 One of the things that annotation is most related to, annotation is something that we do in the margins or in the context of something else. And one of its applications that's most useful for all of us is the more personal aspect of taking notes with as a part of an overall personal knowledge management strategy or practice. So this year, partly as a kind of a reaction to the kind of absolute explosion of innovation in the note-taking area that's happened over the last three, four, five years, is to do a whole kind of a dedicated track or a dedicated session on note-taking and kind of the intersection of note-taking and annotation and where it's all headed. I am super plattered to have kind of an extraordinary panel with us. Before I introduce them, let me just kind of give the basic why here, which is that note-taking it is an intensely personal and sticky thing, sticky in the sense that once you start using a certain system or a certain practice, you're likely to stick with it for a very long time. And so choosing becomes really important. And also because of the way that these systems are designed and the choices that they make in terms of how they encode and store information, the design of these apps is super important because it really shapes how we think. So thinking about thinking and thinking about note-taking applications becomes something that it might make sense to do. So that's the purpose of the session here today. And I want to go ahead and introduce our speakers. So Ward, many here will know, Ward Cunningham, who is the founder of Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales and who really innovated much of that system or I think wrote most of the original code and invented a lot of things. But primary among them for us today are a couple of things. One is the notion of kind of creating pages into existence simply by naming them and simultaneously linking them. It's maybe something he'll chat about if he has a moment, which is really a phenomenally important insight that many of the apps here have adopted as a strategy and is kind of a feature of a lot of the way that these kind of modern Wiki-linking apps work. And also a concept of automatic back linking, which is another feature that is kind of omnipresent in the space. Dana Doyle is the founder of Readwise, which has quickly become the kind of universal glue that links all the apps at what I call the edge to the apps that folks use to map different topics together. And it's probably one of the most used apps we see here with Hypothesis in terms of how people are using what we built with other folks. Eduardo is an engineer at Google who's created the Agora, which is an open source federated note taking platform, which really implements a lot of interesting and cool things that have to do with how you might collaborate on building your personal knowledge management system with others. Bastion is the lead developer and maintainer of org mode, which money here will recognize as the mode inside of Emacs that really jumpstarted a note taking revolution in the early 2000s of kind of extremely efficient note taking and organization that has become a model for a lot of how the other apps that have followed have kind of worked. Oliver is kind of the renegade counterculture open source and privacy guy here whose WorldBrain's MemEx project is beloved by many for its approach taken in terms of how you can store and archive and annotate the web as you travel around it. And Connor is perhaps revolutionized this space more recently, more than any other single service with the creation of Roam, which is used by tons of folks. Super excited to hear what he has to say about where they're headed. And Junio, who is one of the key team members at the LocSec project, which is although they're a relative newcomer, are implementing and kind of ticking some of the key boxes that people want to see in these kind of apps maybe more effectively than almost any other kind of the relative newcomers. So super thrilled to have all of them here today. And we're going to go ahead and jumpstart folks in this order. So I will go ahead and what we're going to do here is we're going to do a series of whitening talks, kind of five to seven minutes on their kind of vision for where things are headed. We may have room for time for kind of a question or two after each one, but we'll want to move relatively quickly through all of them and then get to a panel discussion, which will follow this in which it would be more of a kind of a freewheeling discussion with plenty of time for audience participation. So without further ado, let me kick it over to Ward. So I, you know, I get going and I have trouble stopping. So I thought I'd kind of follow the outline Dan sent. And there's plenty of room in that to say useful things. You know, he asked what are the trends that I see and of course trends on the internet are not very positive right now. There's a lot that has gone wrong. You know, in the 90s, we all thought that it was a savior and it turns out to be the destroyer in many ways. And I think that really is the advertising model. Advertising being just a structured form of lying, really, and you know, I'd say don't trust anything you care about to somebody else with a business model because their business model isn't to make you successful. I also sometimes call it clear cutting of the internet, you know, and that seems to get it emotionally. I think I tried to replace some of my familiar jargon with metaphors and that's what I like. You know, the other thing I like is that some of us, maybe it's an old-timer thing, they're seeking a quiet place to listen to the wind in the trees. That subtle thing that, you know, inspires, might take some practice, curiosity to hear that. I use that to talk about some development practices that are, could be called listening to the wind in the trees and responding. You know, on the internet, I think it's making the space that is more like a park than a shopping mall. And I think my colleagues here are probably, you know, are park builders too. My particular vision, you know, is I wanted to make something that was federated, but still recognizably a Wiki. And Wiki has never been federated. Usually there's one big database and everybody shares it. So I just said, well, you know, if we wanna have small sites that don't get ravaged, maybe everybody brings their own site. And this was at a time where you could say, node install Wiki and have a Wiki. And, you know, the internet has gotten more difficult than that. And we could talk about why it's gotten so difficult. But I'll say the idea was that I called it profligate copying. In other words, you're expected to copy. You're not successful if you're not being copied. And I think there's a lot of places in the world where, you know, impact in the world is when your idea is spread. And they spread by other people having your ideas. And maybe after a while, they forget you were your ideas. But, you know, if you can't charge money for them, then who cares if, you know, the success is spreading those ideas. And that's a foundation of creativity, really, is understanding other ideas and then taking them and making them your own. Sometimes we'll call that the chorus of voices. It's a little different than GitHub where you wanna have a bunch of people contributing to a piece of code where there's one correct piece of code in the end. And here we're thinking, you know, there is this sort of fork capability. And we use the word fork because it means you're taking it. But I'll talk about chorus of voices where nobody has to be saying the same thing or at the same time, but that it somehow comes together and makes something probably improvisational more than anything. But that is, that's what we seek. And it turns out that a lot of it looks like note-taking. You know, people have mentioned that, you know, about the time you have a thousand pages, you're ready to start a conversation because something will come up and they say, wait a second, I got a page on that. And then you pull that page out and maybe share it and talk about how it's different in the current context. But that's a body of work. And it might not be all pages you wrote, it might be pages you found other people and just put a little bit of your own spice on them. The other thing that I think is emerged to be really important is we talk about kind of shaping the white space around ideas that this is, you know, like improvisational musicians talk about free space or sometimes white space where poets talk about having a place to create, a place in their mind to create. And that's a little bit different than remembering things. It's really, it's truly trying to move things over side so that you can think of something new. And doing that collaboratively is pretty amazing. The other thing that it's been at the heart of what we've done in the last 10 years is mixed content on a page, you know, that we have a markup, but we never made a universal markup. In fact, the most common markup is just simply plain text and hyperlinks. So the double square brackets is about what you get there. But, you know, when you're just talking, that's pretty nice, but we can do lots of other kinds of formats and we kind of lean to the more complicated things like map markers and knowledge graphs and data, data, representational data in various forms. And what we like to say is if you really have something you want to get done, instead of doing it somewhere else and talking about it in Wiki, maybe you can do it in a Wiki and share your setups. You know, if you've got an electron microscope hooked up, you know, maybe they're pretty ornery and if you take some great pictures with it, maybe you set it up with a Wiki page and share that Wiki page with the colleagues across the world. Could be interesting. How am I doing time-wise? Did I run out? Wrap it another minute. Another minute, okay. Well, I've got a minute and a half worth of stuff here. One thing that's come out of that idea is, first of all, when you own your own server, you can pretty much hook whatever you want to it. We've started writing multiple servers, different, you know, implementations of editors and these get called the outpost. The model is