A very common use of Notion is to maintain and publish one’s “open diary” or in some circles, one’s digital garden.

The excitement is in discovering what’s in common (an automation could technically facilitate this task) and the activity that is very human is discovering the “space in between” - this is where creation and innovation happens.

I have to give props up to Openly for inspiring new levels of exploration and experimentation 🙌🏻

[jessy.io jessy.io jessy.io](https://communitygarden.notion.site/jessy-io-jessy-io-jessy-io-8304365cf4be4f878139abbe1a1dd768)

This was an experiment to see exactly where the edges of collaboration are in Notion and begin a thought experiment as to what is missing that might make a difference?

I took on commenting in Openly’s space and while, to be expected, inter-collaboration between spaces, while it technically works, are not use cases I feel Notion has at the forefront of its priorities (I will get into some of the stumbles I ran into below that shape my first impressions)

This type of inter-space collaboration is particularly important to thought leaders and researchers interacting with an intent to find/create common space yet with almost certainty, need tools to triage differing perspectives.

Collaboration at this scale fundamentally needs to be solved at the dyad and triad level before having any hope of scalability to the larger globe (let alone 10 people).

I also discovered, outside the tool itself, some “rails” needed to be invented or the process could potentially get a bit chaotic!

Commenting Intents

Here are a few commenting guidelines I developed as a result of diving in. One could see this as progressing levels of collaboration (as expressed by comments):

1. to comment on spelling changes or grammatical errors - comments distinctly resolvable
2. creative direction (resolution is either taking the direction or just saying “no thanks”)
   1. suggesting a change in icon consistent with topic (or what is written)
   2. suggesting additional content (like a tweet) that might provide some clarity
3. suggesting areas for potential collaboration (resolution of the comment means yeay or nay to moving forward in this way)

Usability Issues

(this section may later get swept up into Notion)

• managing comments in general
  • lack of consistency - I can go back and edit some of my comments & can’t edit others.
    • I can edit comments on the intro on the front page
    • I can’t edit comments on the Open Collaboration page.
  • I don’t have a list of “posted comments” (similar to how one might have a “sent items” folder in email)
  • small issues like leaving the Notion UI to copy a URL from Safari and coming back, I wasn’t able to comment further (this might be iPadOS specific)
  • I have no sense of “data ownership” over comments (not that this ever existed when you post to a blog) - a more progressive platform would allow for persistence of comments
    • just because a comment is not relevant to a certain page or part of a document, doesn’t mean the thought is not relevant at all (thus shouldn’t be deleted)
• I have to navigate to another person’s space (link above) from my own workspace to be able to @mention pages in my space I feel are relevant. Some method to selecting namespace through an @mention without making it cumbersome for the default namespace requires inventing.
  • managing namespace is not exactly the most trivial thing in the world (ie. you and I could have wildly different things to say on your page on “evolution” from my page on “evolution” - what we want is a mechanism to provide for two independent perspectives and manage a space to discuss “the in-between” (this would be particularly important for conflict resolution)
    • While the platform is no longer up to see how Tiddlyspace handles this, I’m aware it does to some degree and would be worth revisiting.

See space inbetween for a less technology-centric view on this matter (esp as influenced by dance and meditation)