COMMUNITY
An initiative in its early days. We want to build it with and for the people on the ground (practitioners, engineers, developers, clients), to share what works and clear away what gets in the way.
A small group of practitioners who design the modules with us. Early access to the building blocks, monthly working sessions, a say in the roadmap.
First come, first served. You get the building blocks before anyone else, and a say in the roadmap.
No spam, nothing resold. One email a month at most, and only when we have something concrete to say.
Cabestian builds on open source tools proven by their own communities. You can see the stack, so you can check it. Nothing hidden behind a promise.
Online sessions: a real case, a test bench, feedback from the field. Short, free and open.
A problem from the site, a solution shared. Short, signed, dated. Proof of use counts for more than a promise.
Construction does not move forward on its own. We stick together, and we take the trade forward together.
On site there is no second chance. The tool has to hold, and when it holds badly you need to be able to repair it yourself.
The best blocks of tomorrow's construction will be shared ones. We would rather contribute to them than rent them.
Running a large model on your own machine. No API, no quota, no vendor policy that changes tomorrow.
Ollama installs and runs the open-weights models (Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma) on any recent computer: one command, and the model is ready to answer.
llama.cpp, underneath, is the C++ inference engine that made all of it possible. A community project, no venture capital, and now the block the rest of them rest on.
A meeting recorded, transcribed and summarised without a single word leaving the room. The opposite of Otter or Fireflies.
An app that records, transcribes and summarises your meetings, entirely locally. The audio file never leaves your machine, and neither does the summary.
No per-minute pricing, no data protection policy to negotiate, no monthly quota. The technology already existed: it just had to be made simple.
Dictating text anywhere on the Mac, locally. A layer of the operating system that ought to be native, and that exists thanks to one developer.
A macOS app that turns speech into text anywhere on the system: a keyboard shortcut, Whisper running locally, and that is it. No cloud, no account to create.
What should have been a native Apple feature, shipped by an independent developer. The best proof that a good idea and one motivated engineer are enough.
The app itself stays proprietary, but the plugin ecosystem is open. The community extensions are where the value is.
The Obsidian app itself is not open source, but its ecosystem of community plugins is, entirely.
Extended Graph, Dataview, Templater, Tasks and hundreds of others: each written by a user who saw a gap in their own practice. That is exactly what we want to build with the Cabestian community, for construction.
Forty years of production databases, run by a community with no vendor to buy out. The default standard.
An open source relational database since 1986. Today behind Apple, Instagram, Reddit and Bloomberg.
No single vendor to buy out, no locked SaaS, no licence cost per core.
Many vendors bill by the minute, by the user or by the model. For each one, a proven open source alternative you can host yourself, with no subscription.
Licences running into thousands of euros per seat.
Nothing equivalent to date, on the open source side.
Your audio goes to their servers. Monthly quota.
Recording, transcription and summary, entirely local.
Data hosted in the US. Priced per user.
Self-hostable team messaging, works on mobile.
Your notes on their cloud, in a proprietary format.
Local Markdown, open source plugin ecosystem.
SaaS CRM, priced per seat, data lock-in.
Self-hostable open source CRM, full export at any time.
Cost per token, vendor policy, data sent out.
Open-weights LLM on your machine, free, no quota.
Meetings hosted in the US, free plan capped at 40 minutes.
Self-hostable video, no account, end-to-end encryption available.
Documents on their cloud, indexed data.
Encrypted collaborative editing, Office-compatible formats.
For each need on site or in the office, a selection of proven open source projects. Not exhaustive: only the ones we have seen hold in production.
Control
Documents
Modelling
Inference
Meetings
Conversation
No promise of a finished product. We open a block once it is stable and useful to more than us.
Data models for French construction projects: contracts, site instructions, milestones, parties. An open, documented format.
Reusable field note templates: minutes, incident sheet, coordination memo. French versions, ready to adapt.
A community initiative modelled on ArcKit, adapted to the constraints of French construction projects. Getting started with its first contributors.
The detail of each block is built with the people who sign up. The first members have the say on the public roadmap and on what comes first.
Follow
Feedback from the field, upcoming sessions, blocks published: it all appears here, in the Field Notes, without noise.
Contribute
The schemas and templates open on GitHub as they stabilise. Issues and pull requests welcome.
Talk
The Sessions are free and open. A case, a benchmark, a debate, not a pitch.