Here a short intro to Obsidian and Personal Knowledge Management Systems.
I currently, document some of the Codex/BitTorrent stuff in the vault you already can use to see how does it feel for you. The vault is available on GitHub: https://github.com/codex-storage/bittorrent-codex-docs. You can just clone the rero, and open the cloned folder in Obsidian. That’s it. This is you local copy - anything you do is only visible to you. GitHub is used for a more controlled syncing. Normally, when you work on your own content, you will put your vault on some shared network drive (end-to-end encrypted of course! :yum: ), and then you can conveniently open it on any other device. Syncing is done by the network drive, Obsidian has nothing to do with it in this case. You content keeps the same structure (including folders) as you see it in your local (shared) folder - thus, everything is transparent and extremely portable. Myself, I have a paid subscription to Obsidian Sync service (not that I really need it, but I wanted to try it and to support the Obsidian team a bit). It costs me $96,00 per year:
Obsidian also provides publishing service, which I use for our Codex/BitTorrent documentation and which costs me around 96,- per user per year will not break the bank (limit is 20 users currently). Paid Sync service also includes versioning of the content.
Personal Knowledge Management Systems
Now, maybe the most important part is that Obsidian (as well as Logseq, and mentioned above Roam Research) are called Personal Knowledge Management systems. Those system can be used for project documentation and any other inventory, but their true power is in knowledge management. Sounds like nothing, but it was and still is new for me.
I spent years “reinventing” my documentation systems and only after I discovered Obsidian I started to learn more about how to effectively record information in a way, that it is findable when needed, and fulfills quite a different purpose than many people expect when they think about documenting: a knowledge management system should allow you to be more productive in creating new ideas based on what you have learned before. A good intro is to look into the concept of zettelkasten. You will find a lot of good free and paid materials on how to use tools like Obsidian or Logseq effectively. Of course, Obsidian is also very good on creating a traditional documentation without taking full advantage of linking and indexing, and it is still very convenient to use it as such - not everything is suitable for zettelkasten, sometimes you just need to write longer manuals or tutorial or just keep your home inventory. Such more traditional documentation vaults often relay on folder structure, but soon after you start learning about knowledge management like zettelkasten, you will discover that folder are actually really bad idea. A proper knowledge management system relays on linking relevant content so that information is always preserved with some context and relation to other things. And this is where systems like Obsidian really excel, with the convenience of linking content and powerful graphs and search capabilities - if you embrace that, you will see why using folders is more an impediment than anything else in recording what you learn and what you need to find to built new great things. A knowledge management system is something quite personal I believe, but learning it will certainly help in how we record the knowledge about things we are working on. We can also have multiple vaults for some dedicated purposes.
And again, we decided to give it a try, and if it does not work for us, we will review and adjust.
To start, we have two options:
- Built on top of the Codex/BitTorrent vault (this vault),
- Start with a fresh new vault.
We can have multiple vaults, but there should be one central vault which will always be ultimate place to go to find out the stuff. I feel this should be a knowledge management vault, but I would not be too dogmatic about using the folders - I do not use them for this purpose, but if you need one for something, the system will not break because of it - everything in the end is connected, and indexed, and in which folder things are (as you will see) is really secondary. If we need more vaults later, we can add them, but we should always refer to them from the main vault so that we have single source of true.
The last remark from me would be that we should be careful not to bloat the system with too many invasive plugins, so that the content remains as clean and as portable as possible. The setup I created in the Codex/BitTorrent try to follow that principle.
I think this is already long intro. Please play with Obsidian shortly. I do not feel like an expert here, but if you need to discuss something I will be happy to help.
Some other links
Some of you were wondering if commenting/reviewing can be done in obsidian. I did not try anything yet myself. What I found is https://github.com/Fevol/obsidian-criticmarkup. I may give it a spin in the coming days.
There is also a blog post from HackMD, which is related: HackMD & Obsidian: The ultimate markdown workflow.