want the folder to be visible permanently without showing other hidden files, set the folder setting to a name without leading dot (e.g. Collectives). Please note that this is a per-user setting, it only affects the Collectives user folder for the current user.