Happy Tuesday Roamans,
It's another jam-packed edition, where I try to squeeze in the most interesting things I've found in the Roam eco-system in the past couple of weeks. At nearly 2,500 words, we'd better get started!

Around the Roaman Empire

Grouped linked references

​Ponez has developed a neat extension which will let you group linked references based on pre-configured categories using regular expression rules. This is super handy for a whole variety of use-cases. As a quick example, in my last letter discussing Better Practices for tagging in PKM, if you use status tags consistently, then you can easily set up categories for all the resources you use and then use this to filter the linked references by the category.

iFrame components

Stian Håklev created a little wordcloud demo to showcase a new feature added to Roam which will make it easier for more developers to add their own functionality to Roam. It opens the door (almost literally) to creating custom interfaces and visualisations, etc hosted on your own server. You can use any language that can be compiled to javascript, and have access to a limited subset of your graph data. There’s plenty of documentation in the developers help graph if this interests you.

Under new management

Perhaps the biggest news of the last few weeks is that Chris (@Roamhacker) has passed the baton for the continued development and maintenance of Roam42 to David Vargas. It means that going forward it will be hosted from the RoamJS.com domain along with his other plugins. David plans to build this out into an alternative location to Roam’s eventual Roam Depot as a source of good quality plugins and add-on services.

If you are a Roam42 user and you haven’t yet updated the links to load it from RoamJS directly, you should do this sooner rather than later. David has a short video showing you how to make the necessary change on the RoamJS website.

You can also find out a bit more of David’s future plans in this twitter thread.

On a personal note, I would like to thank Chris for all his amazing work and support in the Roam community to date, and for helping to push the state-of-the-art in Roam forward, showing the way for what is possible. Don’t worry though, Chris assures me he’s still sticking around.

I’m a believer

And even if you’re not, the secret is out of the bag now, the Roam team has released a first version of a native desktop app, using Electron. Much like local graphs, I expect that it will become available to other Roam users in the not-too-distant future.

Ones to watch

As I was recovering on Sunday after my first COVID-19 vaccination shot, I got a chance to catch up on my video queue. Here are a few Roam-related, which I think are worth your time.

Lost In Roam

Jesse J Anderson’s video series, Lost in Roam, is a refreshing, honest look at how he’s trying to see if he can get Roam to click for him. I loved seeing him walk through his thought processes as he experiments with the tool.

Interview with Conor

An enlightening AMA with Conor White-Sullivan which shines some more light on where the Roam team is heading and the grander vision.

Workflows for using Roam for research

Lukas Kawerau and Lisa-Marie Cabrelli talk with Matt McKinlay about how they use Roam for research. There are a ton of nuggets you can glean that you can take into your own graph. Well worth an hour of your time.

And now some time has passed

I am a huge fan of Interstitial Journaling and in Letter XVII I covered Fabrice Gallet’s SmartBlocks which makes for really easy consistent timestamps. He has now taken it further with some really cool new additions. It can now calculate the elapsed time between the start and end times.

That’s just the start though, you also have the ability to set minimum and maximum times based off preset trigger words to be very intentional about your time. For example, you can make sure your coffee break isn’t longer than 10 minutes, or you spend at least 20 minutes on your Morning Pages. Check out his short video demonstrating the features. I think it’s a great example of Programmable Attention.

Roaman Spotlight

Speaking of Fabrice, his “find and replace” and these interstitial journaling smartblocks have endeared him to many Roamans already so I’m delighted for you all to get to know him a little better.

What do you use Roam for?

Roam has quickly become the control center from which I organize most of my activities, data and ideas. I use it to manage my tasks and projects (in parallel with Todoist and Google Calendar, thanks to useful extensions by Mark Lavercombe and David Vargas), to keep a diary (using a template for morning page and evening reflection), to channel my attention thanks to Interstitial Journaling, and to save bookmarks and inspiring tweets in a context that allows to find them easily and to preserve their meaning.

Of course I use Roam as a personal knowledge management, to explore open questions on the long term and to make my different fields of research intersect (notably epistemology, pedagogy, the effect of technical devices on our ways of thinking, ethics, philosophical exercises to develop autonomy of thought), by linking my notes of readings and my reflections. I have not yet fully implemented a Zettelkasten proper but I am following the Roam Book Club 4 on “How to take smart notes” by Sönke Ahrens (the book and the multiplayer graph experiment guided with incredible energy and intelligence by Beau Haan are really great) to learn and see if I will be able to integrate it into my practice.

I then use Roam as a database to prepare my lessons (I am a philosophy teacher), to collect texts, quotes, statements, arguments, concepts, problems, thought experiments, multimedia resources, etc. and to link to all these data my own reflections, explanations, exercises and my lessons. I’ve been looking for years for a solution to manage the mass of data I accumulate every year, to quickly find the ideas that work best with students, and to reuse them in a new context. With Roam’s back links and block references, I really believe I have found a robust solution, to easily find and reuse the best elements, without redundancy, in an almost surgical way thanks to the block level.

I also use Roam as a support for my classroom lessons, projected on the whiteboard. In high school, the teaching of philosophy in France is organized around a set of notions (such as freedom, justice, conscience, nature, etc.) which are all linked to each other: any question we choose to deal with is linked to a multitude of notions, which is often difficult for students to grasp (they are used to putting knowledge in boxes isolated from each other). Roam makes it easy to highlight these relationships and to see, in the Linked reference, what has been said about a notion in previous courses and how all ideas are gradually enriched in a coherent way.

