Good intro video of Obsidian and using it for Zettelkasten approach to note taking and content creation.
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Adding to a comment I posted under a different topic:
The first steps would be
a) to develop a kind of ‘evaluation aspects tree’ against which the tools can be compared; and
b) to start a discussion focused on a proposal for actual action recommendation (below) structured loosely according to the ‘pilot’ system I proposed in the “P D S S _ R E V I S E D” paper on Academia.edu. (We can start with an unstructured discussion first , I can try to map, condense and organize it). Bringing it to a preliminary agreement by participants, following some degree of thorough evaluation. This material could then be used to see whiter and how the indifferent platform candidates might accommodate such a discourse.
Here’s the other post:
I feel the need to repeat my earlier comment on the structure of this effort.
I see it as a well-intentioned effort to ‘get ready for the needed change’ in how humanity is running things. And a well-intentioned effort to collect ‘all’ helpful information available for that purpose.
My question is: How is the conceptual conceptually different from the encyclopedias, from Diderot to Wikipedia? It has to be done either according to some 'ontology – a classification – or without that, relying on the computing/ search power of the query system to find everything by ‘key word’ or equivalent. The inadequacy of that approach can be assessed by looking at the obvious perceived need to constantly develop yet another such collection – because the previous ones just became too clumsy to work with, just by beaming more all-inclusive. Some recent examples are the Systems Community of Inquiry blog / page by Benjamin Taylor (https://stream.syscoi.com/) compiling interesting work on systems, or Dmitry Sokolov’s amazing effort to compile all potentially helpful information for the same purpose: his LikeInMind project (https://www.facebook.com/groups/LikeInMind/ or http://confocal-manawatu.pbworks.com). Though intending to stimulate discourse, neither one is generation much in the way of comments or discussion. Any ‘new’ effort to actually achieve a more ‘action’-oriented outcome then feels the same need to start compiling documented work. (Debategraph and some other efforts tried to follow this advice, and there should be more discussion about how to do that better.)
Rittel’s still under-appreciated insight was that information systems aiming to support planning and policy-making should be organized to support the argumentative process of these activities – according to ISSUES (i.e. controversial questions) arising from the argumentative discussion of prelims to be remedied and proposals to do that.
To the extent the OGM effort actually hopes to achieve or influence real action on the problems humanity, it is my opinion and urgent advice to start discussions on actual, specific problems and proposals, aiming at producing recommendations for actual decision-makers to implement as ‘global agreements’. As for the ‘global’ ambition of this, would it be useful to start with an issue of interest to a ‘non-western’ community or culture with very different conceptual and philosophical perspectives about such issues – to overcome the likely objection of yet another ‘colonialist’ (this one overlaying the western outlook with the presumably more global ‘systems’ claim?) Just asking.
Hey, let me very briefly offer another option proposed by the early hypertext pioneers: you could use ontologies/semantics to supply/feed user interfaces for augmentation (to augment/extend our limited natural human capabilities), in order to organize and navigate the material and also have powerful controls for curation and manipulation. Then there’s no need to get terribly stuck or confused on ontologies, taxonomies, argument/debate “mapping”, the reasoning/AI/inference business, knowledge graphs, paper simulation, or other similar more popular paradigms of today. The example could be more of what you need for focus and situational awareness in the cockpit instruments of a fighter jet for that kind of split-second or high-efficiency performance, or as found in some games, just in this case for the purpose of analyzing complex, urgent problems or coordinating large-scale group collaboration.
I don’t know if OGM cares much about this approach in particular or where you possibly could find such tooling anywhere on offer available to us, it’s also somewhat still early days and in a research stage, as there have been prior examples of this, and for sure businesses, finance, governments, the military has such machinery in use, wonder if the general population can get some too or has to remain stuck on the bad Web stuff, which is good for developing online shops and games, but of little use for OGM-type concepts.
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Just to clarify: I did not get a good idea of the ‘approach’ you are advocating – do you have a specific product in mind we might use, or is it a general, more general ‘strategy’ proposal? What come to my mind, as a result of you analogy of a fighter jet situation, is some sophisticated simulation game program – like the ones used for training pilots. Would such a tool have to rely of specific context data, or could there be a ‘general-purpose’ version?
Personally, I have been worrying primarily on the design of platforms and methods supporting planning / policy-making discourse for decisions that must consider 'distributed information and thus require wide (initially unspecified) participation. But I have always emphasized that there will be, in any community small or global, emergency-type situations that call for fast decisions by people designated – empowered – to make such decisions. (one specific problems I am worried about is how to keep people in such situations to be addicted to their power, and how to keep them from getting tempted to abuse it).