that you could have a place in Antarctica and it's not very pleasant, but you can do things or you can't do anywhere else and you don't cut off every connection with the real world when you're done in Antarctica. You know, one of the things that that's done for us is really freed us to think of the future in a very positive way. One thing I should mention about annotations is that our pages are a little problematic in that they don't have a specific home. They float around the internet. They have a history, but they don't have a home. What we've done with annotations recently is add descriptions of intention. You know, this is a little line that says, when you're here, you can push this thing and this will happen. And that intention is independently evaluated by what I might have called the testing system a few days ago and now I call it the robot critic. And that robot critic is an outpost that might be reading what you write. Maybe there's several of them and it's commenting back in the Federation about whether what you say happens happens or not. And this allows us to grow the system, you know, in another world you'd call them unit tests or integrated functional tests is what I call them before. But now I think they're annotated intention and the conversation around these annotations is just a conversation with you and another robot that might be a little more like the check engine light in your car than anything artificially intelligent but still very reliable and that's our path forward. So thanks for the time. And I hope I conveyed the feeling of what we're doing as much as how we do it. Well, thank you so much. Daniel, you're up. Nice to meet everyone. My name is Daniel Doyan and I'm one of the two founders of a small tool called Readwise. It's still pretty small and most people haven't heard of it. So I'll just give a quick overview of what it does just for context. But we started working on this back in 2017 and we were really focused on the mission of using software to improve the practice of reading which is a pretty grand mission and to make that a little bit more immediately actionable. We noticed that all these readers like us who used Kindle or who used real later services like Instapaper or Pocket, most of these people had accumulated this very high quality data in the form of highlights and notes and annotations while they were reading but very few people like maybe less than 5% of the people who were reading in this way actually had a way to go back and revisit those highlights and make use of them. So that's really the origin of Readwise is we developed a somewhat novel workflow to go and get your highlight data which isn't so easy to get with most of these services. And then once we had it, we would just make it easy for you to consistently review those highlights. And we do that in many different ways from a daily email which is kind of the easiest and most consistent kind of like lowest engagement all the way through a web app and mobile app. And people immediately enjoyed this because like I said, they'd already curated this really high signal, high quality data for themselves while reading and going back and revisiting that content is pleasurable and it may create the opportunity to take action or it may spark a connection or you may use it as a writing prompt and Peter pool immediately resonated with that. So from there, in order to expand that value prop we started with Amazon Kindle. Kindle obviously has a huge monopoly share of the e-book space, something over 90%. So most book highlights were coming out of Kindle but we started to support the so-called long tail of reading apps. So we'd add Apple Books which makes it really hard to get them out, Google Play Books, Instapaper, Pocket, PDFs, Medium and Accadre of other sources. So then our value prop kind of evolved into being a place that makes it easy to get all your reading data and annotations into a single place. And once we did that, then probably most interesting for the folks here because most people who, for example, know what Rome is are like the very elite power users. They're not really interested in our kind of simple, easy daily habit, but would rather get those highlights that we've liberated and bring them into a place like Rome where they can do even more powerful stuff. So we've also built a series of export integrations to complement the import integrations and we've become kind of like a very, very tiny zappier of like reading data. So that's kind of the background on ReadWise and what it is, what we're focused on long term is we have this belief that when the personal computer originally came out, it immediately was better for writing than anything that existed before analog. It was better than typewriters, it was better than writing by hand. So everyone's heard the phrase software is in the world and software immediately ate the practice of writing, which obviously includes no taking. What software didn't immediately eat was reading because reading on a desktop computer, on one of those small low resolution CRT monitors, like that was not a better experience than just reading an ordinary book or reading a printed out research paper or something. Okay, but technology has finally caught up and we now have the devices, for example, e-ink tablets, normal tablets, smartphones, where you can now consume content much better on a computing device. So it's just a matter of time until a new category of software is created, which is essentially the analog of the word processor, but for reading. And that's very much what we're focused on, helping to innovate. There's obviously going to be a whole ecosystem around that space, but that's the place that we're interested in playing, helping to create software that doesn't cater to the mass market, people who are reading fiction or romance novels, but instead people who are reading with a purpose, creating that productivity elite software. Thanks, Daniel. Well, thank you very much, Dan. And it's a pleasure being here and I don't know in this company. So I'll try to be short, which is not one of my strengths. So please excuse any discomfort and I'm starting a timer, yes. So an hour, this is the project that brings me here and I will try to like just like on this and hopefully like see if it can be useful dollars which is our intention. So first of all, what is an hour? So we're going to be using different definitions throughout this short week or different layers of abstraction or levels of abstraction I guess, but in its first definition, I will say that and I would say crowdsourced distributed knowledge graph. In particular, as it is currently as you will see, it is a knowledge graph that it assembled or you will say integrated out of volunteer data. Entity mapped is all we request, which means each resource is explicitly about something. And in particular, of course, we have started with as many of you may know with a corpus of notes, just notes that people are taking in diverse tools and we are trying to extend that to annotations. And I guess it's also a social network in a sense, perhaps, yeah, because the knowledge graph that we're building or that we can build both contains knowledge producing a social context, like all knowledge. And in particular, very often this knowledge is about people. So you could say that the knowledge graph contains a social graph and that is probably true of many tools in this space, right? And more generally, perhaps, and I would say public space. This is our inspiration, right? And here I would just say for now that it is not a market, but a commons, right? So a bit about our vision here, which is when I say our, I believe I say, belong to us all. So perhaps this will be a bit obvious to someone else but here goes. The vision is that the social knowledge space, the space we are in, needs an iteration layer or an interlay that can be managed as a commons by communities. So we call it the Aura for short. The name isn't important. I actually believe our implementation, very humble, may not be important either, but I believe the concept is useful. So here goes. I think we are all here in a nexus to some extent, or in the continuity, and we face unique opportunity as communities because to some extent we are part of the community sometimes. And it is the right time to step up as a group and invest in interop, resist vendor locking, and try to ideal solutions that essentially keep us away from centralized systems, right? That we know how limitations. And to minimize this, I believe the ones working on the Aura for now that we want to keep the cost of interval low as low as we can. So from this all, a few design principles for the Aura stem, and that will be that the Aura should be free and open source and it is, and the Aura should require a little of integrators and try to give back plenty. And the Aura should try to make use of existing conventions, which to some extent it can be derived from the second point. Okay, so this is, I guess, relatively nice. Actually, okay, I hope you can see this. So this is really nice, but we're going towards more concrete how this actually work. So we have a reference Aura, and it is built around a few, just a few common building blocks. So we have nodes repositories as the initial copper. We have the weak healing as the one integration primitive we are depending on. And we have a set of optional conventions that we can add to this. And using these, we assemble essentially these nodes annotations in alpha and also social media activity, like which is being tested into this social wiki-like construct. So you can see an example here on the right. The idea here is that all resources that map to the same wickling, so to the same entity because in the Aura, the wickling describes an entity, they are all attached to the same node in this knowledge graph. And the Aura overlay that we have that is shown to the right, presents them sequentially, essentially as a sort of like sequential wiki. And then try to integrate them in the context, essentially show connectivity like at the bottom and also in the Aura as a group. So we are also like trying to develop some features that perhaps can remind you of like precisely a social network. We're very inspired by the internet