Experimental sensemaking tool—testers wanted

Knowledge management
1

Hello all! I’ve not posted here before, but you might know me through my working notes site, or through its influence on Obsidian Publish. I research experimental interfaces meant to help people think and create better.

I’ve been working on tools for sensemaking with Matthew Siu. That is: tools for dealing with the situation when you have a big pile of messy notes (journals, research logs, interviews, experiment data), and you’re trying to extract clarity (themes, directions, actions, lessons) to unblock meaning and forward motion.

We’re looking for people to test a prototype. In particular, we’re looking for people who are:

  • acutely in need of this—you have some big messy notes that you need to distill into clarity (e.g. new year plan / review? synthesizing interview notes or lab notebooks to form a theory or plan next steps?)
  • comfortable working in Obsidian (our prototype is a plugin)
  • game to do some live synthesis in a 1 hour video call

If you’re interested, please click here to get in touch!

7 Likes
2

Hi Andy, welcome to the forum!

I took the liberty of sharing your post here to the knowledge management channel in Obsidian’s Discord server.

I’m very intrigued by this tool, but don’t have the time to switch up my workflow and do the testing right now, unfortunately.

4 Likes
3

Sounds intriguing Andy! Filled out the form.

4

Welcome Andy :wave: it’s an honor to have you here!
I don’t have a current need but very curious to follow along - but I can also wait until the plug-in is released.

5

Thank you @andymatuschak and Matthew for letting me play with it for an hour in my notes. I blogged my impressions: Matthew and Andy Watched Me Test the Obsidian Reference Plugin – Interdependent Thoughts

2 Likes