A common take is to say that such decisions will rely on ‘intuition’. But isn’t reliable intuition – for such situations as may occur in a fighter jet cockpit – the result of intensive training? That is, being exposed to many real or simulated situations in which such decisions are called for, but accompanied by equally extensive ‘discourse-type’’ information about the kinds of situations, the forces involved, the expected results of different responses, etc.?
That knowledge can then be incorporated in the ‘simulation games’, responding to the human 'player’s actions with realistic instant consequence simulations: the game program uses (known) knowledge ‘augmented’ by its superior computing speed, to simulate the actions of a human or equally augmented artificial ‘opponent’?
Is this what you have in mind with your suggestion?
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Reliable intuition as the result of training sounds correct to me. My experience of my own intuitions is that they appear as a voice off to the side whispering “Pssst! I have an important message for you.” It is easy to ignore the whispering.
Thanks for asking, I’m all for clarifying and avoiding/reducing confusion and misunderstanding! 
You’re right, it’s not a particular contemporary product, because I’m not positive if such one exists or is generally offered somewhere, but there are a bunch of candidates and examples which can provide some sense of how such a thing could look like. So it’s more of a general strategy/approach, still to be built as one or several products, but it’s also about a larger, wider support infrastructure, not just individual consumer packages, if you want. If our job would be to fly a fighter yet, we would want the cockpit instruments, simulators, air traffic + ground control, intelligence, R&D, logistics, etc. to pull off such a complex task well. Now, surely, that analogy has its limits as our sensemaking and global mind is not about flying through the air at top speed somewhere or about physical machinery, but mind amplification for aiding the intellect and understanding with navigating effectively though a flood of information. I’m a little bit worried that an open group like this is well equipped and trained with such tasks, to achieve such ambitious goals.
So if OGM is (maybe just in part) anticipated to enter into large-scale sensemaking and StoryThreading and systems analysis practices/services, what would be an/the adequate simulator if we would want to start with taking lessons now/soon?
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I still have this bookmarked to reply, Rob. But in the meantime, I wanted to share this:
So here is a tool I’m building for several groups that have similar needs to rank and compare attributes of entities, from tools to software to politicians, organizations, companies etc… It might be able to be applied to this need.
I have a question about the tools listed. Do they allow for easy interoperability between each other? More concretely, if I have a data set in Scapple how hard / easy would be to export the data and import it into Kumu? Fundamentally all these tools operate with graphical (as in graph theory with nodes and edges) data structures with annotated nodes and edges so in theory they should all be interoperable but I haven’t used any of them so has anyone tried the experiment?
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Tricky stuff @davidk01 - Obsidian uses Markdown files as the underlying storage, so that is somewhat portable. Links are expressed with square brackets.
Many mind-map tools export Markdown. Many tools export JSON format.
But whether a second tool correctly interprets the JSON is a whole different thing.
I think Markdown (text files) maximizes your chances but the more graphical a tool is, the less likely that the graphical features are retained. Others would have to talk about Kumu.
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Scapple files are XML, so in theory not rocket science to migrate, esp if you care mostly about node-text and links, and less about styles and physical/visual placement, etc.
<Note ID="5" FontSize="12.0" Position="522.859375,156.347656" Width="49.0">
<Appearance>
<Alignment>Left</Alignment>
</Appearance>
<String>Garden</String>
<ConnectedNoteIDs>0, 25</ConnectedNoteIDs>
</Note>@peterkaminski @Jerry and other Brain users…
Check out v12 that just dropped, total game changer for The Brain! Adds many features from Roam/Obsidian.
Jerry, you may be running an older version of The Brain given your web publishing needs, but you might want to check out v12.
Here are their release notes: https://www.thebrain.com/blog/version-12-beta
Cheers,
Rob.
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Hmm, interesting Rob, thanks!
Still doesn’t tempt me enough to really try TheBrain, though, I think. But it does add to the reasons why I should.
Oh, i thought you already were a Brain user, that was why I tagged you. Must have been confused with someone else!
Aaaaaalmost upgraded to v12 just now, but don’t want to destabilize my Brain b4 the election
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As I have been with The Brain for a long time and also use Markdown tools - nvAlt and more recently Obsidian… I noticed that the unit in The Brain is a “thought” and the unit in Obsidian is a “note”. While a subtle difference, I think it influences how you use a given tool. I think TB is more about organizing and linking thoughts which may be a URL, a file, a note you write. Obsidian is more about writing notes where you can also link to things but not “attach”. Just an observation.
Yes! And this conversation about links vs nodes, thoughts vs notes, etc, is a great topic for us as we explore what a future OGM platform of platforms might look like.
@skreutzer, I appreciate your emphasis on the tech requirements coming (at least partially, from what we need for focus and situational awareness.
Btw, the “we” in my project is not we as individuals, but we as organizations/communities, and social systems.
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I think you should download and run a subset in parallel and see what it looks like for you… It is not without bugs!