https://maggieappleton.com/roam-garden
Just like any good seventeenth century English garden, this Digital Garden has two sides to it – the private and the public.
Everything I post here first sprouts in my Roam Research garden.
If you have never heard of Roam, first stop by Anne-Laure LeCunff's articles on Roam for Metacognition, and the more hands-on The Beginner’s Guide to Roam.
Otherwise the rest of this post will be completely bewildering.
Thanks to the thriving #roamcult community, building and tending my Roam space has become a glorious exercise in knowledge management, experimental workflows, and collective problem solving.
There is no one way to use Roam.
Seeing the wide diversity of systems Roamers build is the whole point. It's a grand communal experiment.
Robert Haisfield has started hosting a series of Roam video tours where Roamers walk through their databases showing all the ways they've adapted the system to their particular needs.
This is essentially a COVID-friendly version of MTV Cribs for personal knowledge management nerds. Conspicuous consumption in the age of sense-making knowledge work.
HT Anna Gat for the insightful comparison
Hey @Conaw did you hear that people are giving each other MTV Cribs style tours of their Roams via screenshare 💜🏡🎥 pic.twitter.com/GfOOjUxz6v— Anna Gát (@TheAnnaGat) May 23, 2020
After posting too much on Twitter about the extensive lengths I've gone to Painting Roam with Custom CSS, I got chatting to Rob and ended up doing one of these digital-hipster crib tours.
We had a wonderfully wide-ranging chat on note taxonomies, spaced repetition, the limitations of text-based thought. Enjoy, and forgive the mess in the kitchen...
The workflows and techniques I covered with Rob are essentially an adapted collection of Design Patterns for personal knowledge management.
They're not "mine," but instead a remixed mashup influenced by Andy Matuschak, Malcolm Ocean, Tiago Forte, Nat Eliason, Joel Chan, and many other Roam-esque-thinkers (not all of whom even use Roam).