More collaborative notes

[sandal]

I am part of a study group and we constantly share notes/summaries/flashcards etc. I started using remnote a few months ago and I send the others my remnote summaries with flashcards and everyone was amazed. They all joined remnote too. We would love for remnote to be more collaborative so we can have a common shared folder to share everything that syncs instead of sharing snapshots of documents.

[ODKhub]

I very much agree with you.

[Evaristo_M]

Definitely. That’s the only big feature, that i miss in the software. The sharing function is very poor.

[_yb]

Hello,
I think the dev team intends to make a collaborative KB version at some point
I’m also highly interested in this

@Karthikk, below some thoughts on collaborative KB

A core issue of collaborative KB

• KBs are in dialogue with the brain of the person that inputs knowledge (cf. Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index: Thinking Tool, Communication Partner, Publication Machine , Schmidt, 2016). The thing is that knowledge is not independently stored in the JSON file. To be clear, I think anyone using remnote would agree: you wouldn’t be able to properly use/change/navigate the KB created by someone else:

  • it reflects the thinking of the person typing, what personally make sense to them: concepts, definition, structure, linking, referencing, etc.
  • I can heuristically navigate MY kb because I’ve created it, and therefore I have in mind a landscape/overview of it.

• → How would you deal with that, when another user can change anything and anywhere? How do you update your overview/mental landscape of the KB?

• how do you deal with concepts? They mean different things for different people. Or more precisely, they usually reflect the thing that work for a person in a specific context of learning.

Please don’t forget we are not talking here about a google doc type of product, this is knowledge manager that should manage multiples brains… great challenging stuff
I’m not trying to discourage it but to point what I think need resolution before development.

things I would need to actually use a c-KB

• commenting possible (add a right pane for commenting?)
• Authorship of content necessary (eg: framapads)
• a recap page of day by day changes made to the KB so I know how others have modified the c-KB
• something that provide me with an overview of the content of the KB (more structure needs to be possible to overcome the issue said above)
• a variant of the subscription that is valid for the entire team (pay for the team, not for users)

data management stuff

• handling of attached PDFs? probably on remnote’s servers
• handling of partial online/offline status of some users and the changes they do on the cKB: how to update it so that

Very interesting project IMO

[UMNiK]

I do believe most people are looking for a plug-and-play collection of factual flashcards when they ask for shared notes rather than anything approaching a collective Zettelkasten (somewhat of an oxymoron in my view, as in yours). However, see my reply to the similar topic for a link to a project trying to integrate multiple “digital gardens”:

If there is a wiki made of RemNotes, would you contribute?

Would that become just recreating wikipedia without any hope of up-to-dateness though?.. Anyway, there are already a few shared RemNote documents floating around (check description of this video I stopped taking notes in medical school - YouTube), and for a proof of concept of merging multiple networked notebooks check out https://anagora.org/ .

[_yb]

@UMNiK
I share your view, only I think it’s a challenge rather than an impossibility. It’s a big one though, I agree but, it should be possible. I think the answer is another layer on top of remnote; something that actively makes you aware of changes in the c-KB.
There is a prototype in remnote already, now to think of it: the “remnote learner’s club” was already an experiment of c-kb.
Also, I’ve spoken to the guy behind Athens, that they aim at creating a collaborative KB rather than make a product similar to remnote or roams (in October at least)

[UMNiK]

One of the goals of creating a Zettelkasten in the first place is to avoid being beholden both to specific sources and, by extension, colleagues as much as possible in order to facilitate new and original thinking based on your imposed order onto existing information (after personal synthesis of it). IMO, if that is lost, it would be just a wiki of atomic notes, which has its uses to be sure, but perhaps shouldn’t be called a Zettelkasten (even I think it would be too loose a term at that stage).