
Org-brain – mind-mapping for org-mode - zeveb
https://github.com/Kungsgeten/org-brain
======
motohagiography
This was interesting because I've used an OWL ontology to create a business
functional model of a complicated platform. The tool WebProtege was very
helpful.

An ontology has more structure than a mind map, and you can apply reasoners to
them. It was useful for me, but it undermined a layer of obfuscating
abstractions some of the technologists had created as a firewall between
themselves and the rest of the org, so I lost traction for being politically
tone deaf.

Mind maps are easy to dismiss because they are a unifying abstraction created
by someone's point of view, which must compete with every other point of view
in the org. Once you model it, it implies responsibility, accountability, and
that can disrupt the relationships that people have invested in.

The act of documenting something well also adds newly competent stakeholders
to decisions, which has the consequence that it dilutes authority in the org.

In this way, mind maps can get a reputation for being naive technology
solution to a problem that isn't actually a problem, because the nebulous
relationships they expose in fact already work for someone. The helpful guy
with the mind map just doesn't 'get it'.

Personally, I look forward to ontologies becoming more common in orgs, as they
are immensely powerful for getting everyone aligned on a body of knowledge -
assuming that's what one is aiming for.

~~~
bordercases
> Personally, I look forward to ontologies becoming more common in orgs, as
> they are immensely powerful for getting everyone aligned on a body of
> knowledge - assuming that's what one is aiming for.

The Big Hedge Fund Bridgewater uses decision-making assistants in their common
tooling. I assume that ontologies come part and parcel with that package,
considering that "alignment" and cohesion is one of their key motives.

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kqr
I've always thought of mind maps as spatially confused trees, and Org already
does trees very well. This package introduces the "friends" concept -- is that
the fundamental difference between trees and mind maps?

~~~
stinkytaco
Org-brain allows me to have more than one parent. For example, I have a list
of books I've read and reviewed (for personal use). When I started using org-
brain I added author entries as parents; for comics I can do author and
artists. So in the tree it looks like

* Read Books

\-- Book Title

    
    
       Review
    

* Authors

\-- Author Name

\-- Author Name 2

* Artists

\-- Artist Name

But in org-brain I can connect all of these in a logical way so I can jump
through it quickly.

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Whil-
I'd say mindmapping is an inferior term for describing org-brain even. Concept
mapping is better. But that term is also already taken for something else.
Org-brain and thebrain provide another organizational system. It's closer to
graph databases (but more restricted with only three kinds of relations). The
way it mimics our natural way of thinking about stuff is really helpful. Few
tools help us easily capture those relations. Often we're stuck with pure
hierarchical systems (such as mindmaps or folder structures). So I look
forward to seeing this org-mode add-on evolve and truly hope that this way of
organizing information gets more widespread. And covered in more tools and on
more platforms.

Double thumbs up to Kungsgeten!

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tunesmith
Does it support more than one brain? I can't tell.

The ultimate that I've found so far is Flying Logic (flyinglogic.com).

\- directed acyclic graph structure

\- boolean logic (both AND and OR) and truth-value tracking

\- multiple documents

\- automatic layout (like graphviz/dot)

\- python import/export api

Flying Logic is nice but it's expensive and non-collaborative.

I'm not sure what exists that is a next step up from that. Maybe owl/rdf
stuff?

I generally think this entire field is basically sort of addled, and we're
just waiting for software to catch up to brains. Our brains aren't
hierarchical, they're graph-based. But since our physical world is
hierarchical, there's this impedance mismatch and most of our software (todo
lists, outliners, mindmaps) makes the wrong call by forcing us into tree-based
structures.

Try representing a recipe's instructions accurately in something like
OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, or org-mode. Meaning, where blocking steps accurately
block their dependencies. You can't do it. But you can with a DAG.

As another example, you can't even represent a simple argument in anything
less than a DAG. It's like a compiler.

1\. Socrates is a man (axiom)

2\. All men are mortal (axiom)

3\. Socrates is mortal (1, 2)

4\. All mortals will die (axiom)

5\. All mortals must eat (axiom)

6\. Socrates will die (3, 4)

7\. Socrates must eat (3, 5)

You can't represent those dependencies in an outline, nor in most mind-mapping
apps (since most of them don't allow a child to have multiple parents).

Gantt charts _can_ represent those relationships, but if you only care about
the graph structure and the dependency relationships, why be saddled with a
huge project management application? And, most of them can't handle OR
relationships anyway.

Graphviz/dot is decades old and isn't collaborative. But at least it's DAG
with good layout.

