Description: Syntropize is a proposal to radically increase the effectiveness of information workers through a comprehensive redesign of the operating environment of a personal computer.
Congratulations @CxRes - this is a magnificient and far reaching reimagining of computerdom and fits nicely within the Solid philosophy. I recommend that everyone check it out.
Fascinating document you have there. One potential approach is to adapt one of the modern PKM systems, use graphs as you describe, and make it work for a single user. Maybe later extend its integration with platforms such as Solid at a later stage.
PKM’s were definitely an influence in both the proposal and prototype. But ultimately I want something between Douglas Engelbart’s DKRs re-imagined with Bret Victor’s general UI ideas. And PKM’s tend to be not designed generally enough to allow “arbitrary” views (at least that was my experience, when researching system’s I could adapt).
I believe we have enough tools/tech to design such a system, but it will require a collective vision and design (and building consensus about design is HARD). Rather than building more tech this has been my focus. Integrating with Solid should not be that difficult either, if use a general system, because Solid is (operatively) conventions for linked data over HTTP.
I’m a bit puzzled by the term “design.” When you mention consensus about design, are you referring to standards, conventions, data organization, or the user interface?
I aim to a system where I can accumulate, curate, and manage data over a lifetime, to then interact through different (and evolving) user interfaces, apps, agents, you name it. Anything that suits the (current) requirements better.
I haven’t had a chance to view your prototype. Is it to arrange cards in space? Could you share a screenshot or a link?
Sorry for the late reply @cristianvasquez, I had been away for a while!
I use “design” here to refer to that software (infrastructure) that translates the data on the network or your file system to the visualization on the screen. To the extent PKM (or any app for that matter) map some particular storage format to only a few particular UI arrangements, ie views, they are limited. This mapping can be far more flexible, as you rightly observe.
You can download the Syntropize prototype https://gitlab.com/syntropize/syntropize/-/releases. Currently, it supports creating only a few kinds of cards on a board and documents in markdown (if you change the view on top-right, but which must be edited using an external editor). But the data fetching, data model and UI generation all are implemented dynamically. This if scaled properly can give us “arbitrary” hypermedia.
