Andy Ayrey

This would be great, especially if it came with the ability to return/reference an arbitrary value from a related field. part_of is a good stopgap solution to this, but LOOKUP & CONCAT would unlock a whole new level of composability

Echoing @Sam Applebaum's sentiment here. I've come from Roam Research as well—my days are often full of meetings and context switching and I don't always have time to upcycle and structure my notes.

One of the things we use Tana for is to have confidence that we haven't missed any promises made to other people. For example, if I tell [[Rachel]] that I'll get back to her with meeting times, I like that I can run a query for all #tasks tagged with Rachel or her organization. For structured notes, e.g. #meeting, we can auto-populate a #task from the fields on #meeting. However, sometimes requests will come in by email, Slack DM, Whatsapp, etc while I'm doing something else.

In Roam, I'd simply be able to go

• Replied to [[Rachel]] in Slack indicating I'd get back to her with meeting times
  • [] Look at calendar and give Rachel meeting options for next week

And whenever I'm next in comms with [[Rachel]], be able to query all TODOs associated with her.

However, in Tana, should I forget to populate the task field; this task would dissipate into the ether. While there's a workaround in that I can create a query for all #tasks that aren't associated with a person or an organization, this does give me a greater feeling of anxiety in general when using the system—that important tasks are slipping through the cracks!

Two things would solve this:

1. Queries that can find descendants of a node containing an inline reference that match a certain criteria.
2. Ability to auto-populate fields from an inline reference in a parent node.

Arguably #2 creates a more robust data structure!

This would be huge for us. We're quickly finding that Tana is gravitating to being the source of truth about "what's happening in our organization". Being able to inject updates from other services (e.g. good answers to client questions that we've written in Slack threads; project updates from Linear; forthcoming meetings) would cement Tana as the king 👑

1000% — Tana is proving to be a game-changer for our organization. We use it for meeting notes and agendas, technical documentation, and ephemeral tasks that don't warrant an issue in our main issue tracker (Linear.)

For us, the benefits of an API would be huge, allowing Tana to act as a heads up display for things happening in other services (such as updates on Linear tasks, calendar agendas), as well as allowing Tana to feed data into other systems optimised for particular tasks.

Use cases, Tana -> Other Services

• Watching for new or updated nodes with a certain tag, and syncing them to other services. Examples:
  • Pushing #tools from Tana to Airtable, which we use as a CMS.
  • Pushing #leads from Tana to our CRM and financial forecasts
  • Pushing issues to Linear
  • Drafting proposals and pushing them directly to our automated-proposal-generator
• Creating embeddings or fine-tuning models based on our Tana database, enabling things like:
  • Conversational UI for solving customer support queries, based on our Tana documentation.
  • Automating proposal drafts based on meeting notes
• Rolling our own front-end for our organizational operating system

Use cases: other services -> Tana

• Using Zapier + OpenAI to summarise project updates/movements directly into our daily pages
• Automatic feed of upcoming meetings in our daily/weekly pages

It would be a huge level-up for us! The flexibility of Tana's data structure is what attracted us to the service—in the medium-long term an API will be absolutely essential to our workflows.