Tracking people

[djdrysdale]

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).

[lizardmenfromspace]

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

[djdrysdale]

That looks great! How did you implement it?

[lizardmenfromspace]

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)

“Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?”

[djdrysdale]

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.

[lizardmenfromspace]

@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.

[austin]

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.)

[johw]

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

[cfritze]

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?