#🛠️tool #🧠knowledge >Roam should allow collaborating effectively with your past and future self. *-Conor White-Sullivan, the founder of Roam* https://roamresearch.com/ - a note-taking tool for [[tools for thought#Networked Thinking|networked thought]] **this is work-in-progress, more to come...** --- Emphasizes the creation of a "networked notebook" where every note or bullet point can be linked to others, forming a web of interconnected thoughts. Roam is a powerful [[tools for thought|tool for thought]], enhancing user's ability to manage complex ideas and relationships. **Notes to elaborate soon:** - Roam is an online workspace for organizing and evaluating knowledge. - Roam is a knowledge management system that organizes text on a graph of connections. - Roam says: forget folders, forget organisation... just add your ideas and the structure will emerge over time. - This mirrors how the brain actually works; not with folders, but with ideas. - Instead of figuring out the perfect structure ahead of time, just through in the ideas and structure them later - Instead of thinking about how to organise everything into folders, think about how to interlink everything in the graph database to create a web of networked ideas. - Bottom-up vs top-down structure - Unlike in other tools, "Pages" in Roam are location-less and are non-hierarchical. - Roam combines this with "Blocks" which do have a location (inside Pages), and are hierarchical. - Most note taking apps force you to impose structure from the get go which adds a lot of friction to writing. - Roam focuses on making it really easy to add atoms of thought and then gradually compose those together into larger pieces. - Users can remix and connect ideas in multiple overlapping hierarchies, with each unit of information becoming a node in a dynamic network. - Any given node can occupy multiple positions simultaneously, convey information through defined relationships, and populate changes throughout the graph. --- ## Analogies - Like a personal Wikipedia, which can be queried and filtered like a database - each page is a place to write as well as to query - Like Github, but for ideas - any Roam graph or page can be thought of as a private or public repo for thoughts - Like Excel, but for text - a functional reactive coding environment for remixing your own thoughts --- ## References - [Roam Help](https://roamresearch.com/#/app/help/page/fCaJekIoX) - [The History of Roam Research](https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/the-history-of-roam-research-and-the-roamcult-4c1e1897633d) - [Building a Second Brain in Roam...And Why You Might Want To](https://www.reddit.com/r/RoamResearch/comments/eho7de/building_a_second_brain_in_roamand_why_you_might/) - [Building the Global Knowledge Graph: Dreaming the Dream for Roam Research](https://roambrain.com/building-the-global-knowledge-graph/) --- <font style="color: #F86759">Contributors:</font> *[[Jaros]]* <font style="color: #F86759">Last edited:</font> *2024-03-03*