In reply to Call for Model Examples of Zettelkasten Output by Chris Aldrich
Even while on hiatus I obviously cannot ignore Chris Aldrich’s call for examples of output creation systems and the actual output created with Zettelkasten style note card systems. For two reasons. One is that I fully agree with him that having such examples publicly visible is important. The other is that I recognise his observations about the singular focus on system design and tweaking often being a timesink precluding outputs (with the loudest voices often being utterly silent on output).
Here’s a first list of outputs from my system, without the receipts though as I’m writing this away from home with limited tools. After the list I’ll make a few general observations as well.
- I have created 2 or 3 slide decks for client internal and conference presentations from my conceptual notes. First searching for notes on the topic, and the contextual factors of where the slide deck will be used. Then gathering the findings in what I call an ’emergent outline’ (Ahrens calls them speculative outlines). Or perhaps I already have an overview of sorts in the form of an ‘elephant path’ (a map of content, or annotated topical index) which normally help me navigate.
- I have written blogposts directly from my notes. This is now easier than before, since earlier this year I created a way of publishing to this site from my internal notes. This allows me to write in a note, linking internally or including, all within the notes environment and then push the result out to the website.
- I created some new personal insights from new connections within my notes. Not sure if that counts towards Chris’ definition of outputs. This results in new notes where the edge, i.e. the newly found link between two notions, gets expressed as a note in its own right. The first such connection (between my notions of Maker Households and Networked Agency) happened when I was about 35 notes ‘in’.
- For a recent panel at a conference I collated my talking points from my notes
- I use my notes a lot in work conversations, pulling up concepts as needed. I used to do this to pull up facts and earlier meeting notes with the same participants. Now I also use this to provide richer input into the conversations themselves, including pointing to sources and references. This emerged during the many video calls in the pandemic lockdowns, where it was easy to pull up additional material on one of my screens. Now that I have more meetings in person again, I find I still do this automatically. Whatever material I mention I also link in my own meeting notes. This has been remarked upon by conversation partners as a valuable thing.
- I have some elephant paths I regard as output in their own right. One currently important to me is the Practices elephant path. It gives an overview of things I want to approach as a practice (which I place somewhere on the spectrum between habit/routine on one end and literacy (in the Rheingoldian sense of skill plus community) on the other end. Practices are the sweet spot to me for (groups of) knowledge workers to implement fields of theory in their own daily work
- I maintain a client website directly from my notes on EU digital and data legislation. I have conceptual notes for all the regulations involved and maintain summaries alongside them. Those summary notes are automatically synced to GitHub and then published on Github pages as well as the client’s own domain. These same summaries also serve as outline and text for my frequent presentations on this subject, where the slidedeck is kept up to date from the notes that I am certain are always up to date because they are the notes I work with daily.
Some other observations:
What constitutes output? The ‘Luhmann had 90k notes and wrote 70 books’ mantra makes for a rather daunting benchmark to be compared against. I propose we count outputs that have utility to its creator. For me then there are two types of outputs from my notes. A group that is the result of better project tracking, allowing me to pick up where I previously left of, which is a valuable ratcheting effect. Me building my own micropub tools resulted from such ratcheting in 15 minute increments. This group of outputs results from notes, but not the conceptual notes of my ‘Garden of the Forking Paths’ (ie my Zettelkasten style collection). The other group results from re-using and re-arranging the material in my ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ and the example outputs listed above follow from it. In a sense all my work is an output of my notes and my experience, and my tools have always been aiding in my work. Yet there is a qualitative difference.
I have used notes based PKM for over two decades, and in hindsight it was mostly focused on reporting conversations, project stuff, conversations with myself, and many many examples of things I thought relevant. Those I would tag extensively, and I think most of those historic tags would now be their own conceptual notes, expressing the communality of the tagged examples and material, or expressing the link/edge between two or three of the tagged source notes as a notion.
Many of my conceptual notes (now 1000+) and ideas plus non-conceptual atomic notes (another 500 or so) stem from ‘atomising’ my archive of blogposts, and my presentations of the last 10-15 years. Many notes are thus created from earlier outputs themselves.
I recognise what Stephen Downes remarked, that creating the notes is the valuable part towards pattern recognition, and making output needs further gathering of new material. In part this is because adding things to my notes is aiding memory. Once it’s noted it’s no longer novel, and in that sense looses part of the surprisal (informational worth) that led to its creation in the first place. If outputs in my own mind need to be novel, then my notes are limited in value. (This goes back to earlier conversations of the 90% is crap heuristic which I see as feeding impostor syndrom. Outputs imo highly connected to impostor syndrom.
I don’t think I have actual established processes for outputs yet, I’d like to, and I don’t yet feel outputs created suggest as-effective-as-can-be processes yet. Maybe that is because I have not been really tracking such outputs and how I created them. I have become better at starting anything with interrogating my notes first, and putting them together, before starting exploration further afield. Often I find I already have some useful things, which gives a headstart in exploring anything new: there’s something to connect new findings to.
I do not think my current notes could yield something along the lines of a book, other than the nonsense kind of a single idea padded out with anecdotes. I also feel the method of information collection isn’t good enough to base any work on academically. This goes back to the earlier remark as to what qualifies as output of good enough quality.
What are you doing now?
A Now-page is a hybrid between the About page and my weekly notes. The About page says something about my background and general activities. My weekly notes, that only RSS subscribers get to see, talk about actual activities in the past days. This Now page contains the general activities I’m spending time on these days. It contains the things I’d mention if you would ask me in a conversation what I’m doing currently, after we haven’t spoken for a while.
