Personal vs. Team knowledge management (PKM → TKM sync)

Second Brain for Teams
1

Yesterday we had an interesting conversation with @antoniokov about PKM (personal knowledge management) and TKM (team knowledge management) systems. He invented a cool way to solve PKM/TKM problem.

People like to have personal digital gardens and use all kind of PKM for this (Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, etc). It is natural for them to collect information in personal tool about everything, including work-related things. Imagine you are a product manager in productivity space. You will collect notes about productivity, competitors, ideas in your own PKM system. However, how to share it with the team?

We think that people will still use PKM, they are more convenient and private. It’s hard to imagine that suddenly you will move into Fibery and keep all private notes there as well. But we think that some parts of the PKM graph can be synced into Fibery and added to a TKM system.

Here is the flow:

  1. you accumulated 50 notes about chats and comments systems and now you can sync them to Fibery and link to a specific Product Area.
  2. You mark these notes somehow (tag or something else) and they get synced to Fibery.
  3. Notes are immutable from Fibery perspective, you can only augment them (react, comment, link to various entities, transclude into several places).
  4. Notes still live in your personal PKM and when you update something in PKM they will be updated in Fibery as well.
  5. Imagine you have 5 product managers in a company, now they have a tool to share selected parts of their personal knowledge to the team and cross-link this knowledge together.

So you research something, share to the common pool (Fibery) when ready and use Fibery tools to link this to the company context.

Fibery already has integrations and it is relatively easy to use existing mechanism to sync notes from all tools with API.

This is just a very broad idea and we’d like to hear your thoughts.

8 Likes
2

Very cool idea :sparkling_heart::smiley:

3

I like the idea, for sure. But I am not so sure of its level of importance/priority, quite honestly. The other perhaps ironic thing is that, since I discovered Fibery, I have been considering it as a potential PKM for myself, though I haven’t adopted it for that yet. But as export options have improved recently, and with the coming blocks functionality, I am closer and closer to seeing it as “Notion but with better databases” (by which I mean a great PKM).

4

I’d say that the notes I write for myself are generally just intended for me, and then when I feel that they’re worth sharing with others I edit them into something cleare/more compelling. My main worry if I was to sync up my personal notes with the team notes would be that some stuff that I didn’t want to share would get shared, or that people read stuff that confuses them more than anything else.

1 Like
5

I was just thinking the other day about how much I would love this exact feature! Although so far I’m using Fibery for PKM (I run my team so I don’t really have personal knowledge that is separate from the knowledge I want them to have) and that seems to be working well. But Obsidian looks very nice.

6

I’m in favor of this feature. I experience the exact issue and I still use external tools for personal knowledge management. Having a bridge to join the two would be great.

7

This is legit problem, overall it should be very explicit rule so you can manage it safely. Like a special tag for a note that is hard to add incidentally.

8

So far it is just an idea we are exploring, I don’t think we will move into implementation in the next 3-6 months, since blocks are much more important.

3 Likes
9

We use Github-hosted Obsidian vault with colleagues to share especially literature & permanent notes, which are not necessarily tied to the specific cases in the company, yet relevant; some sort of linking (as proposed immutable with an option to make mentions, link entities) would be great.

Thinking of PKM, the ability to index MD files from the Github repo & process them within Fibery could also work. Each of us has our own path (like /jakub, /jan) and one for common interests.

After all, the vault is to me like a file-based database + config file for the Obsidian browser.

Just FYI how we use Obsidian for personal & team knowledge management.

Fun fact: I learned some cooking tips from a colleague by discovering his open notes. :cook:

3 Likes
10

Hi guys,

I didn’t had a good PKM. My notes where in Notion, Google Docs, Google Keep notes etc. But now I’m using Fibery I’m building a Second Brain based on the ideas of Tiago Forte. So my situation is as followed:

  • I have one Fibery workspace for the company. We have a ‘Second brain for teams’ there.
  • I have one personal Fibery workspace as a PKM

I would love this for both of my workspaces. We use N8N for integrations. That makes a lot possible (in an affordable way). But what would be the best Fibery set up to sync the Team/TKM workspace and my own PKM workspace? What’s the best way to keep my notes in sync?

Is there somebody with a great idea? :grin:

And to be honest: I did quite a deep dive into the ‘Second Brain methodology’. I think Fibery is the most briliant tool to build a PKM Second Brain because of all the references and endless possibilities.

