Tag: pkm

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At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them.

While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as a group, in this case by creating your own tools to get there.
The power of finding new agency was felt and expressed by quite a few, and played a role in a good number of sessions too.

When I first encountered computers, in the early 1980s, creating your own stuff was the norm. It was almost the only option. Making the machine work for myself. Like software to keep my ham radio logs and print QSL cards.
These days I run a good many smaller and larger personal pieces of tooling on my laptop. Things like making it easy to search by date in my photos on Flickr, or posting to my website from my internal notes, or from within my feedreader.
Things that reduce friction, speed things up, reduce dependency on external systems.

Vibecoding, and especially the Claude Code style of vibe coding, is bringing people to create their own tools, who weren’t able to do so before. A pool of latent needs they can now tap into on their own.

Some I know are really now learning how a computer works under the hood through their vibe coding. Testing the limits of their machines, finding out how fast local stuff can be. Discovering the power of APIs, the utility of cron jobs, and learning how to run their own VPS or local servers.
Others are creating little tools that work the way they want. An app to present books from their collection in that one specific way just so. A mobile app for public transport built on your own existing commute patterns and nothing else. Apps pulling in data from several sources and presenting them in one interface that likely only makes sense to themselves.

Tools built by people realising they are pretty predictable to themselves, and that such highly localised and specifically contextualised predictability now lends itself to automation by the intended user themself.
Tools, in short, where, access to and control over data lies fully with the user, where applications are views on that data (and multiple apps use the same data), and interfaces queries on the data. Along the lines of Ruben Verborgh’s 2017 article “Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralised Web“ but then way more personal. The decoupling that is possible between data, applications and interfaces is even more powerful when you can do them all three for yourself. And then mash them up in any which way you want.

Vibecoding is allowing people to jump the barriers to entry to that. And judging by the stories they share, it feels like pole vaulting over them, not just clearing the barriers. That energy then propels them on to do more.

Over the past months I’ve also heard regularly how people are cancelling paid subscriptions to various online services, and switching to their personal tools that fit their use case much more precisely.

There are many ethical, political, and societal issues with much of the gen AI world, and how models come about, and how corporate vendors exploit and leverage their power.
Yet, where these things are not just consumed but used locally as a leg-up to a different level of self-reliance, it looks quite different. Something is brewing it feels like.
A shift, and I’d love to see more people explore and extend their own agency with such tools.

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I attended the PKM Summit the past days in Utrecht. It was fun and inspiring. During the extended lunchbreak yesterday I went outside to enjoy a bit of sunshine and walk around town. Ending up in the Steven Sterk book shop I also browsed the shelves there a bit.

One title, From The Winter Archives, stood out to me. Being primed with thoughts of personal knowledge management and note making, I approached the title from that angle. The book, originally titled Fra vinterarkivene, is a 2015 novel by Norwegian writer Merethe Lindstrøm, and completely unconnected to such associations on PKM.

Five years ago Robin Sloan blogged about how newsletters should have seasons, and I blogged about it in response in more general terms, looking at seasons for any creative output. As were are moving from winter to spring, I was also reminded about the different tasks that come with the change of seasons around the house. Disconnecting the water tap before winter, removing some lights early spring, bringing back down the cushions for the garden benches.

Can my notes, can sections of my notes have seasons? There is always an ebb and flow in attention to certain topics and matters, which translate in the use, editing and creation of notes. That is maybe of a different frequency, a week or a few, a month, not a quarter year like a season. The thought of having a folder with notes named ‘the Winter archive’ crossed my mind, just because it sounded interesting, not because I have any notion about what it might actually contain.

Just a whimsical spring thought, riffing off a book title while my mind was simmering with notions about personal knowledge management.

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I have been interested in personal knowledge management (pkm) for a very long time. I have been an avid notes maker ever since I learned to write. Digital tools from the late 1980s onwards have been extremely useful. And a source of nerdy fascination, I confess. I am certain personal knowledge management (pkm) is of tremendous value for anyone who wants to keep learning and make sense of the world around them.

On March 20 and 21 the European PKM Summit is taking place for the third time in Utrecht, Netherlands. I’ve helped a bit, like for earlier editions with suggesting speakers and workshop hosts for this event.

