PKM
I attended the PKM Summit for the first time and I’m still buzzing from the energy of the exchange, the many impulses, and the community of knowledge management enthusiasts that gathered in Utrecht on March, 20-21, 2026.
The workshops and talks I attended covered both note-taking strategies and more philosophical approaches. Tools and features were present – of course – but they weren’t really the main catcher. What stood out for me was something harder to pin down: the way how PKM can transform learning and sensemaking, and how the process of self-understanding and thinking becomes, inevitably, very personal.
PKM provides a particular way of seeing things. And once we notice that, the life-philosophical dimensions aren’t far behind us. The vocabulary people used was “LifeOS”, “Personal Lab”, “Make yourself observable”. These aren’t just eye-catching brands. They suggest that PKM isn’t simply migrating from hardware to software; it’s in the middle of developing individual philosophies. PKM practitioners aren’t just note collectors or knowledge architects. They’re something closer to existential philosophers.
Maybe the venue helped. The event was hosted by Wonder of Work in Utrecht, and the spaces themselves were part of the experience. You could anchor yourself in the room called Earth or Roots, or let your mind wander in Dream and Vision. Either way felt appropriate and comfortable for such a conference.
The most practically concrete thing I’m taking away started at Saturday lunch: a small, spontaneously assembled accountability group around digital gardening — the practice of building personal websites where you share unfinished thoughts in public.
Under the motto “Working with the garage door up”, the group plans to support each other in publishing at least one new entry per week in their personal gardens. It doesn’t have to be polished. A short reflection, a quick thought, a snippet — anything counts.
This note is part of that commitment.
This note was created as part of the next notizlab newsletter, for which we all reflected on our experience at the PKMSummit 2026.
Songs of the Gardens — A 1925 anthology of 18th-century songs from the London Pleasure Gardens (Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone), compiled by composer and music critic Philip Heseltine, who published under the pen name Peter Warlock. The gardens were the theme parks and socialising spots of their day — promenades, pavilions, puppet shows, pyrotechnics, and music. In 1764 a young Mozart gave a recital at Ranelagh. Warlock rediscovered the published songs while working in the British Museum and rescued them from obscurity and held in the collection of University College Oxford.