I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.
— Socrates
Athens is an open-source and local-first alternative to Roam Research. Athens lets you take notes with minimal systems, structure, and organization, freeing you to stay creative and in flow state.
Athens is a desktop app that stores all your data locally and privately on your local filesystem.
Athens is free for individuals to self-host.
If you want to try Athens, you have a few options:
- Build yourself locally via the directions in Contributing (and consider contributing!).
- Sponsor the project on OpenCollective to receive the beta today.
- Join the Waitlist to get in line to use Athens.
Some tips once you've got Athens:
Our Discord community is a space for collaboration and learning (especially about Clojure!).
Every Sunday we have a Community Call at 11am Pacific.
We chat about other Tools for Thought, graph visualizations, graph DBs, decentralized DBs, blockchains, open protocols, knowledge markets, education, philosophy, and governance.
We also love Future of Coding topics such as visual programming, live programming, local first apps, end-user programming, programming language theory, HCI, AR / VR / spatial software, AI / ML, and so on and so forth.
Ultimately, however, we recognize technology does not exist in a vaccum. Technology shapes society as much as vice versa. There are never no externalities. If you are interested in "sensemaking" towards a better world, please join us!
To learn more about this project, please see:
- Our Notion — helpful docs like tutorials, updates, meeting notes
- Vision — individual and collective memexes — computing and the Web as originally promised
- Governance — BD + Core Team + Guardians + Athenians
- Code of Conduct — our values and guidelines, AKA how to be an awesome Athenian
