ticket tracking and wiki software for household management?

February 5, 2018 9:10 PM

My fiancee and I would like to set up a private, but Internet-accessible instance of some ticket-tracking and wiki software for communicating and documenting household stuff with my fiancee. Both because it'll help each of us remember things better, but also to help share work more equitably. I especially care about this because I expect it'll be an uphill battle once we have kids for me to stay involved (and be seen by others to be involved).

In the short term, we're trying to work together on a wedding and a new apartment. It'd be great if we could have, e.g, tickets for each of the places we're supposed to see and wiki pages with our neighborhood research. Right now we're just emailing each other and it's already getting out of hand.

Longer term, I'm also concerned about maintaining an equitable division of labor. What I've seen is that any initial advantage in a couple gets magnified because it's always in each individual instance easier for the slightly better prepared person to do the thing. And that's before we get to the part where schools always call the mother first. I want to make it easy to hand tasks off, and easy for either person to see the current state, as well as any accumulated knowledge. We're willing to put non-trivial time into documenting things to make this happen.

Anyway, I'm looking for something with a web interface, which could either be hosted for me or which I could host on a cheap EC2 or whatever instance. A plain-text, markup-based editor is a must. Bonus points if the web interface has keybindings, bonus points if it has an Android client, extra super bonus points if it has an Emacs client. Gmail and Gcal integration would be great.

posted by meaty shoe puppet to Technology (8 answers total)

Basecamp is an online project management system. It'll be free for your scale, and allows you to share files, multiple to-do lists, that sort of thing. If you can think of the wedding as a project, it'll allow you to create and assign (and transfer as needed) to-do lists, include other people either to everyone or as needed (so you can add your parents, siblings, and bridesmaids/groomsmen/ringbearers etc.)

There are phone apps for it as well as being web-accessible everywhere, and it'll email anyone who doesn't have access to the main project area.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:35 PM on February 5, 2018

I've been getting ads on Facebook for AirTable - if I had a need for organizing beyond a hand-written checklist, I would probably use it.
posted by Toddles at 3:36 AM on February 6, 2018

I'd recommend Trello or Asana for something simple and without ceremony.
posted by lalunamel at 6:10 AM on February 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Freedcamp looks pretty great for this sort of thing, but I haven't used it. I adopted Airtable this weekend and LOVE it, but it's not going to get you the Wiki part. It would excel (haha spreadsheet pun) at the ticket part though.

You might also consider Evernote or Onenote. Neither works great as a ticket system, but you can do separate notes for each apartment and for various parts of the wedding, and all of the notes can be linked together.

Few (none?) of these gets to your need for plain text or Emacs. Sorry!
posted by cnc at 12:15 PM on February 6, 2018

I'd definitely recommend Trello. Doesn't have Wiki functionality, but I find the Board/List/Card hierarchy provides PLENTY of opportunity for discussion, editing, and back-and-forth. It's also got file upload functionality (for images, text files, etc.). My husband and I use it for your purposes, as well as issue-tracking for web design/development, to give you a sense of its flexibility.

It's also pretty much the gold standard for user experience/cross-device compatibility. Great app.
posted by nosila at 1:54 PM on February 6, 2018

Best answer: Maybe a private project on Bitbucket? Their wiki is just another git repository which checks your Emacs wish, while your wife can edit stuff in the web. They do have an issue tracker as well.
posted by aeighty at 4:15 PM on February 6, 2018

Nthing Trello - for the wiki purpose, I create a list within each board called Notes where I track misc info. It's not organized like a wiki or anything, but it seems like for your purposes it would be sufficient - if you have a board for apartment searching, you could have a card for each potential option and make comments on it, schedule viewings, etc. Your Notes list could hold a card for each neighborhood with details in description/comments/files.

You might consider using multiple tools - some things, like a wedding or finding an apartment, are essentially large projects, so a project management tool like Trello or Asana is useful. For things with kids in the future, a wiki tool (or other notetaking app like onenote/evernote) might be more helpful for keeping a shared source of information versus accomplishing an overarching goal.

Or since it sounds like you're pretty knowledgeable, you might also look into ways people have customized open-source wiki options and see if you could manipulate it to serve your project management needs as well.
posted by jouir at 1:57 PM on February 7, 2018

Response by poster: It turns out the fiancee uses bitbucket at work, so we ended up creating a private repo there. That way at least one of us can hit the ground running.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 2:53 PM on March 5, 2018