around the year 2000, I'd like to say. And wikis are a big part of this, also a journaling movement and everything to blogging, et cetera. And of course also like the contemporary projects that we have here out here. And we are trying essentially to build our commons. Let me just skip ahead because I'm having short on time, just for the basics, which is like how do you join into the Aura? Okay, it is a three step process, right? The idea is you can take nodes with any tool, your preferred tool and then optionally submit the nodes to the Aura. The Aura tries to be completely detached from any of these implementation specific details. For this, we currently have like a default setup which means essentially markdown nodes with wikis and some extension. The only extension we require, actually don't require but make use off and get as the essentially underlay terms as well as the platform to host your, the corpuses, right, the corpora. After you take nodes and you can use, as I say any tool and after publishing them to Git, you can let an Aura know and the Aura will just keep pulling your nodes while they're available. So you keep control of your data which is definitely like one of our design principles. And here, okay, so just, I guess shortly late, I have, this is the end of the talk. There's much we can cover, but of course, first of all, thank you for listening. There are pointers here. You can jump to these slides by using the goal in Aura Slides in the Aura or of course, explore at your own pace. We have features that we believe could be used for, of use to the community which is sort of the intended behind the Aura to require a little and try to give back at no cost. So yes, please also let us know if you have any questions. You can reach out to me or any other members of the Flancy Collective. And thank you very much. Eduardo, we have one question specifically for you which is how do you, from Robert Haysfield, how do you approach the problem of people using different words to describe the same concept? Yes, this is a very interesting question which of course, yeah. So the short of it is that we try to not be opinionated about exactly how you do this, but rather instead experiment with what we call, well, our actions in this case is have to do with this, which is experiment with atomic or basic concepts that could be used to eventually reach consensus on canonical entities, equivalence and all their interesting semantic relationships on a social level. So basically we try to, the idea here is to build this sort of meaning without imposing like a cost when it comes to like a plan a schema or a particular way of doing this. So essentially or shortly, we actually don't do this now, but rather give users tools to optionally do this according to different standards. Great, thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me and for inviting me, it's really exciting to meet these people that have been following your work for a long time. I'll try to be short to be able to enjoy the conversation. So I'm Bastian Gehry and I'm the maintainer for Emax awkward. As it said, I would like to go back to classics and 2005 centuries ago, we had Socrates criticism of written culture saying that notes and writings come with forgetfulness. Words, written words are just dead passive expressions of thoughts and the people who express these thoughts cannot reply, they're not here to claim authorship for what I said. So thoughts, written thoughts are like orphans. So he was a very strong criticism and the paradox on is that his student Plato has been writing. He has been writing dialogues famously and these dialogues are about real persons discussing about something. They do interact live thinking out loud and the output of these conversations is not new information actually. It's all about unlearning what the persons believe they knew. I'm sure you're all familiar with this but it's always interesting to think about these two philosophers. One who said there is danger in notes and written words and written culture that we are completely surrounded with today. And the other one, the students who use writing as a way to convey not just information but a way of thinking and a way of interacting with oneself. So just starting from this, I define notes with a purpose. So words, written words are like a pharmacand both a remedy and a poison. And I get from that this definition of good note taking tools. They help us fighting forgetfulness by stimulating thoughts with contextualized information about the who, the what and why. So this is very general but I think it's still helpful to guide us into thinking what we should do about the tools that we are shaping and writing. And good digital note taking tools, they easily blend into online conversation. So I'm really glad I heard this word of conversation by in previous discussion by Walt Cunningham because I think that's really key here into designing the thing we are working on. So we have models and anti-model. The anti-model is the word document floating around with no versioning, no tracking of authors and noisy sharing and most of the time with no context. And I have three models. One is media wiki with pages and discussions and history and authorship and all what you need to get creative for what you write and get a context about what you write. The second model is email driven git workflow with versioning and authorship and also this same plain text format for having conversations about what you do and the same plain text format for patches that you contribute when you write code and the other model is blogs and RSS feeds. I think all the three models are really conversations and I think good digital note-taking tools are really going towards this. I will just take one minute to present Augmod. I think this is not really the purpose of this conversation and I invite people to discover it. So this is an Augmod file plain text with some formatting. The main, so Augmod motto is about your life in plain text. It's a personal information manager authored by Cast and Dominic like sometimes like 18 years ago already. Plain text format similar in spirit to Markdown, a set of tools to manipulate these org files mostly accessible from within GNU remax, but not only, I think there are some modules in PS code, for example. It's a free software. So it's published under the GPL three or later and it's standing on the shoulders of Emacs and this is really the engine for every Augmod feature. Also because it's free software, most of the features have been designed, not implemented, but proposed and designed by the users. And I think that was key by on starting a useful tool is to have the feedback of users and to be guided about what they really need. And the single powerful idea that Gaston started with was usually you had tools for to do items and task management and tools for note-taking and he completely refused this distinction and said, we need one tool, one from the same tool for note-taking and to do items. So the features that we have is this minimal syntax that they've been talking about Folding is at the core of Augmod since the last 20 years, 18 years, but Folding was already present in Emacs, Augmod made Folding for the people. Restructuring, restructuring, changing the structure of the document should be as pleasant as editing text. And I think that's still key in every note-taking document. And we are very passionate about this. Perspective, notes are like a database. You can customize the way you view and navigate the to do items and you should be very flexible about this. Context, you can capture notes from your emails, from a file, from a URL. We have modules on Firefox and Chromium to be able to keep notes within Augfis. Documents are live documents. Literate programming is implemented because you can evaluate code from your documents and sharing. You can export your documents in multiple formats. So when you combine Augfis with Git, for example, sharing these files with someone else, then you have the flexibility of this very minimalistic format and the power of Emacs to edit it very fluently and an easy way to share and to have a conversation with others based on your structured file. And that's it for me. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dan, for organizing all of this and inviting me to the talk. Today, I thought to riff on your intro, your invitation email, where you mentioned the sentence. How are future note-taking infrastructure can serve us wherever we are as constant companions? And here it became clear that the reality of right now is that our workflows change over time. So our apps and services change over time too. And so it's really also that our companions change. And in the whole problem of interoperability, what we see is that the current landscape makes it very difficult to migrate between services or integrate between all of them. And this goes also to the heart of our shared concerns about interoperability and data portability between the services that we use every day and also between the services that are like where the founders and team members are right now present in this call. And we also know all how tough interoperability is. So standards need to be developed, adopted, but also most importantly, they need to be updated over time. And that last part is actually also one of the more tricky ones. And it represents a massive coordination problem between the actors of an ecosystem. It's one of the reasons why HTTP is still on version two after 30 years. And, but ultimately interoperability is UX problem. So the question is, how can users integrate their current tools with other tools to use and easily migrate? And the goal here is, how do you stay in the flow without interruptions? And these interruptions can come in the form of copy-pacing stuff around data migrations, et cetera. So that's the reason, sorry. So that's the reason why this dog is called in the flow. Sorry. And how do we solve this problem with bespoke interoperability? And what I mean with this is if we look at the interoperability as a UX challenge with the goal of increased flow states, there may be steps that tool builders can take that do not require large scale coordination and that already brings large