About

Why Flowershow?

Publishing a digital garden isn't easy. As Quartz puts it:

In our case to easy and free we'd add elegant and customizable.

More generally, publishing markdown isn't easy. And it should be, really easy, as easy as publishing a Facebook post, or posting a tweet.

The goal of Flowershow is to make it easy, fast and fun to publish your digital garden – and markdown in general – and do it beautifully.

Why the name?

The name "Flowershow" elegantly captures our mission: just as a flower show exhibits the most beautiful blooms from gardens, Flowershow helps you showcase your digital garden to the world. Your notes, ideas, and knowledge are like carefully cultivated flowers, and we provide the perfect venue to display them beautifully for others to appreciate and learn from.

Backstory

We've been building content and data driven websites for over a decade.

We loved markdown and had been using it internally for a long time. Over last few years, we'd found we could even start using it with some of our non-technical clients.

As a result we have been building tooling and sites with markdown as the content layer. This formed the basis for Flowershow which started out as an internal tool focused on scaffolding generic markdown-driven websites around NextJS.

Enter Obsidian! A year and a half ago some of team started using obsidian personally. Many of us loved it and started using it for content authoring especially on wiki-like sites.

We then found we wanted to be able to publish resulting notes and vaults especially with some of features obsidian brings for granted – ranging from all those markdown goodies like math, gfm etc but also the more exciting stuff like the network graph that really makes Obsidian special. So we started working on adding these features to Flowershow.

Finally, we ️thought a wider community could benefit from what we were doing. So we decided to make the effort to tidy up what we'd been doing and open source it to allow others to benefit and contribute.

The Team

Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is an entrepreneur and technologist who has worked on data platforms and open data for over twenty years with governments, businesses and non-profits all over the world. He is Founder of Open Knowledge Foundation, Founder and President of Datopian and an Ashoka and Shuttleworth Fellow. He studied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, going on to obtain a PhD in Economics and become a research fellow.

Ola Rubaj

Ola is a front-end developer with a keen eye for details and aesthetics. She strives for excellence and thrives on challenges. She's also an optimist who can turn any adversity into an opportunity. When not coding she spends her free time with her nose in a book or down some rabbit hole learning. She also has a "thing" for flowers.

The Bigger Picture

We need better collective sensemaking

• Sensemaking is the ability to "make sense" of reality
• We are struggling in our sensemaking individually and collectively – just think of the debates over climate change or covid vaccinations.
• Sensemaking is especially important right now because of the complexity of our societies and the challenges we face

One part of better sensemaking is tooling for sensemaking

One part of better sensemaking is (technical) tools for sensemaking.¹

• These range from tools for acquiring raw data, to tools for managing that data, to tools for analysing data and producing information, knowledge and insight
• One important area are tools for organizing our (unstructured) information and knowledge – and sharing and collaborating on that with others
• Wikis and digital gardens are one major way of doing that

The markdown revolution

The markdown revolution is bringing new energy and potential to "old" ideas such as wikis, zettelkastens etc.

• Markdown "plus" and its toolchain are becoming a powerful and flexible "digital notepaper" on which rich digital notebooks can be written
• History of computing shows the strength of simple, composable tools even if crude over sophisticated, complex ones especially over the long-term
• Markdown will still be there in 10 or 20 years
• Markdown is a great (best) basis for rich digital notes
• More importantly, combined with something like git (and a link database) it is now a great basis for a digital notebook (aka wiki)

Though much still missing for markdown to fulfil on its potential

There is still a lot to be done in the markdown ecosystem to fulfil on this potential

Publishing is one important, initial area

Publishing is one important, initial area

• Intelligence is collective: we need to interact on and build on each others insights and ideas
• That involves sharing content within a group or publicly.
• It is best if that is part of an open ecosystem (not e.g. facebook or even twitter)
• The simplest way to do that is some kind of publishing.
• Publishing markdown is still painful. It should be as easy as publishing a facebook post.