Family
We’re in a steady rhythm since beginning of the year. The summer school holidays are here, and we are starting our summer hiatus! Y has been learning to read and write in the past year and is increasingly starting her own individual learning journey, making good use of the local library and an e-book subscription. We recently bought an inflatable kayak to explore the canals and stream in our part of town, now that Y has her swimming certificates. I thoroughly enjoy living in our hometown, even 6 years after our move here I’m consciously happy with that decision several times per week.
Learning
During 2020 I’ve revamped my personal knowledge management system (PKM, using Obsidian as tool of choice), and that lead to more purposefully seeking out new knowledge. I’m trying to build reading more non-fiction into my days, and as part of that I’ve re(?)-learned reading non-linearly. Since then I’m trying to make good use of that. I’ve also been tinkering with PHP code to tweak how I work with my notes in my PKM, such as building OPML booklists, and posting from notes to my site. I use a personal Micropub client in PHP that I created, which allows me to directly post to this site and e.g. my company’s site from inside my various workflows and tools, and a Microsub client which allows me to get nearer to building my personal ideal feed reader. Both micropub and microsub are IndieWeb concepts. IndieWeb is aimed at using the web they way I want, and staying in control of how you share information and data. My blog is the public facing focal point of these efforts obviously. I have been active in the IndieWeb community for a few years, but not currently. Not that I’ve stopped tinkering with the concept and tools, but because there’s not much actual momentum behind it and I don’t get much energy from it. I do think everyone should have their own webspace though, outside of the silos, and that it should be extremely easy to do.
With E I am looking at the emerging tools and capabilities from various algorithms. As with other topics, that will start with bringing people together in conversation. It is now 15 years since I ended up in open data much the same way, and how I’ve been approaching other topics throughout. We’re thinking about meet-ups both in person and online.
Blogging (since 2002) is as important to me as ever, but I feel a disconnect between my (private) personal learning notes and this blog. Blogging is about conversations to me, and I’d like to more easily encourage them in connection to my personal learning notes. How to properly bridge the boundary between often fragile internal deliberations and more public writing without too much friction is an open question. I am using Hypothes.is as a public annotation tool, that directly feeds into my own local notes, but also allows others to follow along and respond. This year I’m try to more purposefully escape making notes for the sake of having notes, and finding multiple ways how to use them in practice better. One thing that I spot as pattern is that my learning notes don’t cover my current work, it’s outside of it. Even though I also learn a lot in my work context, somehow I hesitate incorporating it into my PKM. I wonder why that is.
As I have been very busy workwise my blogging has suffered since the spring.
Work
I’m fully booked for the entire year. I currently have two main roles.
One is for the Dutch government tactical council on EU information policies, keeping track of the many data related EU programmes and regulations with an eye of tying them to Dutch initiatives and representing the Dutch position in Europe. Since the start of the year I’m also the lead for digital ethics at the organisation in which the 12 Dutch provinces collaborate. Within that role I’m also the secretary to the interprovincial ethics committee that I helped shape last year.
I’m interested in also working and speaking EU-wide on these topics like before, but not yet clear how I would want to shape that. Our team does a lot of work related to the ethics of data. I enjoy that, having done a few years of philosophy of technology focused on the ethics of technology development and use.
Our company team has grown the past three years, and that means my role as an employer and as guide to our team members has grown too. My attention there is on balancing people’s working time, ensuring learning and mental health. After the summer we are going to Portugal for a week with the entire team, to participate in a training that is relevant to all of us (on working with stakeholder networks and stewarding community around projects)
I nominally work four days per week although since many months I only keep that fifth day free by also working other evenings. I’m in need of some serious down time.
In the past year or two I have noticed that I find the conceptual angles of my work extremely interesting, but regularly struggle somewhat with finding ways to enjoy the actual work connected to it. Some type of shift in attention and activities seems to be in order, but I’m as yet unclear to where or what such a shift needs to take me. I used the summer of 2022 to explore that in more detail, but haven’t reached any conclusions yet, so I will try and use this summer for the same. This also ties back to the need I feel to do more with my knowledge and experience towards other/different outputs, that I mentioned above concerning learning.
Voluntary work
The Open State Foundation I chair has been in good shape the past few years. We had some changes in the board, and are currently expanding the number of board members.
I’m working on getting the Open Nederland membership organisation, the Dutch Creative Commons chapter more or less, recognised as a public benefit institution under Dutch law. (I’m their treasurer). I’m considering my daughter’s school’s parent board as treasurer, as they are in need of one. Although I don’t look forward to the amount of work involved, I do want to contribute to Y’s school.
I’m open to other voluntary board positions of organisations that fit with my current thematic interests, in the Netherlands or EU wide.
With the new wave of EU regulations on data and digitisation I am interested in weaving the type of networks and community we created in the early open data movement in Europe.
Current interests
Current interests are (and have been for some time): networked agency, ethics as a practice, digital transformation but distributed, self automation, civic tech, machine learning for civic tech and households, seeing my work as (political) activism, European and global developments w.r.t. data as a geopolitical force, personal knowledge management and learning in the networked age.
These interests inform my reading and information gathering at the moment.
Bookmarked The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten by Chris Aldrich
This is a great essay by Chris Aldrich for several reasons. Because it aims to address the absence in the current hypelet around recent personal knowledge management tools and note systems like Zettelkasten of the realisation that everything in this space has a deep rooted lineage. In response he writes about the history of commonplacing, using card collection for creative, academic or professional output. Because the essay itself is the result of the very practice it describes. In the past months I’ve been reading along with Chris’ annotations (the value of which led me to share more of my own annotations too), and reading his essay I can readily recognise things from that stream of raw material. The notes Chris made from those annotations in turn resulted in this essay. Seven thousands words in a half-day effort.
Note to self: I should create an overview for myself and here about my note taking practice through the years and their inspiration. Just to further illustrate the history Chris writes about.