In this session, we'll look more at defining a digital garden, explore some examples with an eye on what value they are adding (to the world and the gardener) and look at some ways to get started.

Pre-questions

• How would you currently describe a digital garden?
• Have you already seen examples you enjoy?
• How technically proficient are you?
  • Happy posting on Twitter
  • Happy maintaining your own blog/website
  • Happy building your own blog/website
  • Happy to build a computer from spare nuts and bolts

Key ideas

• Campfires, Gardens and Streams from Tom
• Memex from Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay As We May Think
• Chronology broke the web from Amy

• Gardening guide for your mind
  • Take notes (short ones, long ones)
  • Link notes - how does this add/develop/contradict your thinking?
• Ideas grow and change - printed word is not absolute

Timeline

• Welcome (3 mins)
• Feedback from survey
• What is a digital garden
• Let's explore some and feedback
• How might you get started
• Community gardening

What is a digital garden?

• Being swept away by the stream -> Zetigeisty

The Stream is the blog, the news feed, the Twitter timeline, all that which flows past us in a line, delivered in discrete chunks, fixed in the fourth dimension with timestamps. The Garden is the wiki, the documentation, the Github repository, all that which continues to resemble itself, residing where it first cropped up, growing in spots, receding in others, what you see is the accumulation of all changes. bonkerfield

• Garden <-> Campfire <-> Stream

What is it isn't

• A finished product

Some common signs

A tended space

• Weeding

Changes over time

• Last updated rather than published (if dated)
• This is evolving knowledge/thinking

Some parts come and go

• Seeds

• Saplings

• Evergreen

• Seasons of thinking

• Ideas run their course

Ideas grow, bloom and intersect

• Fruit
• Idea sex

Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Maggie

• Slipbox
• A space where ideas can grow and be at different stages
• A reflection of the important themes of your thinking

Let's see some examples

Activity (5 mins):

Pick one or more of the links below and explore.

• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?
• What do you like?
• Are these all digital gardens?
• How can you tell?

How might you get started?

• Tools vary in ease of use and flexibility of outcome

• What's the aim of your digital garden?

  • Private/public
  • Around a theme or all of your thinking

• What's your willingness to invest learning time into this?

• Competing philosophy

• Cost - mostly free.

• Tour of Obsidian
• Roam
• Dendron
• Notion

Articles

Table of contents

• Proposal