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How do you collect and organize your horizon scanning?
At Houston Foresight, we have some particular needs (see the graphic). We teach Horizon scanning in a variety of settings (most virtual, but also some face-to-face) to a variety of people and organizations. One particular need is that we like to demo the creation of a scanning library in real-time. So, it has to be easy and intuitive for newcomers to quickly sign up and get started with a fairly light level of instruction.
For about 10 years now, we have been using Diigo. I had been a former Delicious and Magnolia user (veteran readers might remember those), which both had perished, and needed to find something new for my work at Houston Foresight. We tried Diigo and it turned out to be perfect for what we needed. Over the years, we used it in class, in training, and for every client research project we did, we set up a Diigo group library. I have a pretty large scanning library supporting my After Capitalism book. I have several dozen libraries.
I’ve heard all good things come to an end. I don’t know what’s happening at Diigo, but it has been slowly falling apart such that we can no longer use it. This has triggered a search for a replacement. Essentially, a “bookmark manager” is what we need. So far the search has been vexing to say the least. There are lots of cool tools, that meet or even exceed our requirement on one or more things, but then fail on something else.
Over the years, many people have scoffed at Diigo’s simplicity and suggested they had a better tool. We typically checked them out, but did not find any that seemed to met our particular needs in a significantly better way. And a very important point is that Diigo lasted. We have seen a lot of these bookmark managers come and go. It turned out that we had struck gold — again for our particular needs.
I’d love to hear what people are using, and I think other readers would too. It doesn’t have to be a recommendation for us – though we’d appreciate it – it can simply be sharing what you use and why. – Andy Hines
I’ve been a big fan of Microsoft OneNote. It is digital notebook that enables your to copy, drop and drag everything – including backlinks to the original source material. Websites, quotes, pictures, PDFs, graphs. It all works. Start a file for a big project like After Capitalism, then open up a new tab to organize every chapter.
Every tab has multiple pages, and looks like a newspaper. This enables you to cluster ideas together spatially.
You can add hashtag links that are then searchable for cross-reference (like Diigo)
My last book was written with OneNote. My business plan is in OneNote. Everything is going in there. OneNote syncs on the cloud between all your devices.
If I had this in college, I would have been an “A” student!
I’m finding Readwise Reader interesting, the ability to tag words and sentences in an article then collate these across article is useful. Might be worth exploring
I forgot to mention a couple of other pieces of software.
For writing, the Scrivener word processor which allows you to have blocks of content that can be moved around.
For collaboration, Miro shared a whiteboard. Very useful for group work but can become a problem for information updates as there’s no audit trail of changes. It can slip into holding old versions of documents that are updated on a shared drive/ repository.
If anyone has them I’d be interested also learning about other tools used for online collaboration in this thread.
I’ve been using TheBrain since 2007. Great tool for bookmarks, notes, documents, etc. You’ve probably heard it before. Good luck, I hope you quickly find the tool that you need.