A community and self-reliance story: Tinderbox. How it has become one of the most influential tools I’ve ever used

Tinderbox. It has to be one of the most influential tools I’ve ever used.

In a nutshell, Tinderbox is a knowledge creation, curation, visualization, and publishing tool.

I’ve always known it was important and had faith, but, alas, its power eluded me for years. It was not until about two weeks ago, however, that the curtain was pulled back, the clouds parted, and the power of Tinderbox was bequest to me.

Not only is Tinderbox a powerful tool, one that I will be teaching every one of my students from here on out (hopefully I’ll be able to cut their learning curve down to days and weeks and not years, as in my case), it has an unparalleled community. It is the community that I’d like to refer to now.

Below are two posts from a community form thread I started. The post started with this:

ME:

“Hi there, help is needed. :). First off, I’m not an engineer. I’ve read the tinderbox ref files, but I’m getting lost. Is anyone aware of a Tinderbox coding & syntax tutorial? I have the basic .contain and $MyString= elements down, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out expressions, conditions, counts, or other calculation efforts so as to gather more insights or express insights (e.g. twitter())from my data. I get confused by when to use a { or an |, etc.”

After some back and forth, one of the lead community members, Paul, responded with,

“If someone just never gets it, after attempts to try to wrap their mind around it, then stop. It’s not for everyone, and it is by no means essential to using Tinderbox.”

I totally agree with Paul; Tinderbox is not for everyone. But, if you apply grit, have faulty, maybe it can be for you.

As requested by one fo the other Tinderbox community members, I’d like to share my reply to Paul’s note.

REPLY IN TINDERBOX COMMUNITY THREAD (slightly edited for typos)

Let’s start with @PaulWalters’ comment:

“If someone just never gets it, after attempts to try to wrap their mind around it, then stop. It’s not for everyone, and it is by no means essential to using Tinderbox.”

This was me for at least 5~7 years when it came to Tinderbox (longer truth be told). I intuitively knew it was useful, but I could just not wrap my head around it. I used it as a glorified shoebox. I’d find snippets of information, notes, that were important to me, and put them in. I tried playing with prototypes, etc., linking, attributes management, etc. But my usage was in fits and starts; the value of Tinderbox eluded me. I never fully gave up though. I maintained a sense of grit and kept coming back to it. I built a Tinderbox with hundreds of notes with people, companies, ideas, but they were all in different formats, containers, and not connected in any way. I was unable to pull any insight from them.

The Eureka moment

About ten days ago, something clicked in my brain, and the power of Tinderbox revealed itself to me. I’m still by no means “good” at it, yet, but now I have the confidence to dive in and use it. In fact, I taught someone to use it yesterday. In looking back, there were a number of ingredients to my breakthrough:

1. Necessity, start with a problem, as @PaulWalters says “You need to start with a problem (“I want to make a stamp to do this and that…”) and begin to unravel it.”

In my case, I had two problems,

1. I needed to build an industry ecosystem map for my work, and
2. I’ve gotten sick and tired of doing the same work over and over again in Excel.

I’ve gotten sick and tried on focusing on the outcome, e.g. an industry report and not building an asset of notes that would enable the generation of numerous future and alternative outcomes. In the Excel model, I was wasting 90% of my research time because I’d just grab the information that fit at the moment, put it in a cell, and I’d ignore the rest of the insights I was coming across, even if I knew they were important. With Excel, I did not have the structure to capture the notes because they did not fit into my rigged 2 dimensional Excel framework. Tinderbox lets you capture insight and come back and refine it later.

Need alone, however, did not unveil Tinderbox for me. Again, I’ve had the need for years, so there were a few other pieces (lessons, insights, tools, processes, ideas, personal growth) of the puzzle that I needed for it to all take shape.

1. Zettlekasten, about 18 months ago, I stumbled across Zettlekasten. The key insight I took away was that knowledge is created not in the final output but in the process of inputs, with note creation and curation. And if you do this creation and curation effectively, the final output basically writes itself. And it is much richer in insight than it would be otherwise. What worked for me was How to Take Smart Notes by Ahrens (2017). Again, the asset of notes built over time is the fodder of knowledge; as you steep in them, add to them, more knowledge and insight is created, insight that can be used for any output — whether it is written, verbal, or visual.

2. 49’ Monitor, I got myself a 49’ monitor. Now I can see all my work. Simply amazing!

3. Don’t do too much in one Tinderbox, the key insight here is not to try to do too much in one Tinderbox. Now, I now have six Tinderboxes that I keep open all the time: 1) My ecosystem project, 2) personal development, 3) meetings & action items, 4) course development (I teach mobile marketing), 5) the old shoebox I’ve been filling for years — I’m pulling notes from this and putting them into the Tinderboxes that work, and 6) my test-bed for trying out code. Also, I use other tools to get other things done, like DEVONthink for files and images management, TextExpaner to rapidly insert export code in my writing, Scrivner, Grammarly, and Zotero to help with my writing.

4. Massage the data scheme, don’t be afraid to create/delete/re-configure/rename attributes, for my ecosystem project, working on the “problem,” i.e. the data scheme was the breakthrough. I started with the key prototype I needed, Organizations. I then started breaking it down. Organizations have Products. Products have Features. Features have Benefits. Solutions (Products, Features, Benefits) have Use Cases. Substantiation of assertions and linkages among all these require Sources (aka References), Definitions, and Statistics. Each of these groups became prototypes with their own unique visible attributes and containers. My key insight here was that attributes are universal and can be used everywhere, regardless of the notes, the prototype simply helps manage the visualization.

I also learned that it was OK to rename prototypes and attributes along the way as my model matured. The only challenge with this is you need to go back and update Agents, Stamps, and Rules if you change names, but this is a small price to pay. All of this may sound simple, but it took days (actually years if I’m truthful) to connect the dots in my brain and put this framework together.