What has Roam taught you?

Roam is the ideal laboratory to experiment with serendipity and to remember that the emergence of our ideas escapes us in part, that the process of creation, or even simply of writing, is very dependent on context. Roam learns me to build the most profitable context possible for the emergence of new ideas, by making ideas collected in isolation meet, sometimes collide and shake up our expectations. But the strength of Roam is that it also allows us, in the same time, to focus on a precise idea, to analyze it in a surgical way (according to the Cartesian method of dividing problems into simple elements to better solve them). So Roam is teaching me to think more methodically, without the sometimes stressful constraint of the method, since Roam also allows the most free writing possible.

What attracted you to Roam?

The bi-directional links have really been a game changer, it’s as if the recorded data comes to life and calls themselves to attention, sometimes when you need it - without having to make an effort to find it - and sometimes when you don’t, causing unexpected mixes.

I was also blown away by the creativity and dynamism of the community around Roam. I quickly shared its enthusiasm and, after getting help from power users, I was motivated to contribute in my turn.

What’s your favourite feature of Roam?

The feature that continues to amaze me every day is simply block references and especially inline references (the little number at the top right of a block, which allows you to see all the places where it is mentioned, and which allows you to browse them directly, inside the block, without breaking the workflow).

The principle of transclusion is fantastic and is made very accessible by Roam. That a thought can lead its life in several places, in several reasonings, seems quite logical: a good idea is made for that, to feed multiple threads of reflection or action. But the fact that it’s really the same idea that is at work in multiple contexts, and that it can be enriched by producing an indirect effect on each of these contexts simultaneously, I still find that quite incredible.

This initial idea of the block ref, which is first and foremost a matter of reuse without redundancy, has given rise to multiple other uses: comments, discussions with oneself, aliases (the hover tooltip, which I use in particular in my little Tweet extractor extension), the chronology of the use or enrichment of the idea by means of the DNPs that mention it, different developments depending on the audience, “telescopic text” (the text put between double parenthesis, hidden behind the astrolabe and you can expand or collapse), and so forth. We are still far from having covered all the possibilities that this simple feature offers for thinking!

The advanced “Search blocks” feature (via Ctrl + Shift + 9) remains, I think, quite underestimated, yet it is a really good way to find the exact block you are looking for, especially when you have many similar ones, since you keep an eye on the context.

What do you hope to see in the future?

Roam already offers a powerful multiplayer functionality, but I’m waiting to see what evolutions will allow to change the scale, for multiplayer with several hundred or even thousands of people (currently we reach the limits of the system beyond a hundred users or when there is a large number of references, because of the slowness but also sometimes the lack of readability that can be generated by the multiplication of blocks, even if filters are already an efficient solution). Interconnected graphs with block references between graphs would also be great.

My dream is a tool that truly democratizes argumentative debates on societal, ethical, philosophical issues, with thousands of users, and that allows to clearly visualize the discussions and to bring out the best arguments, and their clearest formulation (the main thing being that everyone can really consider the arguments that challenge his position and that engage him more to examine his beliefs, his biases, etc.). There are already a multitude of web apps for argument mapping, which remain rather confidential even if they are well designed. I think that Roam can take this type of system to another scale, thanks to the graph database and the enthusiasm it raises as PKM.

In the nearer future, I hope to see the development of a commenting system more fluid than the use of refs blocks (even if it is already excellent), immediately accessible to non-initiated users.

Tell us one interesting thing about you

I originally graduated as a developer. I worked, in the early 2000s, as a developer (especially C++ and Java) but I stopped coding when I went back to study philosophy. It’s the energy of the Roam community that made me want to code some extensions in Javascript again! But coding remains a hobby for me. I am above all interested in methods to think better, everything that gives more sense to what we do and be guided by better thought values and I hope to be able to share workflows or algorithms of thought with the Roamans soon!

To learn more, you can follow Fabrice on Twitter.

Thinking Out Loud

This letter is already pretty long, so I’m going to keep it short. Roam Book Club 4 is in full swing, and I have been absolutely blown away by the openness and vulnerability in both graphs.

I have been spending the most time in Beau Haan’s graph, doing the daily writing exercises along with the group to continue to deepen my practice, and seeing the depth of the work and the honesty of the participants in their responses is truly humbling. It’s no hyperbole to say that it is far more than just a book club.

As the daily lessons progress, it feels like a chain reaction is starting as the lightbulbs go on as more and more people see the power in the block-based zettelkasten. And we haven’t even got to the best part yet! If epiphanies were fireworks, Beau has well and truly lit a fuse in the book club’s factory. There are explosions all over the place!

​The sign-up form for RBC5, which will be starting in July, is available if this has piqued your interest.

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As always, if you have thoughts on this or other tools-for-thought related topics, hit reply and send me an email. I love reading them all.

Until next time,

Andy

​Download Roam JSON "Directors Cut"​​​​

P.S. If you enjoy my letters and find them valuable and would like to help support me with the running costs, you can do so at Buy Me a Coffee. You can also book private 1-1 Roam coaching sessions too.

A big thanks to Matt B, Geert, and Fr John who supported my "coffee" addiction last time. I really appreciate your support! 💖

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