benefits to users and in the long run, create more interoperability in the network overall. And I found it very helpful to think about the context of the tool you're building. So what's the workflows that span beyond your tool? Which other tools to users use where an integration has outsized effect? And myself, I'm the founder of an open source software called Memex. And it's a tool to collaboratively curate, search, annotate and discuss web content such as websites, PDFs, YouTube videos and soon also images. And in the context of Memex, we have identified that the larger workflow is what we call the creator workflow. And it's a loop of content discovery you see here on the top right, capture, synthesis and then sharing. And those happen all in very, very different tools and they're all interconnected in those workflows. So when we thought about this problem, it was the question, how can Memex strategically provide integrations to key tools and workflows in this loop? So for example, in the capturing step, we enable importing of HTML files and your browsing history. But we also have a copy paster that allows people to search everything they saved and then define a custom template on how to copy paste content from Memex into other applications. Say for example, a list of all of the websites that you have curated for a specific topic. You can do that with two clicks and you have it in Rome or a notion or whatever application you use to further synthesize your thoughts. Memex also integrates with Readwise so that people can collect their annotations into one single place for multiple sources. It's what Ben also described is that becomes a very powerful use case right now specifically for power users that use tools like Rome, Notion or Evernote. Then we also have a Read API for all of the shared collections so that curators can integrate their curations into other applications. And then people can subscribe to those as ours as feeds later. That's not there yet though. And so here's an example, for example, on how CultureHack, they built an editor to write blog posts about culture change, has integrated the Memex collections into their editor to quickly reference annotations and pages. They collaboratively saved and curated. And that worked via our Read API that we developed for, and beginning now for trusted partners that wanna integrate Memex data and trial it with us. So yeah, these all are making Memex more interoperable without the need to adhere to many standards or coordinate with too many actors. Some of those integrations are more bespoke than others. Though the key is that it's small steps that can be taken to make data more accessible over time and so that more use standards can be tacked on or new ones can emerge. For example, the work we did for the Readwise integration, we can use for a direct Rome integration later or our Read-Only API can be used to make the RSS feed possible. A great example for an emergent interoperability is the double brackets that Rome, Obsidian, Notion and many others are starting to use and we're adding this to our editor later too. And with this, we don't even try to adhere to defined standards that many, we don't try to adhere to defined standards that many tools not even adhere to but that the most important tools in our network do. And so it's very likely that this becomes a very like default syntax in many other tools that currently may not even think about what bidirectional linking means or what concept tagging, et cetera. And to get there, we didn't need any central coordination. So no standard was needed to be defined, just a bunch of tools that saw the benefit of that syntax. Admittedly for annotations, it's a bit more tricky to harmonize them since they're not just concepts or pure data, they also belong to an author which has currently their identity tied to a specific service. So the easiest interoperability may be enabling an import export in an open annotation data model whereas the tricky part is making annotations accessible and soon to cross different services. And for that, I don't really have a good solution yet. So historically interoperability was seen as a potential decrement or potentially decremental for a service because you may be able to lose users to competitors more easily. I think this is currently changing. Tools and consumers realize that there's an enormous advantage of building intropable tools. And this is because there's an infinite amount of custom workflows that people have. No single tools will serve that workflows evolve too. So users really want an adaptability of their workflows. They want custom integrations to their favorite tools. They want to migrate easily to tools that serve their needs better. So I feel for tool builders that are serious about building useful software, interoperability can actually be a huge boon to their success. It'll make easier to acquire users. It will make it easier to help users embed your own tool in their workflows. You may be also losing some users, but that's okay, I guess, because it'll create sustainable pressure for you to focus on an audience well and build really, really useful services for them. And if you do that, they also won't leave as easily. So I think the future of note-taking will be highly fragmented, yet interwoven network of tools, services and paradigms that cover these infinite amount of combinatorial possibilities. And so bespoke interoperability may help us to overcome this coordination paralysis that we often experience. And yeah, we can take the first step in meshing together and then see where more coordinated interoperability is necessary without over-engineering a top-down model from the start. Oliver, thank you. Thanks. And I really want to pick up where Oliver left off here. My thoughts are actually very similar in some ways. And mine are really center around a small feature request. And my kind of view of this ecosystem is moving from the edge, the edge being kind of where you are in the margin of a book where you might be annotating to the map where you might be doing your kind of thinking and reflecting, planning, organization, writing, list-making to kind of higher order functions, calendar and coordinating task management and so forth. And the different apps that are out there kind of fall in this spectrum of focusing more to a greater or lesser degree in part of that spectrum. And of course, it's highly overlapping. Some of the features of functionality, for instance, in word mode have a lot to do with basic note-taking but also include those higher order functions as well. For the purposes of my feature request though, I want to look at just the edge and the map and the problem that kind of exists between these two. Because if you're out there annotating and the awareness of your notes, your topic map or the other aspects of your kind of your PKM, personal acknowledgement system is really limited to the home app that you tend to keep that stuff in. You can import from, say, hypothesis to another app but it's a pretty crude one-way trip that only moves upstream from left to right. So if you're in the margin of, for instance, a document and taking a note here on a Wikipedia article about personal knowledge management, you can take that note and save it. And in this example, maybe use read-wise, bless your heart, Daniel, to take those notes from hypothesis and move them into Rome. But what you can't do is in the annotation editor is start double bracketing the word note-taking and have it reference all the other notes in your kind of topic map that you've already created. And I think this is, a lot of folks work around that by just double bracketing the word, creating essentially what is a markdown link and just importing it into the knowledge management system where they'll use it there and then in that system, once imported, it will naturally refer to the rest of the topic maps. But of course, you lose some key features in that trip. So if you were, for instance, to start the process of taking that, to making that link, you would lose the process of the auto suggest knowing what those links are that are in your knowledge base, catching any misspellings that you might be making and just the easy process of being able to start and tab to the response that you want. You may also want to know which one of your notes if you were using something like the Agora, which one of your notes is a personal note that's only available to you versus which one of your notes is a public note that you use as a way to create some topics that you're kind of sharing for the community, potentially even for their collaboration and their input wiki style. And you might even kind of extend the notion further to where you could be subscribed to multiple PKMs at the same time, not only your own, but also somebody else's or even public kind of wiki based systems like Wikipedia. And so you could choose whichever one you wanted and only subscribe to the ones that you want to rapidly autocomplete. And in this way, you could almost imagine this as a form of kind of controlled vocabulary and tagging that the user would be completely in control of. So I think what might be needed, so that would kind of blend the edges between systems. You have your knowledge mapped, your knowledge topic with you wherever you go, no matter what app you're using. But it needs a few things. Needs a kind of a commitment within the ecosystem to interoperate a protocol in terms of how to request things. Some pretty fast APIs if you're doing type ahead, not to suggest some perhaps conventions for referencing different PKMs if we're in kind of a multi knowledge-based world. And then of course services and clients to implement all that. So that's my bit. Let me go ahead and kick it over to Connor. Yep. Great, awesome. So I'm just gonna actually be presenting out of my room or the company room that we're using. And it was interesting seeing the prompt of sort of like what's the future of Rome and then you got the future of note-taking. And so I figured I would title the talk. Rome is not about a note-taking. And yeah, it starts from the perspective that we've never really been about notes, which is kind of strange because if you look at our landing page, it says Rome