5. Trust me, drop the fear, this was a HUGE leap. I’ve been afraid to write, afraid to code, afraid I’d never figure it out. Even though it has taken years, I’m starting to get over it.

6. Trust Tinderbox and the community, as I was building my data scheme, I started to have ideas, as @PaulWalters notes above. I was thinking of my problems and breaking them down to “small Ps,” tactical problems like creating links vs. the “big Ps,” strategic schema problems.

For example, I thought, “what if I used linking to pass attribute data bank and forth between notes as I linked them.” By doing this, I would not have to manually enter the data every time into an attribute field and copy and paste across notes, which was a pain. Also, this would put the power of Tinderbox and Zettlekasten into action.

So, with a lot of help from the forum I came up with this:

$KeyAttributes=;$Prototype=”Feature Prototype”;$Type=”Feature”;$Benefits=links.inbound.”Benefit”.$Name(original).

What this does for me is that it allows me to pass data back and forth between notes with links. When I link a Benefit to Feature, the attribute $FTRBenefit in a note gets copied to the $Feature in another note. I have something similar upstream for $Organization linking,

$Products=$Products+links.inbound.”Product”.$Name;$Features=$Features+links.inbound.”Product”.$Features;^^endIf.

What this does for me is it adds all the names of products in the $Products attribute and all the features related to every product in the organization’s $Features attribute. Now, I can generate insight up and downstream. I can just look at an organization and see everything it has, or I can look at its products and features, benefits, etc.

I’m not saying the above is perfect. There is a lot of tinkering to do. But it works.

7. Stamps and the attribute browser are your friend, I’ve learned to LOVE Stamps. They’re like a surgeon’s scalpel. They’re great for testing and give you much better control when manipulating notes. Once you get them right, you can turn them into rules. Also, I LOVE the attribute browser now. I can output a set of notes, analyze them, but also edit and link them within the attribute browser to ensure consistency for the final output report. In fact, being able to see notes in various visuals is a very powerful value of Tinderbox. It helps me to ensure consistency and generate insights.

8. Too many links in Map view really slows things down, I’ve found the value of leveraging containers and trusting that I can pull the notes back up to the forefront when I need them with agents. Before, I tried to put everything in one giant map view, and my Tinderbox just got unwieldily and slow. So, When I start to map a new org I do it at the top level, setup the org., add its products, use the Link Parking Space to link to features I’ve already created, etc. Once I have all the associations right, I add the $Container attribute and then change the value to have it automatically moved and stored in the right place.

What I’m still trying to figure out now is if there is a way to run an agent that pulls the aliases of notes but also retains/redraws the original linking between the notes and their sub notes for the newly created aliases. In other words, I’d like to run an agent that shows the links between organizations, products, and features. I was experimenting earlier on this and had it totally wrong. Paul was very polite in telling me my code was a mess. Now that I know better, I realize just how polite he was…“a mess” was kind. Anyway, I’ll come back once I figure it out.

9. The universality of some notes, in my schema $Features, another key insight I found along the way, products are a collection of features. Most products have the same base feature concept, e.g. Password Management, which may have nuances on exactly how they implement it, but the primary feature of Password Management is the same. So I can use a common Feature note, delineated by $Type, and link it in multiple products and create unique linkages between a product or company. If a company is doing something particularly unique or different, I can create a note to explain this.

10. Writing is small chunks, e.g. notes, and leverage export code variables, this was my big breakthrough. Each note is a piece of writing. I can use links, ziplinks, etc. to interlink my pieces of writing, and leverage the export features to pull them all together. Also, the use of export code, e.g. ^value($Name), in my writing was a HUGE breakthrough. Why, because now I could address item 5 above. I can pull in attribute names into my writing, like an organization’s name, and if I misspell it I can fix it in one place, i.e. in the attribute, and it would update everywhere. So, now, when I’m writing organization or product descriptions, I can do stuff like “^value($Name) is a leading provider of [[Password Managers…” This insight has made my writing SOOOO much more fun.

Finally, 11, as “this one goes to 11”:

11. Humanity Power, a friend of mine recently released a concept “Humanity Power 1.” The idea is simple, there is “unity’ in humanity, and we can all drive to eradicate the “isms” plaguing our lives. This may not be directly related to Tinderbox, but the idea of “unity” has been really profound for me. I also see there is “unity” in community, and I’ve found exactly this with the Tinderbox community and this forum. For example, two weeks ago, we held a Saturday afternoon session amongst community members. I felt the community. It was tangible. I was able to learn that others are in the same space, some more advanced, others less advanced, but I was able to both learn, and for me, most importantly, contribute. For example, I knew something about Tinderbox and attribute browser usage that someone did not. This realization helped me understand that I actually could do it. I can make Tinderbox work. I then dove in. I’ve spent about 60 hours with Tinderbox this last week.

This last week I’ve been drawing insight from the Tinderbox community bank. I’ve not given as much as I received. I am grateful to you all for your assistance. Now that I’m becoming more self-reliant with Tinderbox, I’m looking forward to giving back as soon as I can.

Anyway, thank you all. This is a brief glimpse of my Tinderbox journey. It is all very exciting. I’m looking forward to the rest unfolding in due course.

SUMMARY

Again, Tinderbox is not for everyone. But if you have faith, clearly define the problems you want to solve, self-evaluate, and get the right tools, then one day, you too can unleash the power of Tinderbox and its community. For me, the wait has been worth it.

If you’d like to discuss Tinderbox with me, or the rise of the personal information economy and self-sovereign identity (my life’s work and passion project), please reach out to me on LinkedIN.