Building the Global Knowledge Graph: Dreaming the Dream for Roam Research

You can think of any Roam graph or page as a private or public repo for thoughts. Right now with Roam’s current functionality, your repos are mostly private.

But Roam was never built with the vision of being a really great single player product. Instead, it was built with a much grander vision of allowing users not just to read each other’s public notes but also to remix them.

Co-founder Conor White-Sullivan has compared Roam to Excel as both are products with “a low floor and a high ceiling.” You don’t have to start using Excel by using pivot tables. It’s the same product no matter how advanced you are as a user. But, like with Excel, you get more power out of Roam as you get better at using it.

If Roam continues to succeed at empowering the individual user, becoming the platform for shared public thoughts, and organizing all of that information into a shared index of knowledge, then you start to see Roam transition from a tool to a utility, sort of like the internet.

In Roam we’re working with graphs instead of worksheets. Graphs are the collection of pages and bullets across a specific account. Roam takes the concept of referenceable pieces of data and applies it to each bullet point, or block. Roam is letting you take each and every thought you have and assign it a unique identifier (e.g. a block reference). ... See more

What you start to see is collaborative knowledge work that isn’t passive. You want to write code that you can put into production. You want to have ideas that drive towards action. Block referencing something from someone else’s graph is a pull request into each other’s minds.

One functional problem with organizing the world’s information is the ing... See more

What really broke down in Google’s original vision is the incentive system they were building towards. There is a very specific subset of information you’re interested in “organizing” when you’re trying to serve the perfect ad.

Today Roam is a powerful single-player tool that you can think of as a functional reactive coding environment for remixing your own thoughts. Use cases extend from grocery lists all the way to conceptual SQL scripts for your ideas.