I am donating a ticket for a student in the Netherlands to attend this two day event. I did the same last year and the year before.

Are you a student at a university in the Netherlands (doing a bachelor’s or master’s) with a strong interest in personal knowledge management (pkm)? (note that it says interest, I don’t expect you to be highly sophisticated or experienced in it!)
Is your interest in pkm to strengthen your personal learning and deepen your interests, rather than increasing (perceived) productivity?
Would you like to go to the PKM Summit on 20 and 21 March in Utrecht, but as a student you cannot afford the 254 Euro ticket price?

Then I have one (1) conference ticket available! Let me know who you are and what fascinates you in pkm or attracts you to the event. If there are several people interested I will choose one. I will donate the ticket a month before the conference, by February 20th, so state your interest before then.

The single condition is that you attend the event on both days and participate actively in the sessions. If you have other ways to attend (by e.g. volunteering for the event staff) then that is preferable. This is specifically for someone who would otherwise not be able to go. I’d be happy to briefly meet you as well at the event, but if not that is perfectly fine too. It would be great however if you would share some of your impressions of the event afterwards online on the open web, especially if that is something you’d normally do anyway.

Interested? Email or DM me (in Dutch, German or English)! My contact details are in the right-hand sidebar.

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Today is Koppermaandag in the Netherlands, ‘cupping monday’. The first Monday after 6 January, when graphics artists and printers show their skills by making something: a Koppermaandag print.

Traditionally, since the early 1400s, Koppermaandag was the day that members of all guilds would have a festive day for the new year. ‘Kopperen’ (‘cupping’) as a verb comes from kop (cup) and stands for feasting and drinking. The tradition waned in the 18th century with the dissolution of the guilds, and only the printers kept doing it, until that too faded. Since World War II several groups of graphics artists and printers have taken up the tradition again. That is how I know of it: E’s great-uncle was a member of the Groninger group of artists De Ploeg and in 1962 a founder of the Grafisch Centrum Groningen. There they made their Koppermaandag prints. The 1965 print was drawn by him and shows him flattened under the printing press.

Last June during a workshop for Y’s birthday with Roy Scholten in the Grafisch Atelier Hilversum I saw their Koppermaandag prints. The next day I marked Koppermaandag 2026 in my calendar, with the intention of doing something for it by myself.

For me knowledge work has always been artisanal in nature. It is a form of professional work where your tools are personal, where your path is your own. Autonomy within networks, learning in networks, creating in and with networks. This makes personal knowledge plus your approach to maintaining it and learning important (usually dubbed personal knowledge management, or pkm). Having your own system for your personal knowledge is both what allows you to create your professional autonomy (your insights woven into connections that have meaning for you), and what ensures your continued professional autonomy (you take it with you when you go someplace else).

For today I wanted to combine those things. Knowledge work as artisanal profession. This links it back to the original guilds. Second the personal aspect of it, and third making something by hand to print, like the card I made (be)for(e) Christmas. The latter links it to the modern Koppermaandag tradition of graphics printers and artists.

I made a card, with the text (P)KM and the number 26. KM for Koppermaandag as well as for Knowledge Management and the P for personal. My personal koppermaandag, and personal knowledge management. The background is a network. The nodes are concepts, things, actors. The connections between them are the insights that grew from combining them, forming a neighbourhood and context for each node. Something I associate both with Bruno Latour‘s ANT and George Siemens‘ connectivism. The frame around it is not closed, and some connections cross it, because while always defined and bounded in each moment a personal knowledge network is not enclosed nor stagnant.

The design I cut in lino, in what must be the first time since primary school. Then I printed it on our small press. The letters and the lines are wonky. That does make it an accurate demonstration of my capabilities though, as per the tradition of Koppermaandag.

Happy (personal) Koppermaandag!

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Yesterday Martijn Aslander demonstrated the personal information tools he recently created. I came away inspired. Perhaps not by the tools as such, and more because of the pathways of thinking it opened. And because everything was so blazingly fast. All vibe-coded, as he has no coding skills himself.
I can see how the way his brain works is aided by the structure and availability of information his personal toolbox provides him. However, I myself would be more interested in shaping a personal tool like this towards being able to facilitate me in my processes and habits, as well as let me work towards actual outputs.

