Johnny

Hi, I'm John 'Johnny' Morabito. I'm currently overseeing and managing operations and information channels in our open source community while learning product design under Shanberg.

From 2018-2020 I went to University of Maryland for the Human-Computer Interaction Master's program where I completed my thesis titled "Managing Context in Literature Review Systems: Process Patterns and System Affordances" under the advisory of my incredible mentor, Joel Chan. In my study I observed the ways that context capture and reuse is afforded (or not) by the various tools and methods used by academics in their knowledge synthesis workflows.

Ironically, in my own study on the challenges of context capture and reuse, I struggled to conduct my own literature review. I experimented with a combination of tools including google docs, notion, lucidchart, miro board, and even a prototype information compressor tool that was being developed by Joel and his colleague. I was trying to trying to optimize my literature reviewing process, but each tool had its tradeoffs and combining them lead to messy results.

Not by coincidence, did Joel discover and share Roam Research with me in late 2019 as "tools for thought" were at the forefront of our minds and our research. The affordances of block level atomicity outweighed all other tools for a major part of my literature reviewing process despite the constraints presented by the outliner paradigm and this new technology.

In January 2020, at the beginning of the second semester of my thesis, I saw that Roam had posted design challenges, and since this tool aligned very closely with my research and interests I decided I would try one of the challenges out with the hopes of possibly working for Roam after graduation. Conor, one of the co-founders of Roam Research, was satisfied with and paid me for my design solution to the following feature request: "many users want links to multiple different words to point to the same page." My thesis work picked up after that challenge and I was unable to work on more.

In May 2020, I joined the Athens Research community and began to sporadically participate and contribute while working on my thesis. After the completion of my thesis and graduation from my Master's program I attempted to reconnect with Conor, but unfortunately was unable to. After that I decided I wanted to dedicate as much time as possible to the Athens project. I didn't want to miss out on an opportunity to work on this type of software which I know will have a great impact on many peoples lives. I've been working closely with Jeff for almost a year now and I'm confident in him as a leader of this project and know that with our shared conviction we have a solid foundation for building an exceptional product and community.

With the Athens project, I'm hoping to 1) manifest the findings and research from my Master's program to make knowledge synthesis easier and more accessible to everyone and 2) encourage, empower, and help our community of learners and contributors become self sufficient as we build this experience together.

Learning and collaboration are at the core of the Athens project values and I believe, as an open-source tool for thought, we will be one of the best places on the internet to practice them.