Working in public as a way to avoid fooling yourself (a la Feynman).

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself– and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.” -Richard Feynman-

http://oldschool.scripting.com/AndySylvester99/2022/10/24/205556.html?title=thinkingAboutStartingAnOpenZettelkasten

A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

Explicit example of someone using a zettelkasten to develop ideas and create content for distribution online and within social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/vgtyuf/mastery_requires_theory_application_of_theory_is/

Based on this definition of a "note", one must wonder if my public notes here on Hypothes.is are then not notes as they are tacitly circulated publicly from the first use. However they are still specifically and distinctly preparatory towards some future finished work, I just haven't yet decided which ultimate work in which they'll appear.

Actual public digital gardens, or what I would consider good ones, are exceedingly rare. Even rarer are find ones which have enough subject overlap with my own areas of interest which tends to make them even less directly interesting to me.

What I wouldn't give to have well tended public digital gardens by people in my areas of interest.

Konrad Gessner's second edition of Bibliotheca Universalis in 1548 contains a list of keywords (loci communes) thus placing it into the tradition of the commonplace book, but as it is published for use by others, it accelerates the ability for others to find and learn about information in which they may have an interest.

Was there a tradition of published or manuscript commonplace books prior to this?

An example of someone taking notes in public to model the process. Also an example of the time it takes to make notes.

Has Dan Allosso (@danallosso) done something along these lines as an example on his YouTube channel?

This is a model that is tacitly being used by the IndieWeb in slowly developing better social media and communication on the web.

I often find that doing the work in public ups the quality and effort I put into the thing because I know there's at least the off-hand chance that someone else might read it.

Generally this means a better contextualized product for myself when I come back to revisit it later, even if no one else saw it. Without it, sometimes my personal scribbles don't hold up when I revisit them, and I can't tell what I had originally intended because I didn't flesh out the idea enough.

This is an interesting hack for getting one to hit the publish button.

I wonder if people have renamed the "publish" button in their CMS to make hitting it easier?

My own anecdotal evidence is that hitting it often can certainly make it seem trivial, particularly if one is posting their status updates to their site along with everything else.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Maggie Appleton</span> in A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden (<time class='dt-published'>05/28/2021 18:08:16</time>)</cite></small>

I've noticed that Dan Mackinlay has some public notebooks with an interesting system for indicating knowledge process too.

I wonder something related, but even broader, "How do we get everyone to work in public?"

Li, Y. (2020, October 18). Public health measures and R. Media Hopper Create. https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_1uhkv3uc

This quote comes from a larger piece by Robin Sloan. (I don't know who that is though)

The problem with social media is that the equivalent to working with the garage door open (working in public) is repeatedly talking in public about what you're doing.

One problem with this is that you need to choose what you want to talk about, and say it. This emphasizes whatever you select, not what would catch a passerby's eye.

The other problem is that you become more visible by the more you talk. Conversely, when you stop talking, you become invisible.