The Digitale Fitheid (Dutch language platform) community (Digital Fitness, the English language platform) has a monthly face-to-face meet-up in Utrecht, and yesterday was this year’s last. In the morning E had attended a session by Frank Meeuwsen on how to use Claude Code to quickly build something from scratch. In the evening I joined Martijn’s session on what he is calling his ‘Theta OS‘.

Some observations.

  • Martijn’s Theta is mostly a dashboard on local information. It shows him lots of different pieces of information at a glance. Each of these things, hotel bookings, books, payments, tasks, quantified self measurements and more, can live and be accessed in their own little apps and silos, but he uses the dashboard to combine them in context. At the outset he said that having his own established ontology (in the information sense, not the philosophical) was a prerequisite. That sounds very true, as the purpose here is having an extremely personal tool. The value is in combining various information sources on purely personal criteria on the fly.
  • His tool stack is sqlite (a lightweight database, installed by default on my Mac), with node.js (to run javascript), and regular html and css for the front-end using the local webserver on his laptop. I didn’t have node.js on my Mac, installed it now to be able to try some things.
  • He is not a coder, so everything is vibe coded with Claude Code. And while maintaining that makes him able to quickly create things, he spent some 500 hours in Claude Code in the past months. Makes me wonder what he could have done in those 500 hours if he hadn’t used it. I do recognise that given his nature, a organised path of exploration and learning would not have been feasible, though might well have resulted in a similar proof of concept after 500 hours.
  • Because of this he wasn’t really able to conceptually discuss the results other than what it does on the front-end and what it means to him. When asked about the architecture of the tool he therefore asked Claude Code to whip up a description.
  • In working with Claude Code he did not feed it his personal information, but abstracted structures. E.g. to incorporate a CSV with personal information he would provide the structure and a bit of dummy data to get a parser or importer and change the database structures. Then use the importer for the actual data outside of Claude.
  • To Martijn Theta is for surfacing and combining little pieces of data and information. He also uses markdown notes a lot (with Obsidian as viewer), but Theta keeps all the small pieces out of his notes. Only when he combines things into something more informational he brings it into his markdown notes. I find this distinction makes sense, as I am usually adverse to ‘make Obsidian do everything for me’ type of efforts. I use several tools that work on my Obsidian notes but do not attempt to be part of Obsidian. Largely absent yesterday was the other way around in the demo / discussion: getting small bits out of Obsidian into his dashboard.
  • The entire thing as it is now is a tool that clearly and visibly had an evolutionary path, as opposed to a planned-for structure and design. This appeals to me a lot. It is the same with my own personal tools and system of notes. Others sometimes remark on how it would impossible for them to create something like it for themselves. Thing is, neither could I. The current state evolved over time, and does not lend itself to reconstruction. That this sense of evolution stands out to me after a few months of Martijn spending that 500 hours in total on his Theta OS too, to me is a strong argument in favor of his approach.
  • This is reinforced by how he clearly builds intensively on his own structures and habits. As I often remark too, I am predictable to myself, and it means any software tool you build for yourself can make choices based on that predictability. If I want to save something I know which attributes I care about, and in which form I want to have them available. If I make a shopping list I know the order of the supermarket shelves of the store I’ll visit. If I’m near a Dutch railway station in the evening, it is most likely I intend to take a train home, that type of thing. The same is true for my information strategies. I know where I store my book notes and how, as I’ve been doing it for ages etc.
  • Building on that predictability he makes functionalities in Theta highly contextual. If he bookmarks a LinkedIn profile, it means he wants a person note with a few distinct fields from the profile (e.g. current role and location), and bookmarking then means the creation of such a person note in the same way as all his existing person notes already are. If it’s a recipe it pulls out the recipe, converts cooking terms and measures to Dutch terms and measures, and makes the ingredients available to dump into a shopping list.
  • Similarly everywhere he has a ‘copy to clipboard’-button in his Theta, it has a contextually determined template, so he can paste it into something else in the way he needs it at the destination. I use those templates in different places already, the way I send a bookmark to my blog, my annotation tool, and how an annotation is imported into my Obsidian notes, how I save a webpage in markdown to my notes, are all determined by a template that takes the same basic information but styles and orders it differently based on purpose and destination.
  • That contextualisation sometimes needs persistent data from outside. He incorporates such data into his local database. E.g. all the place names for the Netherlands, so he can recognise a place name in his own material, or search with any of them across his material. Or the list of translated cooking terms mentioned above.
  • He created his own e-mail client interface (using IMAP to access his mail accounts). This allows him to create processing geared to his own routines. E.g. a button to process an e-mail as a hotel reservation, or as parcel delivery announcement, or to pull location or event data from etc. That information then surfaces in his dashboard where it is made useful. It resulted in a rather long row of specific processing contexts but I can definitely see the power of it. Like I tinker with my ‘ideal feedreader’, doing the same for an ‘ideal e-mail interface’ where the point is to not let things reside in e-mail but make it findable and useful outside of it makes a lot of sense. And again, because you are predictable to yourself it is obvious what ‘outside’ means in each instance.
  • He created ‘companion apps’ (using Mac’s Xcode to make them for iOS, I wonder if something similar for Android exists) for his phone, allowing him to access and work with information on the go.

