Need Help! Figuring out my Knowledge Management Workflow and Techstack

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
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Hey everyone,

I am new to the community. Just finished Michael’s tbx 101 course, 6 Week Tinderbox 101 Course (9 Lecture Hours): Kickoff Friday, Nov. 1, 2024, which was awesome!

It got me thinking that I should reach out to the community to ask a more foundational questions…

Knowledge Management Workflow and Techstack questions

  1. What is/are the best approach(es) to managing all of my knowledge artifacts, e.g. text documents, images, videos, photos, illustrator files, photoshop files, premier project files, press clippings, spreadsheets, code, audio files, databases…I have tons of inputs and outputs that can be remixed but they are all over the place. How do I get this under control with a systematic framework/workflow.
  2. Once I have my workflow, what could be the minimalistic core techstack that I could use to leverage all of my knowledge and assets as I perform my knowledge work? I would love to hear your ideas on how to stitch this all together so that I can just get on with making!
    • Some of the tools I am currently using are (it’s way too many and I have been working on cutting it down):
      • Tinderbox
      • DevonTHINK
      • Obsidian (I tried Roam but switched to Obs)
      • Notes
      • Mac OS Harddrive
      • iCloud
      • Scrivener
      • Word
      • Excel
      • Google Docs
      • Atom
      • TextEdit (will switch to BBEdit)
      • Adobe Creative Cloud Suite
      • ChatGPT - paid version
      • Paper & Notebooks
      • more
    • Out of all of this, I have multiple outputs: linear documents, spreadsheets, applications, images, art (in various forms - videos, web things, business models, diagrams, graphics), and more.

For context, here are some of the projects I am working on:

  1. Matriarch Project, basically a system to transcend capitalism to commons
  2. A Holistic Accountability Ledger (HAL;), finding balance within the system so everyone/thing of the whole gets what it needs (essentially so we share resources - doing it in a spreadsheet)
  3. Repurpose and refresh my 2013 Extreme Capitalism/Jennifer Lyn Morone, Inc/DOME (Database of Me) project
    • for example: how to take this diagram that I produced years ago, and create derivative work from it, and to open up understandings of pathways of how we can sovereignty over our data and obtain value from it - collectively.
      New Economic Model_JLM2
      New Economic Model_JLM21920×1369 239 KB
  4. I am a nomad, traveling the world, looking to build systems with a network of people, places, and projects to tie all of the above together and more. Again, I need workflows and tools to accomplish this.

This is a call out to the community, thank you everyone. I would be grateful to any comments and suggestions any of you have.

Jen

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Here’s another example: how to convert this to a more valuable website.

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Hi Jen, welcome to the community. What you are working on looks interesting and perhaps a great fit for Tinderbox as a workhorse think/sketch/amalgamation/tracking tool, with the added benefit of export to a variety of formats.

Some off-the-top responses to your points below (see in-line):

My own projects are disparate and each evolves organically, therefore it’s hard to describe or relate any ideal methodology. Seems from your description of your workflow that you may have similar challenges. Assuming this to be the case:

  1. I prefer to create a master “Project” folder, to gather assets under. In fact, I may just gather documents in the Downloads folder and Desktop at first, until ideas coalesce into something I can call a “Project”.

  2. Element management is ALWAYS an issue, primarily due the disparity of source material types, their provenance and collection timeline. Finding the “one app to track them all” is usually too much trouble for me, as oftentimes projects don’t last as long as the time it would take to “correctly” track them; moreover - too much rigor/structure tends to choke free-flow, which I have an issue with. That said, I usually get by with a combination of Obsidian, Tinderbox, EagleFiler, and regular monitoring of my many downloaded assets on the hard drive. Cannot over-stress regular and careful hard drive tending.

