Representing my worlds with Org-mode

I'm re-organizing my Org-mode files to be better about writing for a specific audience, and hopefully a more productive writer!

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Hello, readers! Thanks for your interest in what I have to write. It's important for me to express that I only work on my writing when the weather or my disability prevents me from performing land stewardship. I believe that its the obligation of every human, especially in this time when the Earth has been so damaged by our ancestors, to cultivate the land into a space that's capable of holding life, and prioritize that work whenever I can.

With that said, I do consider my communications with other humans a part of that work, in a wider perspective, and so, again, want to express my gratitude to you for taking the time to read it.

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This post was written for the Writing Club, and is about writing as a craft. Specifically, it's about organizing written information using computer software, specifically Emacs and Org-mode, and organize the information that way. It's my first post to that rather-new community!

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Over the winter I've been developing a different perspective on things. I'm not entirely settled on the language of it, but here's how I might convey it:

All of us people live in a reality, but that's not actually where we live. We spend our lives inside a wide variety of worlds. Some of these worlds are only personal. Others are built together within our communities. And others exist somewhere else, built by the societies floating around in their own worlds.

In my perspective on things, this makes worlds very much a tool in their own right, with interfaces that we interact with. (There's some metaphysical implications here, about how this means there's a thing separate from me that exists entirely within me, but those are for summer gardening ruminations, not winter planning.)

Because each world is itself a perspective on things, that makes it an environment, in a metaphorical sense. And the same "thing" can be entirely different in two different environments: a raccoon in a bank lobby is a very different thing than a raccoon in a forest.

This fragmentation of my worldview into worlds-view has some practical implications that are going to change how I do my record-keeping: quite literally how I organize my notes on my computer. (There's also a few other changes I'm planning, and I'd like to make them all at once.)

For anyone unfamiliar, I'm using Emacs, Org-mode, and Org-roam to take my notes. The relevant capability of this tool stack is that I can easily link notes to each other, and then see a list of "backlinks," for every note: what notes link to that one.

And here's how I'm currently laying those notes out:

• org/ holds pretty much all my information.
  • s/ holds the source files: the actual records I write.
    • com/ holds information written for communication with other people - like this little essay!
    • term/ has my personal encyclopedia - which actually also includes stuff like my ledger or garden plans.
    • ref/ is a catalog of references to outside sources.
  • p/ holds the published versions of the information in s/.

This works fine if I'm just producing writing for myself, but isn't going to work well for trying to keep larger amounts of information, especially contextually distinct from each other!

In the rest of this essay, I'm going to talk through how I'd like to re-organize these records.

One change that I'm going to make is that I want to be able to publish communications individually, not just as part of one big published version, and I want to be able to include different prefaces and things. For example, if I'm sharing something as an email through Substack, it can't include Bitcoin addresses, but if I'm sharing something through Hive or another platform, I probably want to include such solicitations!

Let me start by looking at this, what I'm writing here. It's a short little bit of writing for… the Web, but that's rather vague, and one thing I'm learning from being on Hive is that I can be a lot more specific about what communities I write into.

That's worth stopping and unpacking for a moment I think. Traditionally, on the Web, you post something in one place, and then link to it other places. More recently, mechanisms have started to gain traction that make syndication more and more feasible: post on one microblog, automatically post on another. Or post on three news Websites, staggered over a week, or send an email and then a week later post it on a Website, or so on.

Hive seems to allow for this new-to-me way of posting, where I post things yes, from my unified identity, my Hive account, but into a… community? Tribe? The language is still unclear to me, but when I'm writing a post through Ecency, I can choose whether to post it onto my blog, or into one of the communities I've joined as a "guest."

Regardless of how it works specifically, I think it changes my approach to Web writing a bit. Rather than writing things for "the Web" and the reposting them, either partially or in-full, in other places, I can post them directly to those places, especially if it's tied back to my identity, the way a Website is.

So this article will probably go on my personal blog, attached to my Hive profile, because it's very focused on my own approach to things, even though the topics might fit in a more broad community. (Though at this point I'm so unfamiliar with Hive, I'm also just… not sure what community is the right one for what sort of post! But that problem isn't solvable by changing my Org-mode file folder layout.)

So, from a writing perspective, what I do is I maintain and cultivate a repository of information - my personal encyclopedia. Then, I'll, every so often, reach the point where I want to write something. Usually this is based on information in my encyclopedia, even if it doesn't explicitly reference it.

Through the winter I've been using the metaphor of a digital garden. In that metaphor, my encyclopedia is where I bring in what I harvest from life, and compost it down, finding the seeds, planting and growing them.

And then, I take that writing and publish it into a format I can share with whatever the audience is. This might be seen as taking the fruits of my garden to the market.

Well… as I said earlier, I don't write for "the Web," "the market." I write for specific parts, specific markets. So that needs to be a step: recognizing the different markets that I bring my writing to.

So going back to to this post.

It's grounded in information that's in my digital garden, terms like "digital garden."

But it's being cultivated just outside that garden, ready to be transplanted out onto my blog on Hive.

Let me look at how my Org-mode directory might look, with all this in mind:

• org/ would still be the main directory.
  • term/
    • digital-garden.org
  • reference/
  • project/
    • personal/
      • emsenn.org
      • hive-blog.org
      • dcity.org
      • turtle-island-news.org
    • community/
      • webgaz.org
      • makha-sa.org
  • communications/
    • web/
      • hive/
        • my-blog/
          • representing-my-worlds-with-org-mode.org
        • turtle-island-news/

Interesting. I iterated over that list a few times. When I started, I had discrete folders for worlds, like I talked about, and now that I'm "finished," I… have almost exactly what I started with, but changed in two ways: there's a new project/ directory, and the communications/ directory is split into subdirectories.

I think, though, that really does capture the important spirit of the changes I want to make…

At least, their layout. As I mentioned earlier, one thing I want to change is the ability to add boilerplate to texts like this one. I think that'll probably be sourced from project files, so will have to come a bit later.

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This post was first published on the Hive blockchain, which is essentially a distributed database accessible through many different Web and phone apps, tied to a tokenized economy. If you're a content creator (or frequent consumer), I'd encourage you learn to learn more about the protocol and consider creating an account.

Here's some other content I've recently added to the Hive blockchain:

• Time in the network, not timing the network
• Breaking illusions with math

(Already on Hive? Think I should've posted this into a different community, or with different tags? Please let me know! I'm new here, so eager to learn more. Thanks!)