PKMind
What happens inside someone who manages what they know — and why the tool is almost never the problem.
ExplorationCognition & knowledge
What it makes analysable
Pick up a book you read a few months ago. How much of what mattered in it did you keep? Ten percent would be generous, and looking at a full bookshelf, the figure gets worse.
The twentieth-century problem was finding information. Ours is the opposite, and we are still using the methods built for the old one. The usual response is to sort harder and store better, and there is now an industry of tools for doing exactly that.
This project asks a different question. Not which application to use, but what happens in the person using it. Why someone spends more time configuring their system than writing in it. Why one person's notes compound into expertise while another's accumulate into a graveyard. Why a method that works for a colleague collapses in your hands within a fortnight.
Where the model stands
This is an exploration, not a finished tool. What has taken shape so far runs along two lines.
A cycle in three movements. Capture faithfully, transform into atomic notes that can be linked, and produce something. The third movement is the one most systems quietly skip, and skipping it is what turns a knowledge system into storage.
Archetypes as working masks. The Geek, absorbed in configuration. The Gardener, gathering without organising. The Architect, building structures and planning the work. The useful move is not to tell someone to become a different person, but to invite them to wear another mask for a while — the Architect when notes need structure, the Gardener when ideas need collecting. Identification is contextual, so it can be borrowed.
Both lines lean on the Experience Matrix: a knowledge practice that stalls is usually a case of spaces out of step, where what someone knows to do and what they identify as have come apart.
How it is being modeled
The observation came from a field crowded with methods that work for their authors and for almost nobody else. That pattern is itself informative: when a practice transfers badly, the part that matters has usually not been described.
The work was presented at the first European PKM Summit in Utrecht in 2024, and again in 2025 with a worked case — someone who kept switching between applications, always three weeks from the perfect system. Her problem was not the applications. Presenting to specialists who knew the tools far better than any modeling framework was a useful test: the analysis had to hold on its own, without borrowing authority from where it came from.
What is still open: whether the archetypes are three or more, whether the cycle holds outside written work, and what distinguishes a knowledge system that compounds from one that merely grows. That is why this page says Exploration rather than Tool.
Going further
A French-language implementation using Obsidian exists, along with training material. Articles on the subject appear in the journal.
Origins
The note-linking practice owes its shape to the Zettelkasten tradition, adapted rather than reproduced. The reading of what happens inside the practitioner comes from the modeling work that produced the Experience Matrix.
Related models
The Experience Matrix supplies the reading grid this project applies to a particular field.