Ubuntu Canada LoCo

A lot of us have probably heard terms like ‘knowledge management’, ‘knowledge assets’, and ‘intellectual capital’. In fact, a lot of us are knowledge workers – whether it be at our jobs or where we volunteer. In today’s world, information is a powerful, sought after personal and capital asset. Thankfully our human brains are powerful information systems that enable us to acquire, process, store and disseminate large amounts of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information. However, as we all know from our own empirical evidence, our brains have limitations and ‘bugs’ and unfortunately the source code to our minds isn’t readily available to permit us to fix them. Although we can only guess how much information our brains can store, its clear our brains don’t store and recall the data it holds in the same way a computer does. It isn’t difficult for us to forget or misremember. We often look to external means to help us extend our ability to manage and store the sometimes overwhelming amounts of information thrust upon us. However, there are lots of us out there that probably haven’t had the opportunity to recognize just how beneficial doing so can be. Sure… we’ll jot a note down, make a todo list, write a blog post, or update a wikipage here and there but how many of us actively and consciously engage in personal ‘knowledge management’? If you’re not, I recommend you consider it. Take notes, write down your thoughts, your ideas, your research, your discoveries, your meeting minutes, etc. It won’t take long to compile quite the repository of information. The first time you need to refer to some meeting minutes to help remind you of some action item you agreed to or to the notes you made on some topic that randomly comes up in an IRC meeting will be a very gratifying moment and you’ll seem like the guy or gal whose always on top of everything to those around you. Without the right tool though it’ll be tedious and awkward – you want something that makes it easy and effective. I know I’ve personally tried a number of different applications to help me keep track of everything with varying degrees of success – full blown MoinMoin wiki, gnote, tomboy, xfce4-notes, evernote, paper, whiteboard, etc. Nothings really done it for me like Zim does though and thats the real reason I’m writing this blog post – to help others discover it. In fact, I was so impressed with Zim after only using it for a few hours that I felt compelled to send the author a small donation of €30.00. Surprisingly, Zim was formerly one of the tools I tried a few years ago and discarded as not for me but since then its been rewritten and better then ever. So what exactly *is* Zim? It calls itself a desktop wiki but in reality its a desktop wiki with superpowers (or something) but superpowers that don’t get in the way or slow you down. There is just so many good things about Zim (IMHO) I don’t even know where to begin so I’ll just let you go take a look – its only an apt-get away and you can check out the project’s website at http://zim-wiki.org/

P.S. Sorry for not blogging in so long.