I’m inclined to ask: Are there ready-made software solutions for this or should I roll my own in Python or some office program? If it wasn’t for the secretive factor I’d write a simple program to put on my github and show off programming skills.
I don’t know. But if I really did it (instead of just talking that this is the wise thing to do), I would probably use some offline wiki software. Preferably open source. Or at least something I can easily extract data from if I change my mind later.
I would use something like wiki—nodes connected by hyperlinks—because I tried this in the past with hierarchical structure, and it didn’t work well. Sometimes a person is a member of multiple groups, which makes classification difficult. Or if you have a few dozen people in the database, it becomes difficult to navigate (which in turn becomes a trivial inconvenience for adding more people, which defeats the whole purpose).
But if every person (important or unimportant) has their own node, and you also create nodes for groups (e.g. former high school classmates, former colleagues from company X, rationalists,...), you can find anyone with two clicks: click on the category, click on the name. Also the hyperlinks would be useful to describe how people are connected with each other. It would be also nice to have automatic collections of nodes that have some atrribute (e.g. can program in Ruby); but you can manually add the links in both directions.
A few years ago I looked at some existing software, a lot of it was nice, but missed a feature or two I considered important. (For example, didn’t support Unicode, or required web server, or just contained too many bugs.) In hindsight, if I would just use one of them, for example the one that didn’t support Unicode, it would still be better than not having any.
Writing your own program… uhm, consider planning fallacy. Is this the best way to use your time? And by the way, if you do something like that, make it a general-purpose offline Unicode wiki-like editor, so that people can also use it for many other things.
I’m inclined to ask: Are there ready-made software solutions for this or should I roll my own in Python or some office program? If it wasn’t for the secretive factor I’d write a simple program to put on my github and show off programming skills.
I don’t know. But if I really did it (instead of just talking that this is the wise thing to do), I would probably use some offline wiki software. Preferably open source. Or at least something I can easily extract data from if I change my mind later.
I would use something like wiki—nodes connected by hyperlinks—because I tried this in the past with hierarchical structure, and it didn’t work well. Sometimes a person is a member of multiple groups, which makes classification difficult. Or if you have a few dozen people in the database, it becomes difficult to navigate (which in turn becomes a trivial inconvenience for adding more people, which defeats the whole purpose).
But if every person (important or unimportant) has their own node, and you also create nodes for groups (e.g. former high school classmates, former colleagues from company X, rationalists,...), you can find anyone with two clicks: click on the category, click on the name. Also the hyperlinks would be useful to describe how people are connected with each other. It would be also nice to have automatic collections of nodes that have some atrribute (e.g. can program in Ruby); but you can manually add the links in both directions.
A few years ago I looked at some existing software, a lot of it was nice, but missed a feature or two I considered important. (For example, didn’t support Unicode, or required web server, or just contained too many bugs.) In hindsight, if I would just use one of them, for example the one that didn’t support Unicode, it would still be better than not having any.
Writing your own program… uhm, consider planning fallacy. Is this the best way to use your time? And by the way, if you do something like that, make it a general-purpose offline Unicode wiki-like editor, so that people can also use it for many other things.
ISTR there’s something in the Evernote family that does this.