Awesome

mindwendel

Create a challenge. Ready? Brainstorm. mindwendel helps you to easily brainstorm and upvote ideas and thoughts within your team. Built from scratch with Phoenix.

mindwendel

Features

5 minute setup (It is not a joke)
Anonymously invite people to your brainstormings - no registration needed. Usernames are optional!
Easily create and upvote ideas, with live updates from your mindwendel members
Cluster or filter your ideas with custom labels
Preview of links to ease URL sharing
Add automatically encrypted file attachments which are uploaded to an S3 compatible storage backend
Add lanes, use drag & drop to order ideas
Add comments to ideas
Export your generated ideas to html or csv (currently comma separated)
German & English Translation files
By default, brainstormings are deleted after 30 days to ensure GDPR compliancy

Use-cases

Brainstorm ...

... new business ideas
... solutions for a problem
... what to eat tonight
...

Getting Started

mindwendel can be run just about anywhere. So checkout our Installation Guides for detailed instructions for various deployments. The easiest way to deploy and run mindwendel is using our own docker-compose-prod.yml file. For instructions, see Setup for Production. If you want to contribute, jump ahead to Development!

Contributing

To get started with a development installation of mindwendel, follow the instructions below.

mindwendel is built on top of:

Workflow

Fork it (https://github.com/mindwendel/mindwendel/fork)
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b fooBar)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some fooBar')
Push to the branch (git push origin fooBar)
Create a new Pull Request

Development

Startup docker compose setup
```
docker compose up --build -d
```
Setup the database
```
docker compose exec app mix ecto.setup
```
Start the server

  docker compose exec app mix phx.server

Go to http://localhost:4000/
Open you favorite editor and start developing
Open a shell in the docker container to execute tests, etc.
```
docker compose exec app bash
```
Go to http://localhost:4000/

Localization

You can extract new strings to translate by running:

mix gettext.extract --merge

Testing

Startup docker compose setup
```
docker compose up --build -d
```
Run the test
```
docker compose exec app mix test
```

Setup for Production

Generate self-signed ssl sertificate for the postgres server on the host machine; the generated files are mounted into the docker container

mkdir -p ./ca
openssl req -new -text -passout pass:abcd -subj /CN=localhost -out ./ca/server.req -keyout ./ca/privkey.pem
openssl rsa -in ./ca/privkey.pem -passin pass:abcd -out ./ca/server.key
openssl req -x509 -in ./ca/server.req -text -key ./ca/server.key -out ./ca/server.crt
chmod 600 ./ca/server.key
test $(uname -s) = Linux && chown 70 ./ca/server.key

Duplicate and rename .env.prod.default
```
cp .env.prod.default .env.prod
```
Adjust all configs in .env.prod, e.g. database settings, ports, disable ssl env vars if necessary

Start everything at once (including a forced build):

docker compose --file docker-compose-prod.yml --env-file .env.prod up -d --build --force-recreate

Open the browser and go to http://${URL_HOST}

Note

The url has to match the env var URL_HOST; so http://localhost will not work when your URL_HOST=0.0.0.0
The mindwendel production configuration is setup to enforce ssl, see Mindwendel.Endpoint configuration in config/prod.exs
The mindwendel production configuration supports deployment behind a reverse porxy (load balancer) by parsing the proper protocol from the x-forwarded-* header of incoming requests, see config/prod.exs
If you are having troubles during setup, please raise an issue.

Build release and production docker image

Build the docker image based on our Dockerfile
```
docker build -t mindwendel_prod .
```

Formatting

We are using Elixir's built-in formatter.

Check if the code is properly formatted
```
mix format --check-formatted
```
Automatically format the code
```
mix format
```

Feature flags

Privacy and automatic data removal

Mindwendel includes a job runner that deletes old brainstormings after a defined number of days. This can be controlled with the setting MW_FEATURE_BRAINSTORMING_REMOVAL_AFTER_DAYS, which can be set to for instance to 30.

File Storage

File storage is available through an s3 compatible object storage backend. An encryption key (VAULT_ENCRYPTION_KEY_BASE64) needs to be generated before, e.g.:

iex
32 |> :crypto.strong_rand_bytes() |> Base.encode64()

openssl rand -base64 32

Then, object storage and the vault key need to be set:

OBJECT_STORAGE_BUCKET: mindwendel
OBJECT_STORAGE_SCHEME: "http://"
OBJECT_STORAGE_HOST: minio
OBJECT_STORAGE_PORT: 9000
OBJECT_STORAGE_REGION: local
OBJECT_STORAGE_USER: ...
OBJECT_STORAGE_PASSWORD: ...
VAULT_ENCRYPTION_KEY_BASE64: ...

There is an example given inside the docker-compose.yml with a docker compose minio setup.

To deactivate file storage, use MW_FEATURE_IDEA_FILE_UPLOAD (defaults to true) and set it to false.

Brainstorming teasers

If you want to display some teasers and help for your brainstorming, use MW_FEATURE_BRAINSTORMING_TEASER and set it to true.

Localization

Currently, there are two language files available, german (de) and english (en). To set the default_locale, you can set MW_DEFAULT_LOCALE. The default is english.

Testimonials

kits is a project platform hosted by a public institution for quality development in schools (Lower Saxony, Germany) and focusses on digital tools and media in language teaching. mindwendel is used in workshops to activate prior knowledge, and collect and structure ideas. In addition, mindwendel can be found on https://kits.blog/tools and can be used by schools for free. More info on how to use it can be found in this post https://kits.blog/digitale-lesestrategien-brainstorming/

Logos and text provided with courtesy of kits.

Acknowledgements

https://github.com/JannikStreek
https://github.com/gerardo-navarro
https://github.com/nwittstruck
Lightbulb stock image by LED Supermarket at Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/de-de/foto/die-gluhbirne-577514/

Image Licenses

Lightbulb, Pexels / CC0: https://www.pexels.com/license/, https://www.pexels.com/terms-of-service/
GitHub Logo: https://github.com/logos