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Introduction

Key concepts​

Monica aims to document someone's life. Your life is a series of events that happens to you, and a series of interactions with the people close to you, personally or professionally. By documenting what's happening to you, and what happens to others, we believe we can improve your's life greatly.

At its core, Monica has a few key concepts:

An account is what users sign up for when they register to Monica. It's the root element of Monica and contains everything needed to manage your data. The person who signs up for an account will be the first administrator of the account. You can add other administrators if you want in the future, but an account needs at least one administrator. You can also add other users who won't be administrators, thus reducing their privileges and preventing them to do damaging actions.

A vault hosts user's data – basically contacts, documents etc... An account can have as many vaults as needed. Vaults are private inside an account. This means that other users in the account, even if they are administrators of the account, can't read the data in a vault if there are not part of this vault. They can’t even see that the vault exists.

A contact is the core data of Monica. It's someone you know (or think you know). A contact lives inside a vault. Monica lets you document everything about this contact, including his/her social graph: children, family, and so on.

The idea is for you to create contact sheets for each of of the person you want to document in your life. Every piece of information you want to remember about the contact can then be added to the contact entry in Monica.

Core philosophy of the product​

Your life is unique to you. No one else in the entire universe has the same life and values that you have. This is why we have built Monica around the following values:

  • Inclusive: we do not discrimate on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status or sexual orientation. Everything we do in Monica supports this. Who are we to judge?
  • Customizable: we believe that every single piece of information in Monica should be customizable to your own taste. Whenever we can, we will let you personalize your experience based on what you live in your life.
  • Simple, yet powerful: the default experience should be easy to use for everyone, and anyone without any technical skills should be able to use the software. However, if you need more power, we will give you tools to bind Monica to your will.
  • Open: Monica is and always will be open source. Anyone can read the source code. Anyone can contribute to make the software better, but that doesn't mean we will accept every contribution. We deeply care about the experience we want to provide to our community, and sometimes, there are contributions that we don't want to support. It might piss you off, but please ask us before submitting something if you are not sure.
  • Also open: you can export your data at any time, in a free format. You will never be locked on our platform.
  • Private: Monica is for your eyes only. Your data belong to you. We don't serve ads, never have (for 7+ years) and never will. We haven't and won't sold your data to anyone.