Malcolm Ocean's roamblog

September 7th, 2020

edited 2020-09-07 · open in Roam
  • I applied to Roam's backend alpha tester program
    • My Q responses:
      • Have you participated in or started any experiments or interesting projects, multiplayer or otherwise using Roam? If so, please describe your involvement and share any relevant links.
        • I was one of the first people to have a public roamblog, now hosted at intertwingled.blog

          I've also explored using Roam for teams etc, with multiple private Roam dbs. In one of these we've been modelling different kinds of therapy etc, and we imported the entirety of a book as something to comment on & backlink.

          In another, I imported multiple years of history of the #media channel from our slack, using a tool I made called slack2roam: github.com/malcolmocean/slack2roam

          The third is the Complice team Roam, which is the one that's most like, actual project management rather than a shared knowledge base.

          I have many different Roam dbs.
      • Are there any interesting use cases you've found for Roam that we should know about? If so, please share any details and relevant links.
        • I've mentioned a fair number of them above. My roamblog allows me to start drafting my thoughts on a topic that aren't ready to be formally "published" to my blog/newsletter, and meanwhile I can start referring to topics I intend to write on and building up backlinks internally.

          One I haven't mentioned is that I'm part of a culture incubator (described by @Conaw as "Like a memex, but if the memex were a house, and also maybe a cult. IRL collective intelligence innovation") that records almost all of our conversations, so being able to make conversations named entities that can be referred to when taking notes on another conversation or whatever, and to easily find which recordings talk about particular topics... is very powerful, and we're just in the early stages with it.

          One of the reasons I want interlinked databases is that sometimes I want to eg take notes in my private Roam, on one of those recordings, with it still linking somehow to the main topics in the shared Roam. The challenge of figuring out which Roam DB to put things in is actually one of the main things limiting my use of Roam, as I've had 5 databases I use on a regular basis, since last fall.
      • Have you built anything on top of Roam, whether it be using roam/js, roam/css, or a custom browser extension? If so, please describe the projects and share any relevant links.
        • I wrote some of the earliest custom CSS themes as userstyles, and was the person who got Conor to give tags custom data-tag attributes for styling, and ultimately created a lot of momentum towards what became to make roam/css.

          Not exactly "on top" but very API-related:
          github.com/malcolmocean/wf2roam
          github.com/malcolmocean/slack2roam

          I might build a slack-bot to auto-sync slack2roam once there's an API.
      • If you were given test access to the new backend alpha, what experiments would you run and/or what things will you build?
        • I've already started ideating about building an integration between Roam & my app Complice, similar to an old one that I built with WorkFlowy. I want to be ready to launch it the moment the Roam API goes live, so I'd love to be able to build it in advance. A bunch of Complice users have requested such an integration, and we're discussing it a bit in the # complice-integration channel on the Roam slack: app.slack.com/client/TNEAEL9QW/C016YCJ4A20/

          Probably other experiments too, but I don't even know what's possible yet!
      • Are there any other things that we should know about you that would make you particularly suited for alpha testing?