  • Tinderbox can (on its own) be a great document tracker - you can create unlimited User Attributes, drop external pdfs and text files in and use the many facets of the Tinderbox toolkit to find/sort/categorize/repurpose them. Notes can link to URLs, URIs, and/or File locations on your hard drive (and thereby to various repositories such as Dropbox, iCloud, etc); and those Notes can contain meta-data about those assets. Notes can link to each other, and be viewed or collected via Agents to serve disparate use cases within a project. Caveat: the model does break if you decide to move around external assets after the fact; for this, some Tbx users have adopted Hookmark. I have reservations about committing to 3rd party document hard-linking protocols, but that’s just me.
  • Obsidian is great for quick-and-dirty tracking, as you can create and mix link types to documents as well as embed them in your Obsidian notes; which stacks well with its general usability as a structured scratch-pad, and the benefit of its mobile input environment. But Obsidian is less practical to develop raw assets with, so I prefer to move things out to Tinderbox in a timely manner . I am usually already working with a scratch Tinderbox project file by this time, and mashing the 2 sources together is usually fun and laterally enlightening.
  • If you want to get more granular and/or are (as I am) in the habit of scouring and gathering MANY assets in a hurry without being held up by mindset-switching to organize while gathering, there are other apps (DevonThink, EagleFiler, and others come to mind) that can help. But you’re still left with the issue of “where will all my content and references ultimately reside?” for which I have chosen and am quite happy with Tbx.

This is always a challenge. Apps and tools come and go, some outlast others. Tinderbox stands always in the centre of things, all-seeing and ever flexible to changing needs and times. Generally I try to keep the active toolkit to a minimum - see comments inline below.

To the above, I would add:

  • An email client (note that you can save email URIs into Tinderbox, or import entire emails intelligently into it - helpful when tracking collaborative exchanges over time)
  • Browser app(s) and its(their) many open tabs!
  • Drafts app
  • A handful of iOS apps/tools
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I’m a psychotherapist with a background in psychology, though I’ve also worked in history and teaching language and literature, so I’m fairly “eclectic”.

I’m struck by you calling yourself a “nomad”, and it seems to me that your large collection of applications is another form of “restless wandering”, maybe even questing and searching. I’ve had similar trouble.

For me, a large part of the “solution” – insofar as one can “solve” this – is DEVONthink. Pretty much anything I collect goes into DEVONthink, which means that I know where it is. I have one large database which is split up in a fashion which owes something to Thiago Forte’s PARA method (though I don’t use the method religiously):

Basically, DEVONthink is the hub and centre of my work on my computer. Most other things are connected to it somehow. The only thing it lacks is a visual front end (I don’t like lists which are pure text) so I’ve been dabbling with Curio as a way of managing projects.

https://www.zengobi.com/curio/

I’m sure @satikusala would point out that you can do much more with Tinderbox, which is absolutely true, but sometimes I just want a visual representation of a load of important “stuff” all on one “whiteboard”, and Curio will do that.

On another note that has nothing to do with software, I divide my life into the period before I studied psychology and the period after. It changed my view of just about everything. I no longer see politics, economics, or any other of those categories – I just see psychology in action. Social psychology in particular is illuminating. I believe that anyone who is interested in attitude change and behavioural change would find a lot that is useful in social psychology.

Good luck.

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Welcome @jlmorone – I hope Tinderbox grows into a valuable part of your tool shop.

My research is focused on history, with methods evolved over several decades in corporate and government life. Though my tool shop has a lot of software in it, similar to your tools list along with a lot of niche products, 90% of what I do is happens inside the tool shed in the illustration.

image
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Of course, reading and research comes into the shop from the left and final work products exit to publication on the right. The illustration doesn’t show iteration back and forth between the tools, because that would be too many arrows. The arrows shown illustrate a key foundational element that I require from software, the ability to flow information from one tool to another, usually by indexing. We’re not yet in a perfect world of information integration between tools, but we’re better off than we were. I also want tools to link resources among one-another. Again, this part of the research toolset world is not perfect, but it is getting better. In the context of my own methods, Tinderbox has made some progress on indexing, and excels at linking. YMMV of course depending on one’s own methods.

The best advice for getting started with Tinderbox – start with an interesting, easily fenced project and explore. Don’t try to learn all the features of the software all at once. Let your work guide you toward the need for a feature and discovery of features in Tinderbox that can satisy that need.

