--- spicata
A diverse community; was able to bring together a lot of different people.
An active community; even (what like) 5 months into the project, the community is still talking
A steadily growing community; the group does not increase too quickly, and is able to not reach a 'critical' point (at least yet)
--- spicata
An inactive collection of notes; the notes (very important!) are not updated often
unrefined notes; the notes themselves leave quite a lot to be desired (except ed's chemistry notes (i think) )
scattered notes; the notes are also at times hard to find, and not organised
redundancy; a lot of different people cover the same topic. this could be bad or good i guess
dependence: the town members dont get stuff done on their own a lot of the time.
by Edward
We are approaching a point of the town (now at 22+ members) where things are starting to get... weird...
Originally, the point, or the goal, of the town was to be a coalition of notes. i.e. members were expected to write notes on their website and upload them. But unfortunately, albeit expected from such a large grouping of people, this is not the case for most members. Instead, the town has evolving into a more social community, much like our potential counterpart, the "*ඞ*" discord group. This group initially was a dm group for skribble.io, and instead evolved into a broad discord group of friends who have not played skribble.io in ages.1
Whilst the 'among us' Discord group was clearly with the intent of having fun, it grew to have more people, and along with it, also became a place for people to ask questions and get help from those with more experience.
On the other hand, the Town was originally a place for people to intentionally share notes, and eventually grew to become more of a lively place, where people had fun. This kind of 'reversal' in roles — at least in my opinion — shows an interesting trend in the development of the Town and how far it has strayed from the metaphorical target.
--- spicata
So, this begs the question. What now for the town? Clearly, we have fallen short of the lofty goal2 of which we had initially striven for.
--- spicata
I don't have the answer to this question. Christian doesn't either. So we are asking you. How do you want the town to change? Do you want to stick to the original goal? Or do you want to change it?
"a little interjection by your boy M.spicata"
Looking back on the history of websites of the Town — especially those of the Notes Coalition viz. Edward and spicata's — we can see a little trend of 'gardening'. Although many new members may not know where this trend started, it is definitely not unique to the Town. This idea of the garden is just part of a wider idea that gets thrown around in the internet.
"The phrase "digital garden" is a metaphor for thinking about writing and creating that focuses less on the resulting "showpiece" and more on the process, care, and craft it takes to get there."
Digital gardens have a long history that I won't go into the depth of, partly for brevity and partly because I am to stupid to do so. However, digital gardening primarily focuses on the slow and steady accumulation of knowledge through interconnected nodes of information. This was partly what our (sc. Ed and I) websites are based on.
From the standpoint of digital gardening, you can see the possible potency of the Town. Twenty something people, all with different areas of expertise, but all tackling generally the same fields. This could lead to a grand accumulation of knowledge.3
--- spicata
If the point of the Town was to accumulate knowledge, and the point of digital gardening is to accumulate knowledge... well, can we stand on the shoulders of giants?
"Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects."
Knowing the Town, the Town members probably don't know who Andy Matuschak is. If you use Obsidian, and you ever used the 'sliding panes' plugin, then know that it was based on Mr Matuschak's notes. Another pretty big idea of his is the idea of (so-called) evergreen notes. Of course, he'll explain it better, but to summarise, evergreen notes is a method to create insight over notes (i.e. serendipity). The key ideas are that:
They are non-divisible, each note should only tackle 1 topic
They are linked together (more on this later)
Make them based on concepts, not on other arbitrary things like date or author
Make them for yourself, effort spent beating around the bush of context is effor wasted
De-emphasising organisation, file systems and such restrict associations and the creation of new ideas4
Well, I guess that you can add shortcuts to other files, but that doesn't really have the same impact, yknow?
--- spicata
If principles such as these were adopted into the Town, I do think we could probably increase the average quality and output of the notes.
If you immerse yourself in the discourse of digital gardening, you may have come across the difference between streams and garden. Streams are like your Twitter and your Instagram, (reverse) chronological feeds of information... kind of like a blog, I guess. Gardens, on the other hand, are like a spider web, dense, linked patches of information.
I don't particularly like this analogy, however, it does highly a pretty cool and good idea. Connected-ness.
This parallel between the development of the 'among us' Discord group and the Town, and its eventual convergence also shows something interesting about the development of said Town. ↩
However, to call it unattainable would be... a mistake. Clearly, as we have seen from communities online, such goals are possible. It is just up to us to fix it. ↩
Slight aside, this is probably, at least from my point of view, the main goal of the Town. The 'accumulation of knowledge', which of course, can be in notes website, but probably in any other way as well. That is an interesting idea, actually. Are there other ways to accumulate knowledge apart from notes websites? ↩
Imagine file systems that would allow you to place a file in more that one folder at once. That would be absolutely insane, and I would love to see that, genuinely. ↩
