Welcome to the Kernel Library. These shared notes are one way in which we collaboratively learn about blockchains without needing to always agree. We know people have different approaches to meaning-making. Wise communities do not impose standards: they provide the structures needed for valuable individual agency.
This is just a simple repo of markdown notes. You can use whichever tool you prefer to work locally without needing to sign in anywhere.
This public repo is the "canonical" library, and any Fellow is welcome to push their notes back up to it. However, you do not have to. If you want to clone the library, and simply take your own notes in a highly personalised way no-one else will understand, or in a way you wouldn't like to show other people; you're more than welcome to. If you want to collaborate with others on notes, share what you're doing with the community, and benefit from working in public with regular feedback and dialogue, you can also do that. If you want to find some mix of the two depending on how you're feeling, you can also do that.
In general, we do not seek to create unified policies for diverse contributors and contributions. Hopefully, this simple skeleton gives you the greatest freedom in terms of the tools you pick, while providing you with a stable foundation from which you can contribute, benefit, and learn.
More deeply, we wish with this work to see a whole garden of library economies emerge. Maybe one day we'll be able to make it into a map room or even a seeing space.
These notes began life as an Obsidian vault. We like the many different ways we can represent data, knowledge, associations, and connections in Obsidian. We enjoy the rich features provided by their community plugins. You need not agree, and can use any markdown editor you like to work with this, from vim to GitHub codespaces, to VS Code or Atom, to services like HackMD, or even import it into Roam Research.
The library is your oyster. Some tools - like Obsidian - will give you different and more connected views over the same data. Others will give you an editing and creating experience that may feel more comofrtable and familiar.
The point of this is to give you the structure you need to start exercising that creative agency we know is within you.
Note: Obsidian uses a specific internal linking structure in order to generate graph views of this interconnected library. These may break in other software, but are easy enough to fix with a well-crafted find and replace statement.
Each Kernel "block" gets its own directory to work in together. This is a warm, fuzzy, and familiar place for you to bounce ideas around with current fellows who are with you on the same journey.
There is a "[[Highlights]]" folder for the most useful, insightful, counter-intuitive, surprising, divergent, alternative, and interesting notes that bubble up from each block and provide a new and unique perspective not included or emphasised within the syllabus itself. For instance, you might find [[Videos]] from the syllabus, or [[Texts]] that inspired it.
There are topic-specific folders - like [[Topic - DeFi]], [[Topic - NFTs]] and [[Topic - Infrastructure]] - for those who are going through more focused paths in Kernel and want to build shared knowledge bases which can benefit the people who follow in your tracks.
There is also a [[Kernel AI]] folder, which contains directions on how to use our conversational model, as well as examples of good prompts to help you learn how to engage it in more meaningful dialogue, as well as a page for collecting insights about topics to which the model is currently unresponsive.
Danny, Ola, Mitko, Viktor, Andy, Vivek