Conversation

Maggie

visting SFO

@Mappletons

May 28, 2021

I’ve been tended a long post on the history of “Digital Gardening” over the last year. From

@holden

's original essay to the recent explosion of community experiments. 🌿 maggieappleton.com/garden-history Included six design patterns I see as unifying qualities across gardens:

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1. Topography over timelines Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others.

2. Continuous growth Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion. It's designed to evolve alongside your thoughts.

3. Imperfection & learning in public Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. They're more coherent than chat feeds, but less polished than a blog post – in between chaos streams and cultivated performance

4. Playful, personal, and experimental Gardens are non-homogenous by nature. You can plant the same seeds as your neighbour, but you'll always end up with a different arrangement of plants. No two gardens are alike, and we should treat them as a personal, experimental play space

5. Intercropping and content diversity Gardens are not just a collection of interlinked words. Podcasts, videos, diagrams, illustrations, interactive web animations, academic papers, tweets, rough sketches, and code snippets should all live and grow in the garden.

Maggie

visting SFO

@Mappletons

6. Independent ownership Gardening is about claiming a small patch of the web for yourself, one you fully own and control It shouldn't live on the servers of Twitter, Facebook, or Medium. None of these platforms are designed to help you slowly build and weave personal knowledge

5:40 PM · May 28, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

🙌 #5 and #6 are the ones that feel most lacking in the existing knowledge-management tools out there, which is exactly why we started building @understory_coop. Your digital garden (and the way you write about them) has always been a huge inspiration!