Public Digital Garden - Terms of Service
You should read this before starting on the other notes!
Disclaimer: the skeleton structure for my “terms of service” (and many word choices) are directly referenced from swyx.io’s Digital Garden Terms of Service ↗. I shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. Thank you, Shawn! I will be adding my personalised addendums and spotlights, in regard to my own site.
I’ll preface with why we need a “terms of service”, but you can also skip straight to the Terms of Service.
TL;DR
- The nature of a “public digital garden” necessitates a two-way “terms of service” between readers and authors.
- Readers should:
- Acknowledge the fallibility of my content
- Attribute properly when referencing my content
- Criticise constructively
- Authors should:
- Consider others when authoring
- Declare epistemology explicitly
- Respond well to feedback
Our necessary response to a public digital garden
Fluid gardens ftw
I collect and manage my knowledge with a “digital garden” philosophy.
The best word to sum up this philosophy of knowledge management is “🌊 fluid”. The harshest words to sum up this philosophy are:
- “disorganised and wild”
- “always incomplete” / “never finished”
- “most probably, wrong”
- “unabashedly biased and limited in perspective”
- “I don’t remember ever writing this”
- “I remember writing this. I hate it now.”
Hey, don’t call them bugs. They’re features, baby. Honestly, this loose, playful spaghetti-on-the-wall workflow is exactly the kind of second brain that brings out the best in me and many other learners, to efficiently absorb and interconnect information.
We can be so perfectionistic, iterating and re-editing and tweaking to pixel perfection, because we want to publish out the best possible version of our work. Take the inverse of the attributes listed above: “final conclusion”, “extensively researched”, “thoroughly revised” — no wonder we get high-pressure action-paralysis.
In pursuit of perfection, I’ve actually ended up writing nothing at all — literally. The 80/20 rule has given rise to an infinite% increase of output (because my initial was zero)!
Boo! “Public garden”…?
However. All those aforementioned attributes are great, but they are the exact kinds of attributes that suck when publishing to the infinite public web.
The web is already a cesspit travesty of misinformation and mistakes enough already, as we know. And that’s the proportion of misinformation that we do know! It’s all over the place, prone to abuse and quoting out of context, people quickly affirming, “Oh yeah, it’s true, you know! I’m sure, I read it somewhere on the Internet.”
So it makes sense, we keep our sticky notes to ourselves, but crank out a polished blog article once every… half-year?
Which is a shame, because humans learn so much better in a community. There is so much more to learn from each other and cover our blind spots. Besides that, we also get to share our ideas in the public Aeropagus, and thresh out the grain from chaff!
I believe this is coined “Learning in Public”, but I’ve not really delved into what that means, as of yet. But see — I can share that term with you, my public audience, before I’m an expert myself!
How do we garden?
I have an ethical obligation to the audience of my words, to admit and annotate my the limitations and scope of my claims and ideas, to the best of my knowledge. While I’m on this journey to become an expert, and perform extensive due diligence — I’ll make provisions for reservations for my fallibility :)
From the other side of the screen, you guys gotta be as responsible for how you consume, as authors are for how they produce! Especially due to the fluid and carefree nature of digital garden notes, it’s just prime for cherry-picking.
To Garden in Public well, I think it’ll be a fun little exploration to draft out a two-way social contract! The following Terms of Service are mirrored from Digital Garden Terms of Service ↗, rephrased for the application of my own public digital garden.
For Readers
I don’t think I can say it any better than Shawn himself:
Welcome! You are now browsing a Digital Garden. This is my personal space for Learning In Public. I am a lifelong learner so everything is a Work-In-Progress like me, but I do not let perfectionism get in the way. That means that what you read here is not authoritative or complete, and is not representative of my best work.
However, it is representative of my interests and current state of knowledge, and if you have the same interests, then this space is also yours to use as a reference. Feedback and social sharing is welcome - that is the whole point of being public!
1. ☑️ Right to be wrong
I reserve the right to be wrong, oh, so wrong. Already with like 50 public notes, on really tame topics, I already want to rephrase and go back on so many claims.
Each note is a “living document“, always incomplete and provisional, subject to new findings. I will “retract or rephrase” whenever I arrive to new positions. And hoo boy let me tell ya that will happen a lot.
But almost always, 99% of the note remains unchanged. Notes that come out of “work-in-progress” are not “complete” — rather, they move from “budding” to “evergreen”. They progress into a “healthier” and “mature” state. Out of the volatility of puberty, and expecting the fine tuning of adulthood.
As I reserve prudence in making claims, then I urge you, dear reader, to be appropriately prudent in accepting claims. If it is unsure, then assume the least of me.
2. 🖇️ Attribute, don’t plagiarise
I want my ideas to take a life of their own, in other peoples’ minds. But it needs to be done orderly.
Don’t copy nor paraphrase my content without citing where it came from. If you are reference my writings, then you should reference the permalink of the note, so that your own audience can be aware of development.
I’m actually slightly indifferent on people stealing my content as their own, as of my current public notes. I’m really more concerned that someone is going to re-publish my problematic content and my mistakes get permanently etched into stone.
When sharing or riffing on my content, you should:
- if you are quoting
- clearly show the start and ends of the quote
- declare where emphasis added, if any
- include the note’s URL permalink
- no need to mention me by name (though if you want, sure lol)
- optionally, if it’s a hot take, or crucial info, then annotate the date of retrieval
- if you’re not sure, feel free to contact me!
3. 🗣️ Constructive criticism
Comments. Jokes. Disagreements. Counter-takes. Advice. References/resources. Grammar/spelling correction.
I welcome all, and more. Feedback and criticism is how we learn, even if we don’t come to an agreement. No need for “compliment sandwiches”, as long as they are “constructive sandwiches” (what).
You can find my contact information in the footer of this site. After an email, we can continue on Discord or somewhere else! Yeah honestly, even if it’s just a “Caleb, I have nothing to criticise, but just wanted to say you’re so cool”, bro I ain’t saying no to that!
But even better, you can author and publish an improved version of whatever I wrote. Then share me the link to read it!
For Authors
(These are largely copied from swyx.io, so spot on already)
1. 👥 Consideration of others
- Don’t publish private convos or confidential information.
- Consider others’ feelings, especially if it is a negative take on someone else’s work.
- Perform due diligence in research data and making claims.
- Err on the side of treating others how they want to be treated.
- Steel-man the best possible counter-arguments. Be quick to understand, before trying to be understood.
2. 🧠 Epistemic disclosure
- Report confidence metrics, yet reserving the #1. ☑️ Right to be wrong
- Declare the scope and underlying assumptions of claims.
- Declare my own credibility in the topic. Refer others to the experts.
- Link to external resources, so audience can discover influencing and contrasting opinions.
- Practice disclosing epistemic status.
- You can read more in detail at Public Digital Garden - Metadata.
- Not always necessary if obvious from the context.
- I reserve the right to make mistakes in my tagging.
- Declare where content has been modified.
- This is tricky, because in my specific use case, [[these notes are primarily for my eyes]] (broken link, note not found). I edit notes in-place, because that is cleaner to me. But I think it is good to practice an explicit changelog.
3. 🔁 Response to feedback
- Create space and channels for receiving feedback.
- Reward feedback by listening and quickly amending my mistakes.
- Don’t promise to agree or respond to every feedback.
Next steps
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↗ External Resources
- Digital Garden Terms of Service (accessed 2025-07-18)www.swyx.io
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Gardenmaggieappleton.com
- 🌱 My blog is a digital garden, not a blogjoelhooks.com