Writing for an audience keeps me honest.
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-
send off your draft or beta orproposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend,family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. Thenext time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input andsuggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.
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.
Ps) I am trying to post daily content like this on LinkedIn using my Slip-Box as the content generator (the same is posted on Twitter, but LinkedIn is easier to read), so if you want to see more like this, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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/
But it is more difficult in a world of manuscriptsthan in the era of printing to evaluate what constitutes a note—that is, a piece ofwriting not meant for circulation but for private use, say, as preparatory toward afinished work
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.
I have little use for countless of “collected” links and likes. Published Obisidan Vaults look cool, but the initial excitement wears off pretty quickly.
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.
The second volume of the Bibliotheca Universalis , published in 1548 under the title Pandectarum sive Partitionum Universalium , contains a list of keywords, ordered not by authors ’ names, but thematically. This intro-duces a classifi cation of knowledge on the one hand, and on the other hand offers orientation for the novice about patterns and keywords (so-called loci communes ) that help organize knowledge to be acquired.
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?
I watched Christian from Zettelkasten.de taking notes from a book. He’s a professional note-taker, and it still took him two hours to take four notes in the first video - it does take forever to make good permanent notes.
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?
Build pathways between communal and private work. Too often, we celebrate one or the other, but thinking actually works best when it has the opporunity to be done both in private and alongside other people. Proximity and ease of movement between the two modes matters. If a person can work on ideas alone and privately for a little while, then easily bring those ideas to a group, then move back to the private space, and continue this cycle as necessary, the thinking will be better.
This is a model that is tacitly being used by the IndieWeb in slowly developing better social media and communication on the web.
Is it useful to the person writing to know that what’s written may be readable by others and that spurs deeper thought in reflection – or is that more blog-like than note-like?
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.
I have received a lot of positive feedback for noting my epistemic status and effort at the top of my posts. This is hilarious, because I originally started using these as a hack in order to publish half-baked ideas that I'd otherwise not feel comfortable sharing.
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>
Gwern.net was one of the earliest and most consistent gardeners to offer meta-reflections on their work. Each entry comes with:topic tagsstart and end datea stage tag: draft, in progress, or finisheda certainty tag: impossible, unlikely, certain, etc.1-10 importance tagThese are all explained in their website guide, which is worth reading if you're designing your own epistemological system.
I've noticed that Dan Mackinlay has some public notebooks with an interesting system for indicating knowledge process too.
One of the biggest challenges is a very human one – how do we get everyone to work with their camera switched on.
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
Part of the problem of social media is that there is no equivalent to the scientific glassblowers’ sign, or the woodworker’s open door, or Dafna and Jesse’s sandwich boards. On the internet, if you stop speaking: you disappear. And, by corollary: on the internet, you only notice the people who are speaking nonstop.
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.