Mar

28

Mind Mapping and Collaboration

Posted by AlexTG

March 28, 2007 |

We are living in collaboration era. You can see it when looking at almost any web site or software. Share with friends, collaborate with colleagues are just a few slogans that are spread over the Internet touching almost every type of applications. Mind mapping software is not an exception.

There are several web 2.0 services with collaboration capabilities already. Also, several desktop products are planning to add them in upcoming versions.

But what is collaboration in terms of mind mapping software? This is the subject I want to discuss and share my opinion with you.

Many people understand collaboration as ability of several people to edit a single document, a mind map in our case, at the same time. But what does it mean: work on the same map simultaneously? Ability to add, delete, move and decorate topics on the same map?

I don’t think that it will be useful since someone can just delete the topic you are currently working on. Or move as subtopic to another topic, or do something else that may harm your work. These are just few situations when simultaneous map editing results in conflicts.

This is the reason why I propose you to think what collaborative capabilities are really useful for mind mapping and what are just cool features that sound good but are useless. Here is my version of features set that will be enough for all real business, personal and educational tasks for typical mind mapping software.

  1. Ability to share the map with other people in read-only mode. They can access the document even if you are editing it at that time, and they can see changes as soon as you make them.

  2. Real time team brainstorming. The mechanism is simple: all brainstorming session participants can add new ideas which are immediately shown to all but the session holder is the only person who can edit the map.

  3. Ability to put your map into a blog, wiki or html page via interactive representation. The realization of this feature supposedly will be done by means of interactive export.

  4. And the hottest thing, simultaneous editing of a single multi page map. You can edit any map page but only if nobody is working on it at this moment. Of course, you see all changes made by other users on their pages in real time. So there are many people who work with the same document but not more than one user editing one page.

I know that some of these features are already implemented in different tools, so it will be easier to answer a question: what type of collaboration is really necessary for desktop mind mapping software?

Please share your mind and raise a discussion about this topic


Comments

5 Comments so far

  1. Malte Sussdorff on March 29, 2007 8:31 am

    The biggest collaboration feature is if people actually can work on the map, regardless of input device, therefore creating at least a minimal version e.g. for mobile devices, so you could capture ideas and structure them like in brainstorming mode. Not to mention that the software itself should work multi platform.

    This being said, lets take a look at the standard collection methods for ideas. What I would like to see is a 10 minute “brainstorming” session where each participant can input their ideas (short keyword with longer explanation if necessary). After the 10 minutes, the software aggregates the keywords and using a thesaurus or similar things, links them together and displays them as a single item with a cloud around it reflecting the size of ideas that streamed in there. The single keywords (from each users) should be displayed in a small print, with mouse over (for the extended explanation and looking who the original author was) allowing the originator to manually move the keyword out of the cloud, but still have it linked to the main keyword describing the cloud.

    Then the owner of the map could rearrange the items (with others being able to view this and give comments) into the mind map.

    Additionally allow users to create a new page from any leaf, locking that leaf up and allowing them to edit this page on their own. The logic here is that usually users come up with an idea for a certain leaf and then spur it from there. So now they have the ability to collaboratively work on that and spin it forward. This is in addition to your 4.) topic point.

    Though not directly related to collaboration, but still related to it => Action leafs and Task grabbing:

    Once you have the mindmap setup, depending on your working style, the leafs have actions on them ( I would call them action leafs). For each of the action leaf, a user can “grab” it and indicate therefore that he is going to work on this. This again, in combination with PM software, can result in automatic task creation and assignment right from the Mindmapping software. Obviously you could “grab” a whole branch, and have all tasks for the action leafs created in the PM with you as the assignee (and most likely the owner of the map (page) as an observer)

  2. Mind Mapping and Collaboration on March 30, 2007 11:55 pm

    […] Tyagulsky, marketing manager at CS Odessa, is looking for some input into the question, “what type of collaboration is really necessary for desktop mind mapping software?” CS […]

  3. Douglas Woods on April 2, 2007 10:33 am

    I work in the education field and, for me, it is option 4 that I seek. The ability for a team of people to edit a map simultaneously is a great breakthrough in education and it further enhances the use of technology to support project or group work (rather than individual work which has been its limitation up to now). So far I have only seen this facility on one mind-mapping program (2Concept by 2Simple), it appears to work well but is essentially limited as this software is aimed at primary age pupils.
    A further feature which is not mentioned would be the ability for a mind-mapping program to import a whole mind map which has already been produced. During the import, the new mind-map would check fro duplicate themes and add branches of that theme in the imported map onto the them in the original map. Themes and branches that are only in the new map would be added to the original map as new themes. Alternatively the whole new map could be imported as a completely new branch to the original map.

  4. ActivityOwner on April 10, 2007 5:20 am

    All four items have some value. There is a practical aspect in an intranet fileshare environment that make #4 a very desirable feature. It is not so much a need for moment-to-moment simultaneous editing, but the situation where one user opens a map to read it, or for a brief edit, and then forgets to close it, locking out other users until someone can track them down. An analogous situation often occurs with Microsoft Excel.

    Opening maps in read-only mode can help with the situation, but for some applications that will also put the file in a mode that locks out read/write users.

  5. Free Hard Drive Eraser Guy on April 13, 2007 12:11 am

    This is my first comment over here. I like this blog a lot.
    I liked this blog entry the most though, the way you said it was just amazing!
    See ya Later ;) P.S. - CSS update?

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