Roam Research

I love Roam

[[Roam]] is where I think. It's my note-taking app. It's what powers my search for [[consilience]]. It's where [[Tacit Knowledge]] lives that I want to extract and make known to others.

Roam is how I organize my day. I begin every day, getting into [[focus]] what I'm going to do that day. That happens in Roam.

If you want some help with Roam, I want to help. There's an active [[Slack]] community for Roam. Use the Contact form to ask me to get you invited (if you aren't able to get access to the community otherwise).

Knowledge Management at Work

My favorite business quote is from Lew Platt, former CEO at HP: "If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more productive." (By the way, I didn't go web search that just now—I found it in 3 seconds in my Roam.)

In organizations I've done consulting work for, worked for myself, as an employee, as a manager, in every context there's frustrating levels of repeat questions and answers. Decisions already made have to be made again. People who missed the meeting need at best a hallway conversation rundown, or at worst at Zoom meeting catchup that somehow manages to kill the entire day's productivity.

To really get into how to fix that, we'd need to talk about [[asynchronous communication]] and [[contextual communciation]]. But for now, we'll just talk about one key part of those things: Writing it down. And Roam is the best tool I've found for writing it down.

Roam has what it calls Multiplayer. This where you can have as many people in one "graph" (a graph is one notes database) as you want. This means it's great for work. Roam isn't a set of features that tell you what to do in this context though. Just a ton of features and capabilites that make Roam a great solution for teams to have great [[Knowledge Management]] practices and task management in one place together. You will want to establish some conventions for you and your team to follow though. I've been part of a few multiplayer graphs, for work, for a large online bookclub, for a bible study group, and a couple other contexts. From that, I've developed several conventions I find helpful for a team to collaborate in Roam together through.