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I’ve played with Curio; it is a nice app, for sure. As you say, I see Tinderbox as the central piece to my workflow. The primary reason is that I have other apps like Curio lack attributes and export, i.e., they have hard edges that make it more difficult for me to curate my content (i.e., use attribute, linking, and action code) and then ultimately repurpose my work and get it out into any format I want. At some point, all other apps have a limitation where my content just gets stuck, at which point I need to manually move it around, bringing me back to the original problem of my stuff (ideas and work) in multiple places. In other words, Tinderbox has a standardized interoperable input and output interface that helps my content and ideas flow.

Like @PaulWalters I use DEVONthink , Obsidian, and Well as Workd, etc. Primarily for the same categorical reasons. I’d add a citation tool to Paul’s map, e.g., Endnotes or Zotero (Zotero is my preferred) as a reference to the source of truth. I only use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Google Docs, etc., when I have to share with others.

@MartinBoycott-Brown’s point, like the PARA method framework:

  • PROJECT Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now
  • AREA Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time
  • RESOURCE Topics or interests that may be useful in the future
  • ARCHIVE Inactive items from the other three categories

If I can quite easily apply this method in Tinderbox, projects are in $Containers (aka “Folders”, i.e., notes designated with a folders attribute), and areas use a similar approach, i.e., they have folders. Resources are in my “Resources Folder,” which also closely mirrors the idea of “permanent notes,” i.e., coining a term from @trumpity, or Luhman’s Zettle idea, or “atomic notes,” and archive is a boolean $IsArchive that I will place on items that I’m done working on. In other words, the PARA Method and Tinderbox are quite symbodic in my world.

Final thoughts

For me, knowledge management all hinges on managing inputs and outputs and has just enough friction in the middle to help me stay close to the data and automagically perform tasks for predictive effort. To this end, my core toolset is: Tinderbox, Obsidian, TextSniper, TextExpander, SnagIt, Zotero, BBEdit, DEVONThink, Pandoc, macOS Finder, a handful of case-by-case utilities, and then as a last step, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Another reason why I keep Tinderbox closer than other apps, is that learning Tinderbox teaches me the nature, form, and language(s) of the Internet: HTML, CSS, RegEx, JSON, XML, deliminiation, Javascript…the list goes on. It’s like the matrix; the more I learn about the underlying fundamentals, the more it makes working with everything else so much more transparent and easier.

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Totally love the stuff on the links you shared. It’s like Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian fast forwarded to the present age. Is there a place where one see what you’ve been up to more recently?Is DOME still a thing? Onwards — JM

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How exactly, @MartinBoycott-Brown, does Curio do that?

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Like any whiteboard, really.

CleanShot 2024-12-10 at 12.36.43@2x
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You can drag and drop (the pdfs are put there that way) or use various available “figures”, as they are called in Curio. There is a lot more to it than that, of course. Have a look at their website if you are interested.

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Does Curio have the ability to assemble and publish the elements into a cohesive output? I’ll admit, while I’ve played with it, I’m not very adept with it.

With posters and templates in Tinderbox, I suspect that we can accomplish something similar in maps, albeit with a bit more setup and work. However, once this setup and work are done, we have the added benefit of the attribute, action code, templates, powers, etc., i.e.,., being able to, with code, manipulate the inputs and outputs.

Recently, working with @archurhh, we figured out how to render tables using Posters in map view, for instance.

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It’s a whiteboard – actually, in Curio, it is usually a collection of whiteboards called “idea spaces” stored in a Project/Section/Folder/Idea Space… hierarchy. Any level of the hierarchy, or multiple folders, or multiple idea spaces, can be selected and exported or printed. There are numerous options: all or selected portions of an idea space or idea spaces can be exported / printed. Curio is a almost entirely different class of software than Tinderbox in most respects and is a wonderful companion.

(“Publish” nowadays generally means to export data from an app to a shared location or website. I wouldn’t consider Tinderbox or Curio exports as “publishing” since there are no managed collaboration features in either, or direct export to the web.)

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As @PaulWalters says, Tinderbox and Curio are totally different tools for different purposes. If I wanted to use all the tools that Tinderbox offers, that is what I would use. At other times I am doing things that don’t require those tools, and simplicity is what counts. Sometimes I just want to see a few items arranged on a whiteboard, nothing more – the visual appearance is what I need. Moreover, most of the time output is irrelevant to me because almost all the work I do is for myself, and I work alone.

