Clarity
Authored by:: Rob Haisfield, Brendan Langen
Clarity is a shared workspace for remote teams. Clarity is pre-built with templates, workflows and project management structures that create an out-of-the-box productivity suite. Currently, they are positioned as focusing on DAO tooling.
- In the same way that Many products are simply specialized interfaces on top of Excel, Clarity can be thought of like a domain-specific Roam Research database. While someone could implement similar workflows in Roam, it would be dependent on social norms and user behavior to maintain the system. Clarity, being more geared towards collaboration, includes design guardrails that makes it easier for people to manage a project management / knowledge graph database. It’s not as flexible, but that is okay as they are designed for a more specific set of use cases.
- Roam doesn’t give you guardrails, it all needs to be enforced with norms. In a team context, you end up with tons of drift off explicit systems. Especially as quantity grows, you get increasing entropy from difficult to maintain systems.
- Things like due dates need to be programmed in by the user. Clarity just inherently recognizes it.
- Guardrails hold the line. Human and tooling system are in negotiation, humans push the tooling system. That often sacrifices the macro integrity of the system. Need additional guardrails in a team context.
- Roam doesn’t give you guardrails, it all needs to be enforced with norms. In a team context, you end up with tons of drift off explicit systems. Especially as quantity grows, you get increasing entropy from difficult to maintain systems.
Founded by Richie Bonilla
The core data structure challenge in Richie’s eyes is:
How do you maintain a source of truth for a unit of work traveling through stages and time from start to finish?
This would allow Clarity to be an oracle for reputation and attribution of work since that work is never destroyed along the context timeline.
- Attribute work to all people who contributed along the way.
- How can you have fine grained access controls that account for liquid talent
According to him, team synthesis happens through:
- People converging on a term as the canonical term for the team to use
- Viewing accumulating backlinks on a page
- There could be an opportunity here for a processing workflow.
- Writing evergreen insights on the page itself, perhaps with block references to the original backlinks.
Assigning a task.
Visualizing the task assignment.
Assigned work in one place.
Block-based transclusion.
