Obsidian

Obsidian is a writing application that saves content in markdown format. It offers an enjoyable writing experience and a large collection of plugin tools to aid in the thinking, organizing and writing process.

Why We Love Obsidian

Here are the reasons we love Obsidian:

It is commonly used and well documented.
It has a vibrant online support community.
While it is not open source, the content you create is maintained in markdown and is all yours.
You can get up and running with Incus in a meaningful way in minutes.
It does its job (writing) quite well.
It integrates with Git quite well.
It attracts a large collection of well-maintained plugins.
It offers a reasonably simple architecture given the nature of its purpose.
It can be deployed in every corner of the world.
And, most importantly it has great synergy with the rest of the chuck-stack.

Special considerations for Obsidian:

Obsidian is not free for commercial use. While you can install it for free, and it is free for personal use, you do need to pay per user per year for commercial use.
Our opinion is that $50/user/year (as of the time of writing) is high value. The few people in your organization whose primary task is writing will appreciate and benefit from this tool.

References:

We live in a Markdown World

Obsidian Plugins

One of Obsidian's greatest strengths is its internal and 3rd-party plugin offerings. Here are a couple of topics worth discussing.

Excalidraw

The Excalidraw Obsidian plugin gives you the ability to simply illustrate thoughts and concepts. You can create meaningful and complicated diagrams that both inform as well as help you navigate your content. Because Excalidraw maintains its definitions in plain text, it can be saved to your git repository just like any other document.

Advanced Slides

The Advanced Slides Obsidian plugin helps you create good looking presentations (also with Excalidraw illustrations) with minimal effort using markdown.

Imaging having the last 10 years of marketing's executive strategy presentations available to you in markdown so that you can feed it into AI. What conclusions can you draw from the past options, proposal, successes and failures. Knowing the past, where you have come from and where you are going right now creates a much more vivid understanding of the present, and it helps you craft a better plan for the future.

Git

Git Obsidian plugins help you automate:

Keeping off-computer copies of your documents
Version control of your documents
Collaboration with others
Complex workflows for recommending and approving changes

By incorporating git into the writing process, you add a whole different level of AI engagement. AI not only knows what is currently published, but it can also know the decisions and concerns expressed along the way. Said another way, this feature gives you the ability to teach AI 'how' to think about your organization.

AI

AI Obsidian plugins help you use AI with your writing processes. Different writing tasks require different features from AI. The existing AI plugins offer good feature coverage.

TODO:

Alternatives

Obsidian is the tool we enjoy the most for what the chuck-stack needs. However, there are alternatives.

Logseq - similar to Obsidian, and it is open source; however, it does not produce as pure of markdown as Obsidian since it is more geared towards daily journals and outlines. (see discussion/comparison)
Notepad++ - or any text editor that understand markdown.
vscode - has great support for markdown documents.