2 Likes
11

Related:

1 Like
12

Oh hey, another person using Fibery as a PKM! I agree with you, Fibery is very likely one of the best solutions for a “second brain” at this point. For the most part I only miss a good “whiteboard”/Canvas (which Obsidian’s recent major release has demonstrated can be much better and more useful for actual PKM than Fibery’s, unfortunately).

I have actually been thinking about potentially paying to have a Fibery <-> Obsidian integration created…

3 Likes
13

Let me know if you do this and I’ll contribute.

1 Like
14

we have some crazy prototype that syncs local files… Maybe we can expand it to sync obsidian files…

7 Likes
15

My assumption is that it’s quite easy if you use N8N. I never used Obsidian myself but we’ve already build Fibery integrations with N8N and that was quite easy since Fibery’s data structure is great :smile:

We run the self hosted version of N8N. It’s open souce so you don’t have costs (except for server costs). But N8N also has a cloud option ($20 p/m for 5000 workflow executions and 5 active workflows).

You don’t pay per step (like Make) and if 5000 workflow executions is suitable for you, it can be a good option.

My company doesn’t have the capacity atm to create integrations that we don’t use for our own clients, but I do know a great Dutch N8N consultant. Maybe he can fix it quite fast for you (costs: around € 100 per hour). I also worked with developers in Fiverr but the quality is not that good (it works; but crappy solutions that can easily break). Let me know if you want his contact details :slight_smile:

(@Sarah_Arminta as well)

2 Likes
16

Excellent! I was secretly hoping you might. :grin:

Wait… what!? :open_mouth: What did you have in mind when you built this? If it can already read text content, and Fibery already supports Markdown, it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to support Obsidian content, right? :grinning:

Sure, it could be via N8N, Make, etc. But I’d prefer a more direct connection, which I was until-now assuming would be an Obsidian plugin. I’m not a coder, so I’m not sure I’m right in my assumptions here, but I figured that doing it from Obsidian would make it easier to integrate with the local file system, to pull changes from Fibery back into Obsidian if desired (i.e. make it bi-directional), to make sure Fibery changes into Obsidian are synced to Obsidian Sync if desired, etc. It might also better allow for potentially fancier integration in the future e.g. with Dataview and its successor, so that even DBs could potentially be synced (fantasy/wishlist, but may be possible one day!). I would also want to make the plugin open source, if possible.

Also just to make it clear why I personally want a Fibery ↔ Obsidian integration, there is the current advantage with Obsidian’s incredibly well-implemented Canvas that is the most immediate draw. But more broadly I think it has the potential to provide a beautiful hybrid and “backup”/“out” for people who have “cloud anxiety”. If Fibery had good integration with Obsidian and/or local Markdown in general, it could be a form of basic “backup” that is more sustainable than manual workspace exports. It could also open up Fibery content manipulation (at least in basic/limited form) from Obsidian Mobile (a great experience), and even perhaps a wide variety of other Markdown mobile apps, e.g. if you sync Fibery to local machine, and sync that with a mobile Markdown editor of your choice (separately).

So hopefully a discussion can be had before I move forward about whether Fibery’s nascent file system support could be used instead, since it already exists! But unclear if it’s bi-directional, etc., or could be made so… (part of the conversation that needs to be had, of course :grin:)

4 Likes
17

Yes bi-directional will be a huge advantage! And local files sounds good!

Really love all your ideas :grin:

2 Likes
18

I would be thrilled even with what is shown in your video. Obviously @Oshyan’s ideas would be even better :smiley:.

Make it part of a Solo Pro plan and let me give you money. :pinched_fingers:

1 Like
19

Well, Obsidian has own markdown syntax extension and to make it work well we should somehow handle it. It is easy to sync text, but what about links and bi-links?

3 Likes
20

i am soooo loking for a solution like this to have an easy way to combine PKM with TKM. i am a solo-preneur currently introducing new team members to the process. i am still the one doing most of the work. but having all my meeting notes, todos and other things shared would be great. i heavily rely on the task management in obsidian and i love that tasks are embedded in their relational document. but having this automatically sync to a tkm where these tasks also get filtered and put in lists would be great. any way of doing this?

1 Like