is a note-taking tool for network thought. Now this is a landing page that we also haven't updated in since October 12th, 2019. But what I'm gonna talk about is what Rome's sort of long-term vision always has been and why note-taking has sort of been the entry point. And we use language that people are familiar with rather than introduce two new ideas. We connected to something that was familiar with something that was new. And it seems to be, it's gotten us somewhere nice. So Rome is always the goal of Rome. I've been working on the problem since 2008 and slightly bigger. But Rome is always, but I've been working on Rome as a company full-time, Mish, since 2013. And our goal has always been to build a platform for collective intelligence. This slide right here is one I saw in like, yeah, 2008-ish, which is, this is Moore's Law, and it's sort of a stand-in for just the exponential increasing leverage that technology has given us over our physical environment. And my concern at that time was that all of our sense-making institutions, this is too small an image, but whether it's our print, our journal system, our systems of government, they were mostly designed in an era of, like, print media or broadcast media, and had a, they have been getting worse and worse, and it sort of looked like an inevitability for me that they would not be able to keep up with rapidly changing environment. This is, and I think this year, this has particularly become obvious to folks if you look at sort of the dramatic reversals and the difficulty that we seem to have in terms of building a truth-seeking or sense-making society. And the ways that's been impacting our culture was sort of like the politicization of everything, including science right now. But I had some, I had a lot of hope. I still have a lot of hope, sitting back from 2008 or so. This is the great pyramid of Khufu at Giza, and I put a little interactive model in here so you could say that maybe all of the workers who worked on Khufu worked 10 hours a day. Maybe they worked 12 hours a day. It's kind of backbreaking labor, but maybe they were able to do it. And yeah, what I, we've got, let's say they did. But if you took the, there's about, YouTube was bragging about how there's about a billion hours of ads watched on YouTube every day. And so my initial interest in getting involved in the internet at all was figuring out how you could tap into that column of surplus because every day and a half, we're putting as much energy as the total man hours that went into building that pyramid. And I had been particularly motivated by Clay Shurkey and Yochai Bankler and the idea of common space peer production and that there were many potential Wikipedia's left to be created. I do want to shout out Ward while he's here. And I can go into this in the future, but federated Wikis have been in some ways even more inspiring than Wikipedia itself. Okay, so yeah, I'll fly through the history, but basically from 2000 and eight until 2011, I worked on trying to build a collective intelligence and a collective action platform that was based on local governments. It was cool for like getting invited to the White House and like honored by Obama, but like the reality was that it was a complete fire fire because we were trying to one, I was 19 and we were trying to both figure out how to create a user interface for like really crowdsourcing and extracting tacit knowledge and organizing knowledge from a ton of different people in a community and directly channeling that into the political arena. And we had focused on local government because we had hoped that that area would be less prone to like the hyper partisanship or people intentionally misrepresenting each other's positions or just sort of willful misunderstanding or sort of narrative pre-selection of stuff. But it was, I found it to be just as bad as a national discourse. Ironically, we ended up getting acquired by AOL which only confirmed to me that like a lot of our media institutions are not necessarily interested in finding like the nuance or like novel position, especially if there's a way in which the like incentive landscape allows them to score a ton of points against a perceived enemy. So this is an image I love around, you know, one of the things that made it really hard running that first company was that there were so many hypotheses where we could be wrong. And there were so many places where, you know, in order to solve one problem, we created a ton more. And I realized that, you know, I'd not been approaching it sort of scientifically. So from 20, you know, after that acquisition, I was interested in how do you simplify the problem and basically take something from, you know, if your goal is something massive, like try to figure out how to build a better sense-making system and a better way for people to learn from one another and, you know, update on complex ideas, what's the easiest way to start? And I was interested in, you know, flywheels, flywheels and feedback loops, you know, focusing on something that was small enough that we could get off the ground and then, you know, be able to progressively extend our reach. And so one way of thinking about it, and this is the approach that Rome ended up taking, we get a lot of criticism right now for the fact that we, you know, charge 15 bucks a month, but Rome was essentially unfundable for years. People didn't think there was any possibility that you could build a business in the knowledge management space, especially not when something is weird as a like graph-based outliner. So we couldn't really raise venture funding or investment. Our initial go-to-market was focusing on, and I do wanna challenge Ward's supposition that like a business model means that the incentives are not aligned between people. Our way of getting funding off the ground was we were able to piece together from a bunch of different sources. Like the idea, we were able to convince some funders in the like effective altruism research space that there was some plausible chance that Rome could make their researchers, you know, two to 10% more effective. And if it's a space where, you know, there's, in that case, there weren't a ton of math PhDs who were, you know, interested in like a certain kind of applied philosophy approach to, let's say AI alignment and, you know, AI safety. We bootstrapped the company for a few years, just keeping it open for like a dozen to two dozen people. And so this is currently the stage where I would say we're at, we iterated around that and took a big leap about a year and a half ago to open it up to the public and, you know, made a decision to charge a fair amount, even though like currently about a third of our users are either on a three-year discounted plan. But Rome made a conscious decision to, you know, we expect that we are at the very earliest stages of the problem of trying to figure out how to enable many to many communication and building a real hypermedia tool for representing thought. I'm gonna get into that. But yeah, currently for the last year or so, the main thing we've been focused on is sort of how do you, how do we internally use the tool to think better together so that as we add more people to the team, we are not overrun with coordination costs. Currently we are about a dozen people on six continents and that can be pretty tricky because you don't have a lot of the advantages of in-person coordination. And so, you know, the goal for Rome is to figure out how can we construct something that's better than plain text, like better than pros, essentially, for allowing module, like allowing extremely remixable, extremely reusable and like robust collaborative knowledge work so you can get into a situation of, you know, serendipitous collaboration, one might say, or like, yeah, how can you like, how can you get some of the dynamics we have in open source but in all sorts of other domains? And particularly the thing that we're really interested in is, you know, can we figure out how to efficiently allocate expert attention so that, you know, the person who has the key insight can have hooks into the work that other people are doing and, you know, focus on just the part that is relevant for them but still be able to bring in all the relevant context that's necessary. And through that, you know, like, be able to have a highly leveraged contribution and eventually be able to bring in a larger, more cognitively diverse, different-skilled group of people. Mine will be a short one because this whole collaborative annotation idea is pretty new to me and to the log-seq team, although we do share some similarities in our visions. So my talk will mostly be a brief introduction to what we do and mostly I will listen to the ideas from this panel. So my name is Junyu and I'm from the log-seq team. In case you don't know, log-seq is a privacy-first open source platform for knowledge management and collaboration. It starts as a personal project from our founder, Tianfen, and it draws many inspiration from other tools. For example, room research. So we thanks for all the great tools that we learn from. And we think in this age of information explosion, we try to build a tool that help users manage their knowledge more easily in the form of connected graphs instead of just standalone content. What's more, to make the user the sole owner of their data and we put privacy and the data security at the most important position by utilizing encryption, embracing an open source method, open standards, and enforcing data security in all aspects. We chose the open source way because we believe not only it improves transparency and encourages participation, but also it makes a tool for knowledge more to everyone as it should be. We have a long way to fulfill this vision, but so far the story looks pretty good. Although it begins as a humble personal project from our founder, log-seq already have a pretty vibrant user base and a welcoming community. The app, the web app, and the desktop app have recently went through a core refactory resulting in a much better architecture and user experience. And we also just launched the early access for our plugin API and users are starting to build amazing plugins with it. Finally, we think log-seq's vision aligns with the collaborative knowledge management ecosystem in large. We all understand the importance of open standards and fully embrace them. And we aim to build not only better tools to manage knowledge, but also a better platform where people around the world can share and collaborate and build communities around it. And by listening to the previous talks from these great panels, in my previous experience, I think this is a problem mainly unsolved. For example, the interoperability between different note-taking apps. But after listening to your talks, I start to think that this is a problem we do can solve together by embracing open standards and build upon it. Yeah. So that's all for my talk. Junior, thanks. So I'll kick it off with one question, which I call the kind of the 25-year question. 