As I explained in a recent post Knowledge can be considered from the stock, repo point of view or from all the processes and flows contributing or using it. When adding the social integrations it became more obvious that user experience is best centered around Knowledge Processes, tasks or routines. Slates are user experience view of those processes. Kneaver had two major extensibility capacities: Meta-processes and Templates. Templates started as a way to format HTML pages with ease and grew as the universal brick of Kneaver GUI. They support the latest web technology, but they don’t have long-term memory. Meta-process have this memory. They generalize workflows allowing running small scripts, long scripts, waiting for events or user interactions. Slate mix both in a well-defined way to provide a specific experience. The aim is to have a slate for each of your knowledge processes. They can be adapted from existing ones by every user. let’s see two typical slates.

PLN Slate

The PLN slate is part of your launchpad. When you join Kneaver, you start by adding thematic slates to your launchpad. PLN is one of them. It will allow to define the members of your PLN and connect to their social media accounts, blog and email. For Kneaver, your PLN is an Item, each person is an item and placing them in your PLN is basically adding a link between them. All this could be done using generic operations, but it was slow and required a good understanding of Kneaver from the start. a first iteration was to have a PLN wizard. A guided serie of questions asked when you join Kneaver. A second iteration was to add the launchpad and put the wizard into it. The truth is that the launchpad turned into a goto place for reviewing key knowledge. Why not making it permanent and extensible. So the PLN template is now a slate that could be reused and even adapted. The launchpad keeps its name but becomes a Knowledge process of reviewing key assumptions. In this example, we see that a slate is a page or a section of roll page. It is showing and editing simultaneously aspects of several items and their networks. It is a process you can always restart. One could even imagine to place it into a reminder list: review the composition of your PLN every 2 months. It is persisted in multiple Kneaver items or in social media storage and stay associative to them.

Bookmark Slate

Kneaver is now integrated with Diigo. This means that bookmarks are automatically fetched and aggregated to concepts in Kneaver based on tags. Annotations are displayed when an item maps to a web page. Like this, it becomes easy to start by annotating a page and finally build a complete reading card mixing annotations, notes, connections to other concepts. When bookmarks are imported it happens behind the scene in a sync operation. However, bookmarks may finally not show up as we expect because tags used in Diigo don’t map to the name you gave inside Kneaver. It could be because they were done long ago, or in a rush. A review process could be to audit this and show all tags used in Diigo with no corresponding concept inside Kneaver. Because it is a slate it has predefined actions ready. They are chosen from the likely outcomes of such an audit. Adapt the tag in Diigo, create a new corresponding item in Kneaver (an occasion to document the tag and place it into our concept network), search an existing one and add a synonym into it (using an AKA: line), force the link to an existing item or just ignore. This slate will have a table form, with a row for each link or tag. This slate is operating on a flow, a stream of incoming information. Again there is a memory attached to the slate. What was the last time it was used and a marker on the flow. When I use it again only recent bookmarks will show up. I could assign a desired frequency so that the slate list will show it again at this time. Such processes takes time but executed in an optimum setup they are an occasion to be exposed again to things we read, wished to keep thus re-enforcing our memory of it).

Tweets Slate

Some tweets are memorable. After a few days we lose the context and they become meaningless. A few slates prepared with specific filters to review regularly could help us memorize and attach the best of those tweets to items. This slate will also feature the same one click annotations available on the Twitter chat client. Those annotations are stored in the personal record store (xAPI inspired). This could be used later to push them directly into a Wordpress blog post, a great alternative to Storify. An example where flows can be in input (Tweet) and output (Wordpress, xAPI)

Perspectives

Slates are a way to keep Knowledge processes both finished and ongoing. We can return to them on need, we can create new ones. Instead of thinking of the stock of bookmarks, tweets or notes we can focus on what’s new and keep the flows going. It gives us the control, Kneaver just plays its role in offering a long-term memory for our semi-structured network of half-baked thoughts. From the programming point of view, it offers also a great ease and flexibility to offer more contextualized, goal oriented and user-centric interactions.