You gotta have a certain general appreciation for people - especially those who are creating things, rather than just some bigot - who take a stand and say “no, I’m right and you’re all wrong”. Often they’re wrong, but its worth finding out.
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Not such a positive story when you read this…
“A dream will not become an innovation if there is no realization.“
Ciputra
or
"Innovation without Execution is only Ideation"
Thobias Puehse
The last is a quote I use in my mails at work by the way. These are sparks of text that came to emerge when I read the text…
What’s wrong with ideation? Da Vinci came up with endless unexecuted inventions, but was ahead of his time. Perhaps Ted Nelson’s ideas were too technologically advanced (or, more likely, incompatible with the technological trends) to be executed.
But it seems that he has provided endless inspiration to many people who were able to execute, be it Steve Wozniak or, likely, Roam Research (which really seems to be what he was aiming at).
Moreover, is all Executed Innovation worthwhile - Fracking, WMDs or [insert mostly any boy band], for example?
Perhaps there’s need for a quote to the effect of “Innovation without Wisdom is Folly”?
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I think this is getting off-topic, but I can’t resist. My master’s research focused on innovation (specifically what skills are required to be successful at innovation, and what it might look like to build a curriculum around such skills).
Through the research, I came up with the following definition for innovation:
An innovation is a change that creates new value or improves the delivery or capture of value.
Innovations exist in many forms, from product to social movement; at many scales, from new-to-you to new-to-the-world; and in many degrees, from radical to incremental. The success of one innovation often requires the success of others in parallel.
Innovation often results in new knowledge, relationships, and spin-off innovations.
…and the following process model:
To @nixsee’s point about bad innovations, a related idea is “misinnovation:” changes that actually result in lost “value.” (Note: obviously, there may be many ways of defining value.) I never had the chance to develop that idea further… maybe someday!
To try and wrench this back to being relevant to personal knowledge management (PKM), I haven’t looked at the work in a while. Now that I have, the process actually seems to map to how knowledge is developed in a PKM system. Some prompt, finding, or new idea inspires you to start to develop thinking (purpose/problem), so you generate and sift through your knowledge in order to select the ideas to build upon, before you then implement the knowledge you’ve built somehow. Hm!
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Thanks for sharing! Seems like a reasonable way to model it all. The fundamental question, though, is “what is valuable?”. I won’t derail this thread as inadvertently and very regrettably happened in the MOC one, but I’ll just share this PKM-friendly graphic that I shared there:
Value is what allows us to turn an otherwise generic, but perhaps connected, Knowledge dot into a golden dot of Insight. Wisdom would be cultivating the ability to curate/refine the insights into a tangible way of operating (innovating? executing?) in the world.
The suggestion, therefore, is to focus on refinement, coherence, harmony, wisdom, etc… rather than an ever growing network of meaningless notes. I think the IMF/MOC system has a lot to offer in that regard - the development of MOCs into related evergreen-type notes has the potential to be akin to those Golden Paths of wisdom.
The key, however, is understanding which insights/topics are actually valuable/worth pursuing - surely many MOCs were involved in creating “misinnovations”, such as WMDs… For this, humility is in order, above all else - being able to consider whether your insights, much less pursuits, are actually worthwhile.
I’d suggest Harmony as a driving metric - the world is a massive interconnected network map of network maps. For something to be valuable, the individual maps must be in harmony rather than dissonance with the others.
I might even suggest a “Harmony filter” right after the initial Prompt in your diagram - “if Harmonious then proceed” with your Golden search, development etc… process. If not, color it Red and find something else to think about.
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Edit: moved my post on this to the more appropriate thread:
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Was about to edit my post with a link and suggest that you move it! We’re clearly “in sync”, which is surely more valuable and harmonious than the innovation of “'N Sync” 
All other value/innovation discussion, please move to the other thread!
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Can’t resist adding a comment from Elon Musk from 2 days ago, in response to a criticism of his new Neuralink demo:
It is unfortunately common for many in academia to overweight the value of ideas & underweight bringing them to fruition. For example, the idea of going to the moon is trivial, but going to the moon is hard.
I work in a field where bringing things to fruition is how we get paid. I’m hoping that Obsidian will help with that process, and have been loving it so far!
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Exactly my thought!
