I like the idea of a "digital garden" that I came across in these two Twitter threads:
The idea, as I understand it is to create something in between the private notes and the blog post.
Here is my own Twitter thread about my attempts to build one and thinking around it.
- Seeds = cultivate your curiosity with quality content
- Trees = grow your knowledge by taking smart notes
- Fruits = produce new ideas by connecting the dots
Here is an intro from Ness Lab's great post on the subject:
“cultiver son jardin intérieur” means to tend to your internal garden—to take care of your mind. The garden metaphor is particularly apt: taking care of your mind involves cultivating your curiosity (the seeds), growing your knowledge (the trees), and producing new thoughts (the fruits). On the surface, it’s a repetitive process. You need consistency and patience. But each day tending to your “mind garden” is different: discovering a new learning strategy, having a eureka moment, connecting the dots between two authors, getting involved in a lively conversation with an expert.
https://share.getliner.com/AU26D
The concept of the mind garden connects to the "learning and working in public" that underlies Karma and other wiki styled apps online. The concept of Show Your Work fits nicely here. I have plenty of private notes that I don't want folks reading. It's not because it's all stuff that is private or inappropriate but because much of it is half-baked and wouldn't make sense. Notes are the seeds.
More from Anne-Laure:
A Mind Garden is not a mind backyard. It’s not about dumping notes in there and forgetting about them. To tend to your garden, you need to plant new ideas.The best way to do this is by replanting stems and cuttings from existing ideas you’ve added to your garden by consistently taking notes, and combining them together, a bit like grafting (Conor White-Sullivan, the founder of Roam, calls this idea sex). Sometimes, two seemingly remote or even incompatible ideas will give birth a new insight. (look at the pomato, a weird hybrid of tomato and potato)When you find some of these new combinations particularly interesting, share the seeds with fellow gardeners. Leverage the knowledge of fellow explorers. Keeping a digital garden where you can have a shareable copy of your ideas is a great way to contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence.
These ideas tie in nicely with the practice of Remix which weaves together and combines pre-existing material in new ways.
This is the price of gold here:
Keeping a digital garden where you can have a shareable copy of your ideas is a great way to contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence.
References: