Introducing The Fieldbook

This site runs on the source-available Fieldbook codebase (opens in a new tab). I started building it because I wanted a simpler way for teams to manage their learning and knowledge. Sometimes helping people learn means explaining what changed. Sometimes it means teaching someone how to do something in a structured way. And often it means organizing reliable information people can come back to. I wanted those things to live together in an application I’d enjoy using.

I believe great software should be fast, delightful, and opinionated. I’ve been an admin and user of many of the leading learning and knowledge systems for well over a decade, and in my experience, many fall short of that standard. I want to try to build something that meets it. The Fieldbook is my attempt to make something simple and useful to start, we'll see where we go from here.

Minimum viable structure

The Fieldbook has three kinds of content. Updates share changes, news, and perspective. Courses teach through lessons and knowledge checks. Docs hold reference material that can be organized and easily maintained.

Authors create and publish content in a simple, Notion-style editor. Managers can see who on their team is staying up to date on assignments, and admins have a clean panel for managing the platform.

The Fieldbook also supports Ask AI to ask questions about published content, and has an MCP connection so Claude or ChatGPT can work with Fieldbook, including creating and updating content.

I expect The Fieldbook to be most useful to smaller teams that want a straightforward way to share what they know and help people learn.

Self-hosting, for free

Larger SaaS learning systems have their place, and I don't want to disparage them. The come with features and support that are necessary for many larger organizations. I wanted to make a smaller, more opinionated option for teams that is comfortable hosting and managing their own tools.

The initial out of the box setup uses Vercel to run the app, Supabase for data, accounts, and private files, and Google sign-in. An organization brings its own accounts and manages its own content and data, along with the service costs and upkeep of its installation.

With go-to-market engineering and AI agents, it’s becoming easier for teams to shape software around how they actually work. I think we’ll see more homegrown projects made publicly available for people to run themselves, and I’d like The Fieldbook to be part of that.

The Fieldbook’s code (opens in a new tab) is source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 (opens in a new tab). Teams can use and modify it for their own installations for free; the license essentially only restricts offering The Fieldbook to others as a hosted or managed service.

What's next?

There’s more I’d like to build:

• Portability. Make The Fieldbook easier to run on platforms like DigitalOcean and Netlify, with other database options such as Neon. I also want to support Microsoft identity and Okta so teams can use the accounts and sign-in providers they already have.
• Interactivity. Add voice AI role plays for rehearsing conversations, along with simple, elegant interactions within the course player.
• Notifications. This is the biggest gap in The Fieldbook today. I’ve already started working on Slack notifications, and I want to make it easy for organizations to set up email notifications as well.
• Collaboration. Authors should be able to work together in a draft to shape content. I already have the foundations for this, and it’s something I hope to ship eventually.

For now, I’m building the version I want to use and will see where it leads. I hope you find it useful, and if you do, I’d love to hear from you.

— Joe