I listened to the interview with the girl that was mentioned in a thread.
Then I did some research on Ted Nelson…
Whatever good ideas he brought on and whatever people he inspired. With all due respect (and that is meant): would be nice if after 30+ years and with advances in technology we would have a good idea of a working Xanadoo system. From what I read (find) this isn’t the case (yet). Nevertheless, very inspiring man!
@RikD Check out http://xanadu.com/. There are videos of him showing it and even installable versions. I suspect it’ll never get any adoption because it is just too old/clunky looking, and I don’t really see the micropayments that he put so much focus on being something that most people care about.
Your MOCs correspond more closely to what Vannevar Bush called “trails” (see his “As we may think”), or Luhmann’s Folgezettels — these both are meant to develop an idea or a subject. Ontology is a map of already developed (And agreed upon) knowledge.
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I think we’re debating semantics here, but to challenge this: it depends on what kind of ontology you’re talking about. Searle’s social ontology refers to the realities of social objects—particularly how some social objects are differently reified to different people. I suspect that most of the concepts developed and considered in most PKMs are more of this form than, say, Bunge’s ontology in which the world is composed of physical Things.
To get even more philosophical, it’s a contradiction to say that an idea in development is not real in and of itself. The idea is in your PKM system—therefore it is, therefore it may be ontologically represented.
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This is way over my head — my PhD is in a totally different area I see your point; I was referring more to how the concept of ontology is used in computer science — as a practical tool/reference for knowledge organization. (I might be off here as well though 
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No, that’s totally right! It’s true that if a domain is “settled,” an ontology of said domain is fairly fixed (and these are used often in CS). My work (it’s computer science-y too) is focused on when we aren’t sure what we’re trying to represent in our information systems. I ask questions like, “How do you represent something you have no ontology for?” So, I’m kinda pushing the limits of what ontology is for and how it can be used. In this respect, I would say that the ontology of ontologies is unsettled.
In other words, I think this ontology-PKM debate is kinda bleeding edge for theory, so debate is necessary. Many definitions are roughly defined and many decisions remain undecided, in my view.
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In the past I have seen ontologies for keyword tagging photos but I can’t find it. Are there known ontologies available for use?
Hi!
I’m not so sure that I fully understood the IMF, any explanation will be much appreciated!
Here is my structure:
-
INDEX
in INDEX I have domain of interest corresponding to some MOCs :
LiteratureMOC
ArtMOC
SpiritualityMOC etc. -
In LiteratureMOC I have other MOCs:
EpicMOC, PoetryMOC, DramaMOC, LiteraryTheoryMOC
- In LiteraryTheoryMOC I have other MOCs:
FormalismMOC, StructuralismMOC etc
My question is: in StructuralismMOC, for example, should I link all my notes related to Structuralism? This is the part where I stuck…
- Assuming that StructuralismMOC is arranged like this:
a. Definition
Note1
Note2
Note3
b. PRO Structuralism
Claude-Levy Strauss MOC
Victor Turner MOC
And in Claude-Levy Strauss MOC I have:
Theory
Note 1
Note 2
Arguments
Note 1
Note 2
etc
IS THIS a correct approach of IMF & MOCs?
Thanks for your help!
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I think all of these PKM methods are frameworks that you have to adapt and make your own. It seems you are saying you have nested MOCs and that your Note 1 and Note 2 might be linked into different MOCs as appropriate, that seems right. How you arrange content on your MOC is up to you and may evolve as the content gets richer and/or less dynamic (more evergreen).
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Many of you have heard about or used the LYT Kit (formerly known at the IMF Kit). It’s been downloaded a lot.
It’s super powerful, but as you know, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I want to provide as much clarity as possible with how to best use it.
So I’m hosting a free webinar this Saturday at 11am PST (Los Angeles time).
Register for the webinar here.
It’s 30 minutes.
- I’ll cover how to best use the LYT Kit (so philosophy + practicality).
- I’ll also share an overview of the upcoming Linking Your Thinking workshop (Oct. 27th)
And… You’ll receive the LYT Kit afterwards!
(Otherwise, it won’t be available until Oct 13th.)
Hope to see you this Saturday!
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Hmmm… might have to stay up til 2AM for my timezone. I guess it’s worth the sacrifice lol
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