Mind Map of Collaboration

Wed, 06/25/2008 - 19:17 — Alan

I posted a long article broken into 4 parts providing 43 reasons for collaboration in musical activities. Perhaps more interesting is how I ended up with the finished article.

Background

I write my articles in Ecto. It's good for what I want to do with it, helping me write the words of the articles, but it's not much use as a tool for creating articles. What's missing is anything that helps organising thoughts. Fortunately, most new Macs come with a version of OmniOutliner which is a good tool for the job. You could also use the slide feature of MS Powerpoint or OpenOffice/NeoOffice.

This was at a point when I was quickly using up my ideas for articles and had to generate some new ideas before I ran out. I try to keep at least 5 articles ahead of what I'm posting, all in various stages of completion.

At times like these, I revert to mind-mapping and usually with a piece of paper, although a few software tools do come close. There's something better about pen and paper that works well for me.

Creativity

I didn't have my laptop with me, but I did have a small pad I carry most places. It's A5 spiral bound, so half the size of an A4. That made for a challenge for doing mindmaps. I started with what I wanted to focus on in the middle, so I wrote the word "Creativity" and drew a circle around it. Using that as a hub, I wrote out some other words on the spokes and then used them as hubs to generate more ideas or more detail. One of the words was collaboration. That became it's own mindmap. So I started again with Collaboration at the centre. The rest is what you see on the scanned image that's attached below.

Logical

I find mind-maps to be great tools. I like how concepts relate to other concepts. They suit my organised mind as I can see all the relationships at a quick glance. My mind-maps tend to have an inherent logical structure, possibly because I've got a good grounding in logical data model from database design. Mind-maps can have a similar inherent logical structure, but are often visually messier since they're a good way of capturing thoughts as they occur.

Workshops

I've found mindmaps to be highly effective in capturing what a group of people are thinking. Write the central concept down and ask for thoughts. You may need a parking area to capture non-related ideas. The trick is to understand whether the item is truly non-related, it may just need another hub to connect it properly. Take a hub and explore each of the spokes in turn, capture other ideas as they arise. Then make each of the spokes into a hub and explore them.

Further Reading

For a good introduction to mind maps, try the books by Tony Buzan.

Opensource Software

Unfortunately, I've never found a complete open source application for mind-maps. Some of them are useful, but my impression is always that it's better to use paper or flipchart first, then just a diagramming tool afterwards. Alternatively, look at commercial software.

FreeMind - best standard "free" software for mind-mapping, still a bit word- and phrase-based for me. Not quite visual enough

NeoOffice - was the port of OpenOffice to native OS X - has a presentation and diagramming tool

OpenOffice - several platforms, now native beta for OS X

Landscape or Portrait?

The general recommendation is to turn the pad so that the pad is in landscape as opposed to the traditional portrait. It's a good idea, but I've always had issues with writing across lines the wrong way. Just not neat enough! It's a case of blank paper would be better than lined paper.