PKM
A conversation with Guia Carmona which I met at the PKM Summit 2026 sparked a question that keeps spinning in my head: at what point does a private practice of thinking in public become a contribution to something collective?
Guia pointed to a tension in PKM that she had felt but has not yet been clearly investigated. She noticed a quote from my reflection note on the PKM Summit – that PKM practitioners are “something closer to existential philosophers” (see the other post) – and pushed back gently: “if thinking is this personal, this individual, doesn’t that mean we are forgetting a big part of life?” When do the collective spaces come in, and what do they look like?
How needed is individual thinking space, and when – and how – does it open up into something shared?
This feels important not just philosophically but practically. If all our notes stay private forever, you’re refining your own mental model but not contributing to anyone else’s. And on the other hand, if you publish everything immediately, you lose the unfinished, exploratory quality that makes a garden worth having.
These are some preliminary pathway to further develop and approach this question.
Maybe the real barrier isn’t tools or time, but self-belief, self-understanding and self-confidence. Sharing a half-formed idea requires trusting that it has value before it’s polished. That threshold varies enormously between people. What helps someone cross it? Accountability groups, such as that we started at the Summit, can make a difference, but how? – This question need further thought.
I don’t know if this term exists yet, but it comes close to what I want to describe. It is hard to grasp: the aggregate of individual PKM practices and accumulated knowledge, made visible and linkable via a digital garden. A digital garden accountability group is a “tinyverse” of this – and I don’t mean simply a shared wiki, but a set of individual gardens in conversation with each other.
Maggie Appleton’s framing of digital gardens as organized by topography rather than timeline applies at the collective level too. A community of gardens is a landscape, not a feed. You wander through different minds rather than consuming the same chronology.
Maybe the individual-collective split doesn’t need resolving. The private space is where you think; the public garden is where you share what’s ready enough. The gap between them (the “in-between”) is exactly the creative friction that makes both worthwhile. And what I am sharing is just a set of questions that are open for discussion for everyone.
This is a seedling. I don’t have an answer yet I’m not sure I want one yet. But I’ll want to come back to that question regularly, especially as the digital garden accountability group takes shape and we start reading each other’s work. But I’ll keep it in mind and make my observations here.