A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

#to-process

rw-book-cover

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Highlights

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. (View Highlight)

less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing (View Highlight)

New highlights added February 1, 2023 at 2:01 PM

Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group) used the term "digital gardening", but defined it as "faffing about syncing things, defragging - like pruning for young people" (View Highlight)

This is how I do it sometimes -- I do love a good putter about -- but that's also not bad!

It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces. (View Highlight)

Topography over Timelines
Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others. (View Highlight)

New highlights added February 2, 2023 at 2:01 PM

Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. (View Highlight)

Depending on the content it could be useful: something from a decade ago might not be as authoritative as something from last month, depending on the topic.

New highlights added February 6, 2023 at 1:51 PM

Continuous Growth
Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. (View Highlight)

there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion. (View Highlight)

Is this always good? Do we need a wiki/git style edit history? What if I said "the sky is green" and when I got pushback edited it?
I suspect the answer is "it doesn't fucking matter"

Gardens are designed to evolve alongside your thoughts. When you first have an idea, it's fuzzy and unrefined. You might notice a pattern in your corner of the world, but need to collect evidence, consider counter-arguments, spot similar trends, and research who else has thunk such thoughts before you. In short, you need to do your homework and critically think about it over time. (View Highlight)

I wonder if I should start using a tag for unfinished ideas

This has a number of benefits:
• You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen.
• It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow.
• It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you. (View Highlight)

Imperfection & Learning in Public
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. (View Highlight)

We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. (View Highlight)

Is gardening LESS performative than blogging?

Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years.
Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
a spectrum of knowledge management, ranging from chaos streams to the cultivated performance of publishing a book. Gardening sits in the middle. (View Highlight)

This freedom of course comes with great responsibility. Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how "done” they are, and how much effort you've invested in them. (View Highlight)

• 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
• 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
• 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).
I also include the dates I planted and last tended a post so people get a sense of how long I've been growing it. (View Highlight)

I don't think I'd want to overextend the gardening metaphor this much, but I should use some kind of tagging system. I wonder if the publishing plugin I use could automatically display the ctime/mtime of the file: the dataview plugin can as well, but I'd have to include it in each note.

The metadata at the top of my posts showing growth stage
Other gardeners include an epistemic status on their posts – a short statement that makes clear how they know what they know, and how much time they've invested in researching it. (View Highlight)

Independent Ownership
Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.
This patch should not live on the servers of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram (aka. also Facebook), or Medium. None of these platforms are designed to help you slowly build and weave personal knowledge. Most of them actively fight against it.
If any of those services go under, your writing and creations sink with it (crazier things have happened in the span of humanity). None of them have an easy export button. And they certainly won't hand you your data in a transferable format. (View Highlight)

tags: to-process
day: 2023-08-10

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. (View Highlight)

less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing (View Highlight)

Rory Sutherland (oddly, the vice president of Ogilvy Group) used the term "digital gardening", but defined it as "faffing about syncing things, defragging - like pruning for young people" (View Highlight)

This is how I do it sometimes -- I do love a good putter about -- but that's also not bad!

It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces. (View Highlight)

Topography over Timelines
Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others. (View Highlight)

Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. (View Highlight)

Depending on the content it could be useful: something from a decade ago might not be as authoritative as something from last month, depending on the topic.

Continuous Growth
Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. (View Highlight)

there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion. (View Highlight)

Is this always good? Do we need a wiki/git style edit history? What if I said "the sky is green" and when I got pushback edited it?
I suspect the answer is "it doesn't fucking matter"

Gardens are designed to evolve alongside your thoughts. When you first have an idea, it's fuzzy and unrefined. You might notice a pattern in your corner of the world, but need to collect evidence, consider counter-arguments, spot similar trends, and research who else has thunk such thoughts before you. In short, you need to do your homework and critically think about it over time. (View Highlight)

I wonder if I should start using a tag for unfinished ideas

This has a number of benefits:
• You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen.
• It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow.
• It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you. (View Highlight)

Imperfection & Learning in Public
Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. (View Highlight)

We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. (View Highlight)

Is gardening LESS performative than blogging?

Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years.
Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
a spectrum of knowledge management, ranging from chaos streams to the cultivated performance of publishing a book. Gardening sits in the middle. (View Highlight)

This freedom of course comes with great responsibility. Publishing imperfect and early ideas requires that we make the status of our notes clear to readers. You should include some indicator of how "done” they are, and how much effort you've invested in them. (View Highlight)

• 🌱 Seedlings for very rough and early ideas
• 🌿 Budding for work I've cleaned up and clarified
• 🌳 Evergreen for work that is reasonably complete (though I still tend these over time).
I also include the dates I planted and last tended a post so people get a sense of how long I've been growing it. (View Highlight)

I don't think I'd want to overextend the gardening metaphor this much, but I should use some kind of tagging system. I wonder if the publishing plugin I use could automatically display the ctime/mtime of the file: the dataview plugin can as well, but I'd have to include it in each note.

The metadata at the top of my posts showing growth stage
Other gardeners include an epistemic status on their posts – a short statement that makes clear how they know what they know, and how much time they've invested in researching it. (View Highlight)

Independent Ownership
Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control.
This patch should not live on the servers of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram (aka. also Facebook), or Medium. None of these platforms are designed to help you slowly build and weave personal knowledge. Most of them actively fight against it.
If any of those services go under, your writing and creations sink with it (crazier things have happened in the span of humanity). None of them have an easy export button. And they certainly won't hand you your data in a transferable format. (View Highlight)

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