(2021-08-21) Obenauer Ln014 Graphos

Alexander Obenauer on LN 014 GraphOS. A concept that has been gaining traction in recent years is the notes graph: a way to write many discrete notes (digital garden) that are deeply linked to one another. This lets you to grow your notes graph over time, and traverse its contents by the many links and backlinks embedded within.

The application I’ve used to take notes this way is Obsidian, which produces a map of all the notes in my graph (though I’ve found this to be more interesting to look at than useful):

With all the fervor lately around notes graphs, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if the entire operating system were to work this way.

You can see how this framing may intersect heavily with the itemized operating system concept in my lab notes.

In the Graph OS, all of your things are within your system as nodes, or items, within your graph. Emails, calendar events, articles, web pages, podcast episodes, to do lists as well as the to dos inside them; everything. And each thing may have references to, or be referenced by, any other thing. What is the net effect of this arrangement?

In my work, I receive messages from customers in many different places: email, Slack, public social posts, private messages on Twitter, and so forth. Today, when I capture a feature request or bug report, I also add details around who sent it in and where that message is, so that I can follow up with questions whenever I’m working on it.

In the Graph OS, I can simply point a reference specifically to that message, wherever it is, from my to do item. Or, better yet, I can use transclusions

Further, the Graph OS could automatically save metadata on our things, much like EXIF data on photographs, to help embed each thing we work on within our graph for expanded recall. For example, when we take a quick note, it might capture as metadata what event from our calendar we were presently attending, the people we were with, or what our location was.

As your graph grows, you start to find your things by searching and browsing: rather than having to navigate a system of files-and-folders, where there is only one predefined path to get to each thing, there are many inroads that will take you to something you’re looking for

What’s most freeing, for me, is that this concept means you aren’t tied to having something stored in one location

Your graph would grow over time with things you’ve created, things others have sent you, and things that you’ve found as you explore

Then you could look at your map like the one we saw before, but not just of notes; of all the things in your digital domain.