How do I use Kinscape?
I have over 20 Communities in different accounts, defined by different email addresses. I use multiple accounts to separate various types of Community; personal, businesses and sports. I found that this makes it easier to handle.
There are several more I need to set up. One is to scan, organize and store my medical records that seem to be expanding exponentially and which I can never find when I need them!
I have two Communities for families: one on my father’s side and one on my mother’s. People on my father’s side are different from those on my mother’s. What is interesting to one is not necessarily interesting to the other.
Kinscape provides for different versions of a Story for different Communities.
My Profile in my father’s Community is different from that in my mother’s Community.
In both Communities I have put a selection of the thousands of photos and videos dating back to the 19th Century that are in my wife’s and my possession. Where possible I have captioned and explained the context for them. It is always frustrating to pick up a photo and say ’Who on earth is that?’ or ‘Where were we when that was taken?’ and not have an answer.
I have set up a couple of Communities for other branches of the family (cousins) where I set it them up but they now own them. Kinscape provides for such transfers.
My main sports Communities are related to sailing. I have one overall sailing Community and then separate Communities for different types of sailing. For example, I sail Dragons in Europe, J/70s in the US, and J22s in Cayman. Sometimes I set up Communities for major regattas, because those are really only useful for a period of three months or so for active participation of the crews and other support. After that they are a record with photos, videos and results of course. I also post debriefs.
The reason I do not just make each regatta a separate Story in the overall sailing Community is because the crew participation is different and privacy consideration (certificates, for example) make it advisable.
I can take key elements (results, for example) out of a regatta community and put it in the overall sailing community .
I have communities for the various businesses in which I am involved. There are several related to Kinscape. We organize different Communities by year.
Development Community that has Stories for Improvements, Bugs, Meetings, Reports, etc. Everybody in our team contributes to these Stories as necessary. We also use it for messaging to one or more of the team members. This does not replace the use of products like Teams, Trello or Figma but forms an umbrella over those separate and more detailed project activities.
Marketing Community that has Stories on Research, Messaging, Member feedback, Social Media use, etc.
Administration Community with contracts, NDAs, etc.
Each Community has a different Membership. This is key; privacy and efficiency considerations often determine use of separate Communities in an account rather than just different Stories.
Using Kinscape as an overall communications and storage vehicle is very useful for communications and record maintenance. Stories give the context for documents, records, etc. Knowing why something was done is often as important as what was done.
We have a set of Communities for major travel events.
For example, a trip we made to Antarctica several years ago to place a monument to the scientists and others who have died there on the research stations. It is a dangerous place.
We have just set one up for a recent trip to the Arctic. We had a different set of fellow travelers from the Antarctic trip to share our stories, photos, and videos.
I use a separate account for our family real estate activities including our siblings and children and another for real estate investments.
I have a Community for a rugby team that we set up at Imperial College in London 60 years ago.
We hold weekly Zoom meetings on a Sunday attended by members of the team that are now located all over the world, South Africa, Australia, Canada, Zimbabwe, United States, Britain, France, and other countries.
We record the meetings on Vimeo and store them in a Meetings Story in Kinscape.
We develop and post memorials to those of the team who have died; unfortunately, an increasingly frequent event. We collaborate on the memorial Story as we all have different memories of the person concerned. Several of the wives of player who have died stay in our community and attend our meetings.
I am setting up Communities for tennis and pretty soon for pickle ball.
I use My Personal Space for all my records:
Education and employment records.
As described earlier, I’m building out my medical records in my Vault (file store). This will avoid me having to dig through DropBox, Exchange, drawers and boxes to find blood tests, visit records and things like that. I am scanning physical records and putting them into electronic boxes in my vault and where appropriate Stories about various aspects of my health.
Very importantly, I use it as a storage system for all the photos in our family going back to the 19th century. My father’s family were in Guyana for many years and then my father joined the Royal Air Force in 1932 and went through the second world war. He was in Palestine in the 1930s setting up communications. He met my mother in Egypt during that time. He was an amateur photographer, so we have quite a collection.
Of course, my wife and I have lots of photographs of growing up and the various things we were involved in. We have digitized all the photographs before digital cameras came along. Since then, the number of photographs by year has increased exponentially. Filtering out the interesting ones is quite a task, but the records are all there in our vault. The photos I find interesting are different from those my grandson chooses. The ability to caption photos and videos in Kinscape is very useful.
It is important to have a back up Administrator for Communities and Kinscape provides for that. For me that is my wife and then my daughter. Once you have a living Community it has a life of its own and it will last for generations when the administration is passed on when the Admin for whatever reason becomes incapable of functioning in that role.
We now have the ability to store and then look back on records and stories almost forever. At one time people recorded key events in the family Bible inside the front cover, but now we have the ability to record electronically for posterity. This is a very important aspect of kinscape for me. I know past events happened in our families but have no idea why. There is no story there! Future generations in our family will probably have more than they can deal with, at least on my side although my wife is more contained.
I have deleted Communities that were not useful anymore; usually ones without any active Members. I transferred key information into another Community and set of Stories.
There are so many ways of using Kinscape. One of us uses it for sharing homeopathic remedies. Others use it for recipes and another group is using it for educational purposes. Somebody else is using for internal family betting like who’s going to win the Super Bowl. My rugby group has collaborated on singing songs together. Coordinating that was an experience.
As I hope I have shown here, there are lots of ways of using Kinscape and I hope you find them and enjoy them.