25 years being a long time, not a crazy long time, but maybe a sufficiently long time that technologies that are kind of well conceived and durable tend to last. The web passes the 25-year test. I think Ward's Wiki has got a couple of years to go, but it's getting close. And so if we think about note-taking, kind of the future of note-taking in the concept of the 25-year test, what's most important to think about? And either terms of features or capabilities or properties. So I'll toss it out there. For anybody that wants to kind of raise their hand and jump in. Oliver, do you want to kick it off? Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'm not sure on a technical level what will be needed, but I assume that if a 25-year mark wants to be hit by any product, it requires a significant sustained effort over that period of time to work on this. And I know, for example, Connor has a very strong, very vocal about his 25-year plans. Similar to mine is to figure out what's the core purpose that drives you to build a product that can then solve a problem that will only be solved, solvable in 25 years. Like, for example, we both described this need of our society to solve the sense-making and decision-making crisis that we have, because if we don't solve this in the next 25 years, the chances that we're surviving the century or thriving beyond the century are limited. And I don't want to be in a Mad Max scenario. I want to be in a Star Trek scenario. So one part is definitely a strong vision on where things should go, and then an ability of the infrastructure and the product to iterate towards this and be adaptable to the changing environment that 10 years from now will provide or 20 years from now or 30 years from now. Yeah. Connor. So the premise is like, I'm curious what's motivating the question, like, or sort of like, there seems to be an unspoken assumption in there that like, that to the web and wiki technology you're 25 years old and that, can you just say a little more, Dan, around? I mean, what will define the note-taking apps that we use in 25 years, I guess, maybe is another way. I mean, what is most important, another way to put it is, what's most important about what we're about to build? What do we need to focus on in order to provide really durable, lasting value for people to organize their thinking and collaborate with others? So it sounds like for you, there's a, like a, like durability is interesting. It's an interesting idea. The thing that, like this, we're all sort of following off of Dan of our Bush's Memex in a sense, right? And like, you know, from him, Engelbart's, you know, like, yeah, like, the mother of all demos and like there's a, you know, the original idea for how to, how to deal with the crisis of information overwhelm and the fact that, you know, this, the knowledge needed to organize our, or to run our civilization was something to know one individual could possess. And the, like, you know, expertise was becoming so siloed, it was hard to have a good understanding of more complex systems. I mean, the original pitch was microfilm. Like, that would be pretty durable if we still had material for reading microfilm, but like, how durable are VHS tapes either right now? Right? So, like the, I think I sort of want to say something like the, I'm reminded of, essay from Brett, the web of Alexandria, and it was just pointing out like, the most durable knowledge storage thing that we know of is DNA, which is constantly replicating itself and propagating in like, you know, and is, you know, the information itself is undergoing change. So, you know, our first feature when we opened up to the general public was export to plain text as markdown, export as JSON, so it could be machine readable and like, manipulable by other people. And I hope that is one of the reasons that, you know, people were able to get a head start on, you know, like, sort of open source alternatives and other ways. Like the nice thing now is that there's many ways, certainly people were concerned about starting to use Rome because they were concerned about data lock-in, but now there's a half dozen different things that can read that Rome data. But we started with the perspective of like, if we figure out how to solve the problem well and represent the ideas better than you can represent them in text, then like, it will like, other people will want to have their own way of reading that data. So, yeah, I mean, memory diamonds, I don't know, if the internet shuts down, we're fucked. So, like, there's a lot of things that could make things really a lot worse. So, like, durability is in it, like, I can't get a notification if a paper that I read five years ago is falsified. That's the thing that makes me feel like the whole infrastructure we have of knowledge is completely not durable. Like, our journal system is not durable. Like, the Library of Congress, I think 30% of links within five years are dead. So, like, I think the distributed web gives us a bunch of hope. I think that there's a lot of, like, wards federated wiki, the idea that, like, when you copy something, you make your local copy of your own. I think there's a lot of approaches that are better than just a centralized server system. We happen to have started with the centralized server system because the hardest part for us to figure out is how the collaboration actually works. And, you know, we haven't yet figured out how to visualize version control, but, like, the end is going to be, it has to be decentralized. So, that's my answer. Great. I'd like to add to that that, you know, certainly decentralization, and, you know, JSON is nice because the claim it isn't going to be versioned. The thing that we really tried to tackle is this idea that you would actually do work in the wiki instead of just talk about the work. So, we wanted to have some way to bundle data and computation in a way that could persist longer than the implementation technology that we choose. And so, we don't call it a domain-specific language. I think that DSL has been abused, but we call it markup. We just say different types of things have different markups, and then we check and see how simple we can make that markup and still get work done because we know we're going to end up re-implementing it over and over and over again. So, to keep that one step of isolation from the underlying technology will be digital. I think we can be pretty sure, and you can probably represent integers, but it might not be IEEE floating point. Wait. This is giving me a point that I kind of want to raise. I'm reminded of Ted Nelson's eulogy for Doug Engelbart where he said, I honor Doug's legacy by keeping the links outside the file as Doug did. And it was interesting who wasn't included in this. There's a project called Codex Editor that I think is doing really interesting things with standoff notation. It started with an embedded markup, but it's so not the right way. That was for pragmatic reasons of what we could chip. I do think the future is going to be in standoff notation. That's maybe a bold claim, but I think that keeping links outside the file is pretty essential if you're going to do collaborative stuff. Let's jump to Junior. Yeah. I think predicting the future is always hard, but we can at least learn from history. For me, for example, we can learn from the web. After all these years, the web is still around, although it also has some challenges of its own. So, why is the web still around? And for many reasons, for example, it's open, it's accessible to everyone, and also as a platform, it may change. For example, we may have better browsers and different network protocols, but the content itself is always there. So that's one of my take. And also I just saw in the chat someone says that the note-taking applications will always change. You know, it will. But the data itself, the noted itself will be around for a long time, but it takes effort to make it durable. Yeah. So, that's all I can think about right now. Thanks, Bastian. Yeah, just one idea. I think Git has been quite a change for all the developers. It's going to be 25 years in 10 years and less than that in four years now. No, like in nine years. And I think versioning will be very safe into or note-taking tools in 10 years and perhaps Git is the right infrastructure for that. I mean, we will use it without noticing by using online note-taking. And I think this will bring a lot of interoperability into the things we do the same way to change the way developers can share code. So, I'm not sure yet all the consequences for this change, but I see it coming and I see it as a structural change for collaboration and note-sharing. Thanks, Bastian. Eduardo. Thank you. I want to add to the amazing comments so far I think that a very interesting sub-problem that I need to consider for this question is that of the seeding problem, the bootstrapping problem and essentially what I mean by this is the responsibility we have as those potentially towards the beginning of a 25-year long process. So, here I think about things like inclusivity and diversity. So, making sure that the system we build the systems we are building are as inclusive and diverse and available as possible and this is where the worst of a third of the speakers really resonates with me. So, that's like having something that can be used by all the people and that we know that we will be able to be used by all the