Tracking people

Not sure if this is Knowledge Management per se, but I’ve adopted Obsidian as a nice, local notes app for my daily work life. One of the things that I thought would be useful was to use it to build out a way that I could find the name of an individual (I work in a large, complex organization) and see through graph view or some other way other contexts in which I’ve interacted with them, et cetera.

What I am wondering is if the best way to do this is through tagging their name or putting their name in square brackets to make a wiki link. The trouble with the latter is that I’m unlikely to create a unique page for any individual with whom I have any conversations, so I’d just be trying to surf based on backlinks… That leads me toward tagging, but I always worry that the effort of managing tags is more trouble than it is worth unless I am very disciplined (and I am often not).

You could make a people page, which is what I do. Note title is “Glossary of People”, have it ordered A to Z

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That looks great! How did you implement it?

I’m confused by your question, it just quote blocks with dividers, and a header for each letter of the alphabet

Frank A. Furt (Job Title)

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Bob Boblaw (Job Title)

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Oh I thought it was pulling in blocks automatically somehow, so you’d have a header with the individual’s name and it’s automatically pulling in references to them elsewhere.

@djdrysdale In that case I would just create a page for them and embed a link. Important people in my vault I give their own page. As far as I’m aware of that is the only easy way to pull in all the references.

I list people by name and email when I first encounter them, so I can find them with search later.

Important people get a page, and I name the file “Lastname, Firstname profession”, and save them in a People folder. That way, I can search that folder by name or profession (sales, UX, dev, doctor, etc.). And if I have several John Smiths, the profession helps disambiguate.

In daily and meeting notes, I link whoever’s there, so it’s easy to use backlinks on a person note to see when that meeting was or when I saw that doctor.

My Person template is super simple, but 8 include a default description block at the top with ^1 at the end, so I can embed a brief description of one anywhere:

Smith, John UX: Product designer at Facebook. Met at SXSW in 2021 when he was at Goolge. ^1

The standard block reference code makes it super easy to embed overviews like that. (I use the same hack for day, week, months, projects, and glossary terms.)

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I go even one step further …

In my Daily notes I use a dataview inline field to write a short description about any interaction I have with people. And I link the people in that short description. Something like this …

Contactmoment:: talked to [[John Smith) by the coffeemachine about using [[Kubernetes]] and Docker.
Contactmoment:: Had a meeting with [[Suzy Smith]] about [[Project A]]. See [[meetingnotes 2021-11-28]] for more detail.

So only small notes to describe the moment of contact and not a full list of everything that is discussed. There are different pages for that. Can be meetingnotes or other notes about a certain subject.

In my people template i have a query to search for “Contactmoment::” and the name of the person. That gives me a nice list with all contactmoments (limit 10).

The dataview query is like this …

table without id file.link as Bestandsnaam, contactmoment from "daily"
where contains(contactmoment, "[[John Smith]]")
sort file.link desc
limit 10
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Thanks for the dataview query. When I use it, it displays all the contactmoment:: listings in a daily note. That is, if I have three meetings/interactions on separate lines of the daily note, they are all displayed if one of them matches the person being searched on. Do you see this also?

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