On the train home, I started exploring both sqlite and node.js in more detail, to figure out if and how I may want to add it to my local personal tool set.
Can I use this to reignite my work on my personal toolsuite? That work is more aimed at facilitating myself in my processes and helping me achieve outputs.
Despite going to bed late, I woke unexpectedly early, given the holidays and weekend, and felt the need to explore more. So the session definitely kicked something in gear. It does need my personal approach of course, and I have plenty of relevant notes on this from the past years to use for it. Years ago, back in 2017, I already gave the effort a name too, Aazai.
I set up sqlite and node.js this morning to have a sandbox to try some building blocks out.

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I have been using Hypothes.is, an annotation platform, for a bit over 3 years now (my account is 4 years old).
Storing bookmarks and creating annotations that way is easy. A browser add-on makes it one click (and the writing of course) to add an annotation.

Using the Hypothes.is Obsidian plugin also means any annotation comes into my notes seamlessly through the Hypothes.is API.

I use the same API to be able to post to Hypothes.is from within my personal feedreader’s reading flow (I can also post directly to my Obsidian notes there). This means I can annotate something without opening it separately in the browser at all.

Over time I’ve looked in wonder at the speed and volume with which Chris Aldrich uses Hypothes.is on a daily basis. To me it indicates that it is his main connection between his browsing and his rough notes. He hit 10k annotations three years ago already.

Although I have mostly reduced friction for making annotations themselves, my mental model of annotations and my practice haven’t much shifted since I started using Hypoythes.is in earnest in August 2022. (Around the time Chris mentioned above hit 10k annotations.)
One pitfall is similar to ‘I should write proper blog posts‘, ‘I should properly annotate‘. Meaning not having more than 1 annotation for a site or posting isn’t ‘proper’. Only annotating things I’m reading with focus count! That sort of thing. It means a much stricter curation than necessary. The only actual question is if I want to be able to find something back again. If so, then I should add it. It’s not only annotation, it’s bookmarking too.

That goes hand in hand with me more deliberately setting aside time for myself to explore things online. Something that I lost sight of a good while ago. Finding my way back to a sense of wonder, also means wandering about online, starting from a question or notion, and following the breadcrumbs others have left on the open web. This is the good old web-surfing habit of old.

The past week I deliberately spent more time browsing and bookmarking/annotating. My annotations jumped by over 100. As a result I added several interesting scientific papers to my Zotero library, added a few books to my library, and generally had a good time finding things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Hopefully this evolves in a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotation.

Two things I intend to do, to reduce friction for this even more.
One, currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously. (Or better yet, not for now, what if I could have my own instance of hypothes.is that is also visible as a category / stream in my website?)
Two, I haven’t figured out yet if I can get hypothes.is to work on mobile, for the initial bookmarking of a site. My mobile browser regularly has a lot of open tabs at the end of a day, some of it useful to retain.

Today I hit 1700 bookmarks and annotations. Let’s see where that number stands in 3 months, as a measure of a renewed bookmarking and annotation habit.