Daily pages - August 01, 2021

I’m rather hoping that I’ll be able to publish my digital garden before the end of the day, but I’m also nervous about it. I wish I had a rock-solid argument for wanting to make it an open artifacts project.

One thought would be to temporarily ignore the article about how the non-commercial license is so bad, and I could change it to include the NC verbiage. This with the idea that as I learn more, I can decide to change it to a less restrictive license. I think that would be reassuring, knowing that there are still legal means to prevent someone from taking my work and publishing it themselves without my permission.

Here are some of my other arguments:

Open Access publishing is a real thing, and there are publishers creating new tools to simultaneously publish articles and books in print and online. The practice seems to be limited, currently, to academic journals and books, but there is a larger movement as well that is following similar processes.

In my book, I promote the idea of open artifacts projects as a key aspect of creating in-progress artifacts that others can contribute to. They are an important source of “things that need doing” and it would be hypocritical for me to publish my book under a strict copyright.

I’m so unknown that publishing the rough draft of the book online will not be noticed unless I manage to promote it enough that others see it’s worth. On he other hand, the benefits of me writing it in the open could be immense in that I’ll be able to direct people I respect to look at certain parts and give me feedback. It could be invaluable at helping me make the book better as well as building an audience.

In a similar vein, Fuller recommended not fussing with things like patents but trusting that if your ideas are truly your own, no one else will be able to develop them the same way you can. I am probably naive, but I doubt anyone would even know where to start in explaining or finishing my patterns. Even if there were some kind of situation where someone took my ideas and ran with them, I think they would produce an inferior product just because they don’t understand it at the depth that I do. In that case, I can still publish my own version which would be superior.

I love the idea of the digital garden. I had a similar idea in my Working Files pattern in that I’ve felt for a long time that there is value in communicating unpolished ideas to the public. I often imagined that I would publish my notebooks in some form in case any of the ideas in there could be moved forward by someone else. I now see it a bit differently in that I want to, at least partially, process the contents of my notebooks, pulling ideas together and eliminating redundancy, but still making my ideas—as far as I have developed them—available to others.

Tied closely to the idea of a digital garden, I think the act of tending to such a garden could be a very useful workflow for me. I like the idea of having to interconnect the bits and pieces that I’m writing. Creating actual links connecting them really has helped me think through my ideas in a way that simply writing has not. In terms of my personal universe, tending to a digital garden is about integrating my ideas, and I have yet to find another method that works as well to help me do that.