Conversations incorporating multiple discussants’ evergreen notes may promote collaborative sense-making

Evergreen notes can increase conversational bandwidth, but something particularly interesting happens when multiple people have written Evergreen notes related to a single discussion topic. Instead of figuratively “comparing notes” on an idea conversationally, the discussants can literally compare notes around some idea. Each person will have factored their notes somewhat differently, so it usually won’t be possible to make a 1:1 correspondence—and that’s the whole point. Each person will approach the idea from a different angle, notice different implications, frame it within different contexts.

The instinct, then, is to actually connect the systems, but Collaborative knowledge management systems tend to decay.

This is mostly a theoretical observation: I haven’t had enough conversations like this to really understand them.


References

Conversation with Ben Reinhardt, 2020-03-15

  • Ben adorably calls this notion a “Zettelconversation.”
Last updated 2023-07-13.