people in 25 years. So, essentially what legacy we are living with the architectural decisions we are taking and also with the actual seeding of the knowledge and the setting by example we are doing by being the first the relatively first few users of the systems. So, this I think is very important. I personally like to think that whatever takes the place of this system, you know, as you know I call it the algorithm, I don't want to impose the name but you know like this is common, we are building this knowledge commons. Whatever takes the place of that I hope that in 25 years time I will say a 13-year-old or 15-year-old with plenty of time and interest should be able not only to use clearly for free as we are all saying but also to implement that will be my wish. Someone that you know can just that knows a bit of programming and has an interest should be able to get and tap on to these like vast knowledge commons that I hope we are building to. Thanks, Eduardo. Dana, are you back? Maybe, can you hear me? Awesome. Yeah, so I'm probably the least qualified person to opine on you know super long-term visions on where note-taking is headed given that we are focused the least on that. But what we always talk about is note-taking right now typically takes place within an app so you have to context switch from whatever it is you are doing to take your notes and so we imagine in the future note-taking will be more integrated at either the browser or the operating system level and in this way the notes will be much more tied to the actual context you are in that's definitely the vision we see you know for our use case of reading we definitely want to help people take notes better while reading as one example as opposed to having to have a separate note-taking app or a physical notebook open while reading. Thanks. Did I miss anybody? Oliver did you go already? Yeah, I did but I have actually one more thought about it and I think it was Eduardo who mentioned this or parts of that I think in order to make these systems resilient and survivable over time the whole topic of interoperability and the length in the previous presentations and also the introduction of this session with this topic overall is if we build interoperable systems then it means that knowledge has a continuation that actually can be executed because of course knowledge that is in a note-taking application that has a lock-in is still there and it's allowed to take that knowledge into new systems that can gradually survive all of the extinction events that happen for each of those applications as they become too old to serve the use cases of the users they were intended to serve in the first place and if we see for example the internet as an interoperable system has proved that to be right it's hard to update but ultimately it survived until now over a 30 year period almost unchanged because it was built on the foundations of interoperability and meaning you could move from one server to the other you could still talk to everyone else so yeah over time if we as a collective community of note-taking or just generally tool makers knowledge tool makers keep an intention to say interoperable and make it easy for people to one move to new services and two if they move to new services have at least as friction as possible although that's very one of the hardest problems that we can solve like communicate with people that use other tools so an example that I bring up often is why do we have to reinstall and repopulate our entire social graph when we move from whatsapp to telegram why don't we why we're not able to talk to our whatsapp friends that are not that haven't changed at the service and so yeah of course this is going to be a hugely complicated problem to solve but yeah definitely I would agree that's key that's definitely key and I will say that if in 35 years there's people in the future we ask but cannot take their whole social networks together with all their data and just move platforms with the snap of a finger we have failed we have failed them I think this is one of the biggest 25 years ago there were 20 million users of the internet period there were no mobile phones like the level of pessimism on this are you guys not seriously trying to think about neurolink and like you know room scale knowledge representations that are not verbal what the hell are we talking about with no taking even is it knowledge captures and all compression I think Conor with all due respect I think that what you point out is very interesting right of course the media the form and the resources that people are going to share in the future I want to think we can't imagine if we could imagine them all we would be living a boring future in 25 years so I agree with you there that the formats and the media and the things being shared will change but I believe that the basic problem which has to do with power dynamics to some extent I believe of the data who wants the data who really can make a claim on data and actually you know like interop it like Oliver was saying that problem is sort of like orthogonal to the actual nature of the media yeah you know I want to complain for a minute when we're talking about longevity and that when I ask people to put up a server and share their content and their content is unreadable because it's an HTTP and there's some theater there about privacy but I notice that every raping and plundering site is running HTTPS you know that that basically means you're big and conglomerate and dangerous and little people just putting up servers are denied access to this media so who thought that was a good idea it used to be called breaking the internet okay we've got a bunch of great questions here in the Q&A so let's move to the audience but one short simple question that got a bunch of upvotes right away was what if any role do you see AI taking in collaborative note taking and I guess you can take it that any way you mean it you could in terms of AI in the formation and creation of notes or AI in terms of the ability for AIs to reason over the collective collaborative knowledge that we're all creating anybody want to jump on that one there's clearly an opportunity there in translation you know it's proven to be effective even if humorous on occasion I'd be very suspicious of depending too heavily on any individuals artificial intelligence for fear of of you know you know the biases that are intrinsic in anything done statistically anybody else on that well maybe some speculative idea I think AI will be able to get to infer questions from the notes most of the notes I take for example are just information answers to question I ask myself and I think in as a Geoparty game or as the IBM Watson game I think it's very useful to go back to the questions for which we have the answers because we will have too many answers and too few questions so I hope AI can help tackle this issue thanks Sebastian I will perhaps add short to things like one is to word on translation I'm looking forward to translation not only of natural languages but also of like mental models right when I say X and you say why do we mean the same thing right how to recognize those occasions or how to actually translate to be more intelligent and the other thing is like I'm also looking forward to the application of essentially the latest techniques that I can take creativity like transformer based models and so on to note corpus to be social I actually I'm a believer in the potential of perhaps training AI to as groups to perform functions and so on all right let's go to one of the earlier questions from Chris Aldrich who says I find it curious that we didn't hear much of anything about the rise of the bi-directional link either within the wiki or ideas like what mentioned that allow one knowledge base to communicate with another is it important as I think it is so this is perhaps particularly relevant to in the notion of the coming future of federated open collaborative kind of personal knowledge management systems and how bi-directionality kind of plays in that future started off with word since you invented the bi-directional link what do you think about all that you know I I I don't think it's a hard problem as long as there's a will to make it happen people who are creating things for a profit or advertising driven they want to be sticky and so the last thing they want to do is thing anywhere else so overcoming that is the challenge it doesn't have to be any more complicated than putting a recognizable code on every item in your notes and then scraping that together and building indices from that from the the realm of interest one problem is that with a bi-directional link you say here and it turns out it's 10,000 and that doesn't help you want to say of the people I care about in the moment for the notes what 10 things link here and that needs to be expressed somehow too the context in which you're interested you got a hand clap from that I saw it floating up the screen two hand claps well I think those are for you anybody else yeah Eduardo and Dan we had a conversation I think a couple weeks ago that I found really interesting and you also rift on it in your short presentation essentially how do we make it possible for in the UX or for example creating double brackets that you when you hook into like when you create a double brackets that it does not just allow you to search inside what the current tool is but all of the tools that attach to it so it means also you create those bi-directional links to multiple endpoints in the end like it can be Rome it can be notion it can be memex it can be hypothesis it can be an agora like and so that that was that is for me one of the most straightforward and powerful ways of making those tools more interoperable and making those tools interoperable around the user's need again to be interoperable like when you for example pull up the different connectors then it's obviously yours like if you haven't hooked your own Rome Graph into it then you're not going to get someone else's wrong then you're not going to get your Rome Graph and you won't get anyone else's Rome Graph if you haven't in some form connected to it and again this plays into this notion of how do we create a more user