Free-form "just draw any edge to any node!" apps aren't all that great either,
not without automatic layout, not without respecting any logical relationships
indicated by the edges.

~~~
Kungsgeten
org-brain doesn't support more than one brain out of the box. In practice
though you can have two folders (one for each brain) and change the path which
org-brain uses, and thus activating one of your other brains.

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Kungsgeten
Hi! I'm the author of org-brain. I'm happy to see there's an interest for it.
There's a screencast of me explaining it, which might give a better overview
than the documentation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGOwfWok5s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EGOwfWok5s)

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epaga
FWIW this reminds me of my iOS app Mindscope which is more visual but has the
same core concept of zoomable hierarchies. Kind of a mix of Workflowy and
Scapple. [http://www.mindscopeapp.com](http://www.mindscopeapp.com)

~~~
FPGAhacker
That looks pretty good. I’m pretty happy with scrapple on my Mac, and have
been looking for something similar on iOS. Thanks!

My desire would be the same but with writing via stylus (Apple pencil
specifically) instead of typing.

I take very free form notes during meetings and brainstorming and such via
pencil and go back after to make a more coherent list.

For me, free form really needs a more direct analog input. Plus I can doodle
at the same time.

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stinkytaco
I've been using org-brain since a few weeks after its release when it was
posted on Reddit. It was basically the tool I had been waiting for, combining
the significant amount of knowledge I've built up in random files and org-mode
outlines, but able to connect them in meaningful ways. If you jump back and
forth between org-mode and brain there is some manual maintenance, but it's
been worthwhile. Great tool.

~~~
wilkystyle
I've been a Markdown guy for a long time now, and despite being a long-time
Emacs user, I've never really taken the time to learn org-mode.

There was a post from 2014 that was on the homepage last week [0], and it got
me _really_ interested in org-mode + ssh sessions.

I keep a daily log in Markdown, as well as a list of tasks that I'm tracking,
and the ability to seamlessly describe _and_ execute code locally or remotely
was incredibly enticing.

[0]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16559004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16559004)

~~~
Crespyl
I've also been a long time Emacs+Org mode user, and while I was aware of babel
and the ability to tangle literate programming documents, it simply never
occurred to me that I could execute those snippets in-place and manipulate the
results in-place like an ipython/jupyter/mathematica notebook.

I had the same reaction to that post, and I'm really excited to get more
familiar with it, as it makes a great addition to some of the work I'm doing
now.

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gorgonical
I have made extensive use of org-mode for many years, and I keep trying to get
into org-brain as a way to really have a "digital brain" \-- I use org-mode to
implement my own horrible version of GTD, to great success. I have tried to
start using org-brain many times, but it never works.

I think there's something about having to externalize everything I know that
confounds me. I wish org-brain could scan my brain and spit out something I
could start working on.

~~~
stinkytaco
Depending on how you use org mode (if you are creating IDs for everything),
org-brain can scan it and spit out something. You can take an existing outline
and turn it into a brain and start adding relationships.

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harlanhugh
Hello, I'm Harlan, the founder of TheBrain. Thanks for all the interesting
feedback here.

We're pleased to give anyone who mentions Hacker News a 20% discount for the
next week. To get the discount, just call us or use the chat system on
TheBrain.com and ask for the Hacker News discount. (FYI, there is also a free
version that is quite capable and never expires.)

~~~
dredmorbius
Any relationship between TheBrain and org-brain, other than concept?

Curiously, I'd just run across Jerry Michalski's mind-mapping via Doug
Rushkoff's _Present Shock_ a couple of days ago.

~~~
harlanhugh
No relationship, I hadn't actually heard of it until just a few days ago. The
author of org-brain states "It is heavily inspired by a piece of software
called The Brain".

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Dangeranger
This is a useful package and one way in which to build a personal wiki with
references to Org notes files and vice-versa. There can be a bit of a
performance hit when the personal wiki grows to be quite large as the files
are searched and indexed when performing visualization mode, but perhaps with
additional popularity there would be people willing to tackle that
enhancement.

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megamindbrian2
thebrain.com is cool. Thank you for sharing!

~~~
eltoozero
Been around for a while too, TheBrain is an interesting program. Probably
ahead of its time.

I hope it’s eventually open-sourced as I hope they’ve got loyal long-term
enterprise customers to keep paying for support contracts and it would greatly
expand the user-base.

~~~
megamindbrian2
Funny, I just used their chat to ask them to open source. Might be cool to
integrate with Google drive the way they have with colab.research.google.com

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ggm
Surprised by how few good omnigraffle clones are out there. Markdown to tree
in js as slides feels like a tractable space