To use a sort of analogy, sometimes I write in pencil because I may need to rub things out, while at other times I write in pen because I want it to be impossible to rub things out. Different tools for different needs.

Cheers!

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My opinion based on what I know of you @satikusala and my experience with Curio (several years ago and so my knowledge is admittedly out of date) is that you may find Curio frustrating.

It is a very pretty app with plenty of ways to see data linked and associated. Curio also has a multi-page document layout, which has benefits especially when using it as “PowerPoint on steroids”. Excellent drawing and sketching tools, and arrows that link objects are dynamic and follow those objects around (other apps are doing this now, but Curio I think was the first to do so). A great Library that can be used cross-document, and also the ability to embed links/urls in objects. Managing data assets of multiple kinds is also a breeze. I seem to recall that it stores some assets internally and others in its system-level library, but could be mistaken on this.

However, as @PaulWalters and @MartinBoycott-Brown describe, it’s a whiteboard app and your data basically goes there to rest. There’s no further analysis possible unless you enter fresh data and paradigms to your queries.

Looks real nice though.

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Devonthink - hold stuff, tags,folders

Curio , mindnode - visulalize ideas. But, there is not enough metadata to add value to the visuals.

Tinderbox - understand ideas, integration, metadata to slice thoughts and reassemble them. TB can also visualize data - it is easier with Curio.

Scrivener - an excellent writing space for non linear writing
omnioutliner/bike - organize ideas, TB has an outline view, but I prefer the UI of a dedicated outliner.

Obsidian, apple notes - now it gets messy , better interface for less formal notes. Obsidian and Devonthink can cross pollinate.

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I wouldn’t assume to know what software anyone would like (including myself!). But, for those who haven’t tried Curio in recent years, I suggest trying it again. It is very feature-rich and pleasant. For that reason, I spend more productive time in Curio, yearly, than in Tinderbox.

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How do you use them differently ? What things do you use Curio for vs TB ?

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Interesting. I’d love to explore this idea further. Is not exporting to HTML, worked, a blog, CSV, a commandLine, or JSON, etc., publishing? Depending on your setup, wherever you publish do it can process your output.

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Love your App descriptions. To add to the TBX description: Tinderbox, depending on how you’ve organized your templates is an absolutely AMAZING non-linear writing space—one the provide you the flexibility to transform and repurpose objects (a.k.a. notes) form linear, to bullet lists, to tables, to graphs, and more without losing any of the fidelity of the original object (note).

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In my vocabulary, exporting (which is what we do in Tinderbox) is not publishing. Tinderbox is not built to seamlessly integrate with an online facility for sharing notes to others. There are steps involved in doing that which each user needs to build on their own. For example, with simple, minimal configuration (and no need for templates) Ulysses can publish to Word Press or other platforms. Another example, Craft can publish to its own bespoke web platform. There is a technical difference that matters and terminology matters in setting expectations.

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It took me a while to answer this same question for myself (where Tinderbox fits in a tech stack). My sense/opinion is that the thing that makes Tinderbox unique is its programmability and flexibility. It’s a toolbox for building information environments, not just a way to visualize or organize information. Curio is nicely polished for what it does, but it’s not built to make it easy to run a bunch of dynamically selected text through a command-line program and then bring it back in for visualization. The pandoc workflow that @satikusala et al. make such good use of is a powerful example. Taking full advantage of the power of these open source text tools in combination with Tinderbox requires getting up a steep learning curve, but once you’re there, it really is an amazing combination of flexible, powerful, and visual. I said this years ago and I still think it’s true: Word is a feature-rich word processor. Vim and emacs are very powerful text editors. You can use both types of applications to write a term paper, but they are very different types of applications with different core goals. I personally think emacs is one of the closest conceptual analogues to Tinderbox (albeit very different in many ways), in that a core goal of the software is to enable customization/adaptation to suit your preferences and needs. It took me a while to understand the distinction between vim (purpose-built efficient text editing tool) and emacs (text-focused computing environment). Tinderbox, like emacs, is designed for you to be able to design with. Kind of meta, but that’s what I love about it.

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