Zettelkästen?

Yes, it is. ISC is, for those who may not know it, an MIT license reworded, to match international jurisdiction, which implies certain rights from the ground up.

I had the realization yesterday while waiting for a train that the Notes app on iOS contains all the functionality I'd need in order to be able to build a small organization/business .. as long as I standardized my form of note-taking and rigorously applied policies on how Notes are transformed from one Folder to the other - and on what conditions I send the Notes to others using Airdrop.

In other words, all I really need a computer for, is formatting and forwarding rules. ;)

Anyway it was an interesting experiment to come up with some standard Notes that would be productive for a small office - and I realized, part way through this hacking on the rails, thats how people used to do it: plain old ink and paper, and a standard system for routing things around.

I started to wonder what happened? I guess HR departments got tired of having to train workers, and came to rely on computerization as a way of 'training in the chair' - or, outright, replacing peoples ability to apply standard techniques to their workday.

Even today in a computer-savvy environment, people still seem to resist the idea of having standard ways of doing things. Everyone has this idea that they are unique and special individuals who have more to contribute to the world than they end up taking - but give them pen and paper and tell them thats the only way to do things from now on, and all the hubris falls apart and the excuses come out.

It has been true for 40 years, and I think it'll long be true for another century at least: if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem.

There's an open-source WYSIWYG Markdown editor named Zettlr, the author of which is very fond of the Zettelkasten method and seems to provide some features meant to help with it:

https://www.zettlr.com/

I don't know much about Zettelkasten, but I used this app as a Markdown editor of choice for some time until I discovered Marktext.

Here is a picture of German author Arno Schmidt with his "Note box":

https://www.tagesspiegel.de/images/heprodimagesfotos88120140...

Btw: He is regarded as an important author who is famously not read, as his magnus opus is even difficult to hold with a weight of 13 pounds:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seasons-biggest-novel-has-1...

And Niklas Luhmann himself explaining his Zettelkasten (the archive with 50000 notes beside his desk):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCFP5i_0ibE

What he is explaining is not important, what I want to show is that it looks like utter (creative?) chaos for someone not Niklas Luhmann.

I actually was just at a small meetup for people in the SF Bay Area who are building memex's. The Zettelkasten was a common theme in several of the projects people were working on. Here are my notes from the event for anyone interested: http://ceasarbautista.com/posts/memex_meetup_2.html

There are a couple projects that came up that were loosely based on the Zettelkasten:

- IdeaFlow by Jacob Cole - Roam Research by Conor White-Sullivan - "Cards" by Joel Solymosi

IdeaFlow and Roam are both basically WorkFlowly except that you can link bullets together, plus additional unique features. The ability to link bullets together basically makes it a Zettelkasten, and enables many cool features. As Conor puts it "You shouldn’t have to know the structure of your thought as you’re typing".

Cards was more faithful to the Zettelkasten in that the metaphor was index cards instead of bullets. The unique thing about Joel's approach is that you can transclude them into documents (sequences of cards), which was a feature inspired by Project Xanadu. That enables Joel to reuse cards across many documents, and had the benefit of letting him effectively update multiple documents at once by editing a single card.

I've been writing an encyclopedia for the last six years. When I heard the Zettelkasten idea it made me wish I had heard of it earlier. It seems like a potentially better way to organize information since the links are between paragraphs rather than pages.