Andrew Andrew: Thanks for the suggestion on paperpile! We'll look into this. Out of curiosity -- how do you think about the distinction between groups / labels? (what's the difference here?) We can also add a separate but parallel tags system as well.

Kevin Sun: Hi Kevin. Sorry, is a bit of a long response.

Again, going to lean on how I use Paperpile, which I think does this well. In short, PP labels and folders aren't that different, except folders are hierarchical (sub-folders within folders) and labels can be styled/coloured. This might not seem like much, but having two systems allows me (and other people who have explained how they use folders and labels) to mentally separate them into different functions, which is really powerful. So I use the folders to help structure how things relate (where they are in my system) and the labels for status indicators (what I'm doing with something, or what I think of it). So in PP, all the articles have a home in a folder (PP also allows an article to be associated with multiple folders), and I then use the labels to mark (i) if I've read it or not and (ii) if read, if I thought it was useful or not.

My use case for Dex is as an academic network manager, and the specific uses I'm hoping to be able to achieve is to write down somewhere what I know about (a) fellow students that I've interacted with (e.g., courses/units we've taken, publications we've worked on, their research interests), (b) lecturers/supervisors I've engaged with (e.g., previous teachers for courses/units, research areas), and (c) scholars whose works relate to my research interests (e.g., their institution, key publications, research areas).

So, for Dex to assist me with this I'd want to put people in folders (with subfolders, ideally, because I'd love to use Dex for all my contacts. So, for example, "Friends", "Family", "Academic" (subfolders: "Academic/Lecturers", "Academic/Students", "Academic/Scholars"). I'd then like to be able to label/tag people independent of those folders, e.g., "PHIL500", "MATH501", "Potential supervisor", "Machine learning", "People I'd like to work with"). I'd also use the already-present contact field to put scholar's institutional profile webpage etc.

Then I'd be able to do things like:

(A) looking for a supervisor on a great research idea? Filter by folder=Academic & label={"Potential supervisor", "Machine learning", "People I'd like to work with"}.

(B) Saw a post from Sally Richardson - how do I know her? Search "Sally Richardson" and see she's tagged for "PHIL500" and "MATH501".

And, putting on my hat as a small business owner and a worker for a business with 5000+ staff, I reckon the above would make Dex a good solution for both of those use cases too.

This PaperPile blog post has some great explanation of how they've designed labels and folders: https://paperpile.com/blog/whats-new-with-labels/

Cheers, Andrew