centric interoperability that allows them to adapt their workflows more efficiently without making this a mandatory experience for for everyone if I may I think back links will be the default for every note taking system and we don't have backlinks in org mode right now but there is a tool called org Rome which implements backlinks and that people enjoy very much what I think resonates with what Daniel said previously that for now we have apps and those apps are things that we need to open and we need to take notes within the apps and it's not very well integrated within the system so the whole problem of backlinks and link consistency in general is about having the note taking process with closer to the system and being able to make references to the world system in a more generic fashion the secret weapon of org mode is that people we live in Emacs so it's very well integrated with all the people use every day the file and even browsing the web on Emacs so this kind of integration is very powerful and we are trying to think about how to get backlinks but it always needs something that monitors the world system and I think the when note taking will be closer to the system then the tools we have to monitor reference integrity will be available more easily so our experience in this was that when we had uniform site maps we added links to the site maps in addition to pages and then it becomes very natural to say if you are looking at 5 sites if that's your neighborhood and you ask for backlinks you will get backlinks in those 5 sites and it's computationally efficient which is important to us because we are running on the user's computer but I think that in the point was made about externalizing links but it doesn't have to be externalized they just have to be externalizable and the context controllable a common effect of ours is you will be browsing along and there is a little counter in the bottom of how many pages are close at hand and it will go from 100 to 1000 to maybe 10,000 and when it gets up past 10,000 then all of a sudden a lot of these things sort of start breaking down you just throw them all away and start over and you know you are focused again you know it's a go away don't bother me sort of effect but it's very real. Thanks for kind of gets back to another question that just came up what is the drawback to bi-directional links you kind of hinted at that a little bit which is of course if they are too broad coming from too many sources it is kind of a spammy and so you really only want backlinks from the folks that you care about but sometimes you don't know what you are going to care about so there is almost a reputation kind of an awareness attention dynamic that comes if the system expands too large one of the reasons maybe the web didn't implement them is because of the idea that it never did any we are really a couple of minutes from ending here I think I will just throw it open back to the panelists if anybody wants to make kind of a comment or an observation in closing maybe even around interoperability Thank you we will shortly start perhaps by saying that it is just my personal opinion and that of the people I work with to do what we can to make it easy for people to adopt the aura or essentially the conventions that we are depending on that we believe are essentially the cheapest ones we know and the most generally usable in the direction of a better convention we will adopt it as many conventions as it takes so that people because of the inclusivity aspect so I just want to offer this to essentially work with you to reach better standards and of course just I will follow your way because I have been doing this for so long many of you so yeah, thank you for your time and for letting me share this Thanks, Appara anybody else Connor I will go last okay anybody else want to jump in few words just a quick word thank you again I think there is a burst of new solutions new problems and I very much appreciated the discussion and the attention paid to the longevity of some solutions that we already have and I think the more experimentation there is I've seen a lot of things that I want to explore now the memex looks great readwise and all that stuff so the more solutions we have the more discussions like this one we need to have so thanks again welcome so Dan are you going to invite us all next year to see where we got yeah we'll call it then the new new future of just well thanks for bringing us together yeah, you're more than welcome thanks for coming yeah thank you so much for talking my thoughts for a second I think the last time I saw you Dan was at this conference maybe two years ago it's been a crazy couple years I like particularly want to shout out or like have a thank you while I'm on the call with fashion because orb mode was one of a few systems that I was using as a proto roam that involved and a few others and toward because the conceptual model of the federated wiki and his sort of thinking about dissent and you know the problems of like a sort of forced consensus were really big for me and then also I mean I don't want to like now it looks bad who I don't name but and then I should also shout out Dan who gave me the how to take smart notes book which ended up really helping Zettelkasten had already been a big influence but I did not realize somebody had written a book about it until Daniel gave it to me and that has been really important for our community I think the curses and it is alive you know like you like and I think a lot of this there's a lot of ways to focus on things that are not like core I guess right and and not and yeah I think my main my main thesis is like solve problems in the order that you have to solve them in order to get a feedback loop going I similarly was once a like you know like everything must always be open source I think there's probably a world where like romance of being open source at some point but like for me there's a complexity budget and there's like you know you minimize the variables you've got and it's very possible for open source systems to end up with perverse incentives based on where their funding comes from and focusing on things that are not necessarily pushing the frontier so and yeah I think that's my main point is that right now we're still at such an exploratory space and the problem is so like like the problem is so weakly explored of how do we represent knowledge to ourselves and to others and how do we figure out how to think better together that you know adding additional unnecessary constraints while you're trying to figure this out I'm very happy that there's so many open source clones of Rome that are focused on interoperability those things because like if I you know screw this up there will still be people who are building on you know the last five years of work but like there's so like so many problems that are still open and if you simplify your system sometimes imperfectly at first right you can you can you can have a chance at like figuring out what the solution might look like so you know like the main one of the main things you were mentioning Dan of like multiplayer backlinks that's the problem that we've been working on right how do you how do you figure out how to filter for that based on like users within your trust network the internet didn't start with a social network built onto it and like eventually adding decentralization is a whole other layer on top of it but we'll see we're going to be working on this for a really long time so it's just about the sequence of the problems so nice I can only echo this like we have been definitely victim of over optimization and idealism in the past and made it very difficult for us to build a product that actually can provide the value it needs to yep and so that that was also one of those insights like one of those learnings that led to the presentation I made before where you really you don't need to be an idealistic interoperable product where you adhere to every standard that is available right now which introduces a lot of complexity, slowness of iteration etc but rather go for these very particular interoperable integrations between the services that are crucial for your users to complete their workflows and and ultimately I feel this is maybe the commitment that will be really helpful for all of us together is understanding that the biggest blocker to collective intelligence right now is nevertheless non-interoperability it's the inability to connect the knowledge across different sources of information and move information across different systems as the user evolves their own knowledge workflows and as the user is capable of executing better technical implementations for the heuristics they have in processing information and interoperability can certainly help but we don't need to be idealistic about it I've got to run everybody but thank you guys so much thanks Dan for hosting and thank everybody cheers thanks Connor and Daniel let me kick it off yeah I mean we've been in this space for about five years now and it definitely feels like you know as of a year or two ago there was definitely an inflection point where it feels like there's a lot more innovation a lot more people focused on this a lot of people coming in so it just feels like an exciting time to be working on these on these problems we all call it no taking but I imagine in the not too distant future there'll be a different term for whatever this space is we're in I'm not sure there is an agreed upon one yet you know personal knowledge management or tools for thought or something like that but yeah I appreciate being invited to this and being able to participate a lot of exciting times ahead indeed I think we've was that everybody yeah well thanks I just want to say thanks everybody for joining this was really a session I've been looking to forward to for a while really appreciate you guys making time and for coming from all different time zones around the world she knew had to drop off because it was probably three o'clock in the morning there isn't it but it's a pleasure to be with you guys you know in this space kind of making stuff together and look forward to more of it in the future so thank you all thanks to everybody in the audience