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.

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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:

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  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