There are many tools-for-thought, second brains, and digital garden apps out there, with more being built every day. How do we work on interchange between these systems?
Many people want Markdown as the One True Format, which they have become used to working with. But there isn’t even one standard for Markdown, never mind the front matter for metadata storage, various plugins, extensions, queries and other components that each system has.
We also don’t want any single large systems to be the de-facto standard that is fully owned by one private company, whether that is at the API layer or the export layer.
Can we work on ways to interchange data between systems in a way that preserves the unique capabilities of each system, while also allowing users and developers to more easily use different tools to work with their own data?
Blaine Cook, atJSON
@blaine will start with an overview of atJSON https://github.com/CondeNast/atjson
For Condé Nast, it is essential for our stories to be a format that doesn’t age quickly – we have over a hundred years of articles from publications across the world. It is extremely important for us to be able to put these stories written for digital media in our archive for the future. Many current content formats do not strive for rigorousness in this, instead tying the constraints of the format to the current platform of choice. When constructing this format, we chose to separate the original text from the data associated for this purpose.
Jeremy Ruston, TiddlyWiki ebook conversion & tiddler formats
https://tiddlywiki.com and https://twpub-tools.org/
@Jermolene has a demo of some related work that he is doing with TiddlyWiki that transforms ePUB into tiddlers. Already supports multiple formats — WikiText, Markdown, etc
Gordon Brander, Subtext used in Subconscious
https://subconscious.substack.com/
@gordonbrander is building a new TFT called Subconscious and will tell us about Subtext, simple markup for note taking.
Christina Bowen, Social Roots, healthy teams and social coordination
Thoughts and questions about cross-group coordination and collaborative work to address social mess problems. We’re the first cooperative funded by the NSF SBIR program and are currently researching healthy teams and social coordination, especially around things like food, climate, health. I’d share when we are and some key questions we have about text-based coordination.
More broadly, we will have an open discussion about these different systems and what challenges everyone is facing.
Generally, anyone working on Tools for Thought and thinking about import / export and interchange between different formats and systems would be interested in this topic.
Video
Join us for Part 2
On Friday, June 4, 2021 1:00 AM register here, see the agenda and notes: