Digital Gardening

ore often than not, the digital gardens of today are botanic—privately owned online spaces made for visitors to fawn over while a “do not touch” sign looms in view. These private gardens are generative for our personal learning, but they are far from the communal gardens I grew up in that valued collective work and knowledge. Where are the digital

A garden is made up of the following parts:

Seeds: the content contributed by gardeners,

such as text, photos, video, audio, or other digital media.

Gardeners: the users that invest in tending to and growing the garden.

Soil: the framework, meaning the design system and processes the garden is rooted in.

Elements for growth (such as water, sunlight, and

Digital gardens hold a component of discovery where gardeners may be delighted or surprised by what they may find. They are designed to embrace a culture of learning, where one may be open to be changed by ideas.

Digital gardens are not about creating utopias. Rather, they design towards the small and slow progress of protopias, as defined by futurist Kevin Kelly as “a state that is better today than yesterday.” We need protopias, alternatives, and the seeds of gardens. We need space to dream, and for that dreaming to connect to concrete action.

When you find some of these new combinations particularly interesting, share the seeds with fellow gardeners. Leverage the knowledge of other mind explorers. Keeping a digital garden where you can have a shareable copy of your ideas is a great way to contribute to the growth of our collective intelligence.

Amy Hoy, in How the Blog Broke the Web, describes the downfall of the digital gardens that once grew across the landscape of the web. It is a history of how personal websites, particularly through the ease of use of the modern CMS, changed for the worse. Instead of carefully tending to our gardens, we became lazy caretakers of our space, molding ou