Federating Your Second Brain: Rewilding Notes into Gardens, Newsletters, and Networks

Personal knowledge management (PKM) tools like Obsidian, Zotero, and Hypothesis often become private archives, second brains locked away. But what if we treat them as starting points for connection rather than endpoints of storage? This session explores federating as a metaphor: moving from private notes → to public contributions → to connected spaces across the open web.

I’ll share my workflow for moving ideas through different stages of growth (seeds → plants → evergreens) and how these notes branch outward into digital gardens, newsletters, and blogs. In this sense, a PKM system becomes not just a personal archive but a node in a larger ecosystem. Feeding many-to-many connections instead of staying siloed.

Participants will see practical examples of:

• Designing PKM workflows that move ideas from private notes into public, open formats.

• Building digital gardens and newsletters as “rewilded” spaces for knowledge-sharing.

• Extending the spirit of Domain of One’s Own into personal publishing pipelines.

This won’t just be a show-and-tell. I want to hear from participants about their own workflows, questions, and whether they’d want to learn how to build this kind of system themselves. Together we’ll think about what it means to treat our second brains not just as vaults but as living, federated habitats for voice, creativity, and connection.