SB V2 as a project Managment tool in academia

[zef (Zef Hemel)]

@Christoph

Some tools for important responsibilities such as writing papers are dictated by the context: No matter what I choose, I‘d be collaborating with colleagues used to send Word files back and forth, the furthest I could stretch that paradigm is suggest collaborating on a shared Google Doc, so that‘s that.

Yeah, I think SilverBullet can't be of much help here. It's not built for multi-player collaboration. You could theoretically do that a little bit, but I wouldn't recommend it. What I sometimes do in similar situations is write a first draft in SivlerBullet, then through its export command (Cmd-e or Ctrl-e) export it as rich text and paste that into Google Docs. That works. It's a one-way operation though.

@Christoph

Also, I have learned the hard way, that completely open systems, such as orgmode or Tiddlywiki, whilst almost limitless in their capabilities, are not for me because I can be distracted by exploring a technical rabbithole in the system when I really should be working on my actual job not the system meant to facilitate that.

This is a super common trap. I think a lot of us get side tracked into working on the system than actually using it. In this context, sadly, SilverBullet gives you virtually unlimited power. It's up to you to restrain yourself

@Christoph

Currently, I have a few open questions. I am using a Pikapods hosted instance of Silverbullet. In the long run, I would need to have all the managed documents at hand along with my notes and tasks (proposals, PDFs, papers, travel documents, expense forms, analysis reports etc). This would probably be best in a tool such as DEVONthink. Could this access documents in the file system on the server and what would be the prerequisites? I understand that Pikapods has SFTP, not Webdav. Would this be an argument in favour of hosting Silverbullet on my own server?

Yeah, I tried SB on Pikapods and indeed you can enable SFTP access, which seems to work fine. I don't know Devonthink and if you see that as a replacement for SB or companion.

If you just need the certainty that you can get your files out of Pikapods, you should be fine with their SFTP access (you can just download everything whenever you want). I think they also have S3 backups. What you can also do is backup/sync your files to e.g. Github: Backup your space to Github

If you host SB yourself on your own server, you have a bit more flexibility of course, but it all depends on what you need.

@Christoph

So: SB as a place for ideas, thinking about several long-term projects all running in parallel, tasks in the context the care arising from but collected from multiple locations and viewable in one location, with links to relevant documents managed elsewhere, bonus points for Macs as well as iOS devices being acceptable (at least for capturing information and tasks) - doable in Silverbullet or am I trying to chase unicorns?

I think this is all doable, it's more or less what I also how I use it.