I have a free license for Buzan’s iMindmap* to give away for the best answer to a competition. This is it:
Many, many people have never heard of mind mapping. Others have heard of it but have no idea what it is or how it might help them.
Write a comment to this post (and/or send a mind map!) suggesting how to achieve exponential growth in the numbers of people doing mind mapping. This needs an idea that will motivate committed visual information mappers and at the same time can leverage the whole mind mapping community to get the word out, explain, demonstrate, tell stories, show all different styles of maps, all uses.
I shall judge the winning suggestion (my decision will be final!) and pass (only) the winner’s name and email address to Buzan Online so that they can deliver the license. Judgement will be based on originality, practicality and opportunities to obtain best leverage of existing mappers’ contacts. If you decide to send a mind map to illustrate your ideas or thinking, please send a png or jpg image to vic [at] mind-mapping [dot] org. I will arrange for it to be embedded in comments (max width 540 pixels).
This competition will run from 4th October to 3rd [updated] November December inclusive.
Regards
Vic Gee
http://www.informationtamers.com/mind-mapping/
The master list of mind mapping &
information management software
PS You probably know that some people know about mind mapping or other visual information mapping techniques and do not like them, and will not use them because they have their own thinking style. They find that visual representation gets in the way and they don’t need introducing to it. I’m sure we all respect that and got over it long ago.
These are not the people this competition aims to find ways to reach out to. VG
* iMindMap Ultimate (£149 ‘recommended retail price’)
John Taylor emailed this mind map with the comment “My small attempt.”
(click for full-size image)
You asked about how to “achieve exponential growth” in the number of people doing mind mapping.
Almost everybody still use linear note-taking even when brainstorming and when I saw a famous TV character writing linear notes on a flip-chart I thought “this is the answer to Vic’s question !” – just see this picture http://www.imdb.com/media/rm469670144/tt0412142
So, the only way to achieve this exponential growth you want is to send a direct message to the general public. What about Dr. Gregory House mind-mapping their brainstorms instead of writing boring lines of text ? People would talk, ask about it, discuss in the forum, imitate him and start mind mapping on their own.
My idea is this:
As a group, us mind mappers all have our own sites and blogs that put out the word to the masses. Why don’t we all work together to get the word out there?
I suggest that each prolific member of the mind mapping community contribute their favourite mind map to an e-book, along with a description about the mind map and what benefits people can get from mind mapping.
This e-book will be highlighted on each contributers web site and will also be promoted in all our emails and other forms of communication like Twitter, Pownce and other social networking sites.
A very simple website should be setup where people can read about mind mapping and download the e-book.
This idea obviously has a few rough edges and may need to be tweaked in certain areas. This might sound like a big thing to organise, but if everyone contributed then I don’t see why it can’t be done.
That sounds like a good start, thanks Matthew. I would be happy to co-ordinate that and host it at mind-mapping.org as ‘neutral ground’. Each map could show links to the originator’s site.
Vic
Hello Vic:
I’ve created at mindmap on my blog for your competition: My Entry I also sent it to you via e-mail.
Thanks for your consideration. And thanks for expanding the mindmapping/visual mapping industry.
Chance Brown
Author of The Mindmap Blog
I think this requires a BIG idea, rather than glossing around the edges of the GUI or coming up with some modest ‘application’. I think Tim Berners Lee, with the Semantic Web (SW) is/has such a big idea. I have been using Mind Manager for many years now on an everyday basis, but other than embedding emails/files in complex maps, the whole experience is frustratingly static. The ideal would be to have each/all of the Mind Manager ‘Topics’ (which are very analogous to SW Concepts) dynamically linked to Semantic Data so the user could ask sophisticated live questions of actual data. I have been thinking of integrating the SW as a ‘back end data source’ to Mind Manager for some time but have little idea of whether people would find this to be of utility. An example (for a quick idea of what SW does and how similar it seems from a GUI perspective to MMAPS) see here http://www.insilicodiscovery.com/v2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=97&Itemid=180 .. And example of a dynamically linked to SW Mind Map might show only these 3 (Semantic) Topics {Books, Authors, Characters} – this would allow you to phrase a question aimed at the Amazon Web Service of the form “Find all Books containing the character Harry Potter that were NOT written by J.K. Rowling” – something that returns half a dozen titles and is not too easy to perform any other way. So in essence my idea is making MMAPS dynamically connected to data – especially the web – but semantically mapping ONE Topic to ONE Semantic Concept in OWL so folks could ask very powerful questions. I am happy to direct my company towards doing something like this, just keent o see if it is an idea of value. Cheers, Brian Donnelly.
Thank you Brian for that response. And I apologise for the delay in moderating the comment. For some reason the usual email notification didn’t get through.
I agree it needs a big idea, though the big idea I was hoping for was more related to how we get the greatest number of people to know about and start using mind mapping, rather than questions of improving a GUI, or any specific software.
Your approach takes a completely different direction from that taken by others who have responded. But it’s valid to say “if we do certain enquiry tasks much better, and present them graphically, this will spread the knowledge and use of mind maps”. Looking at your video, I should probably say concept maps, which are closer to the nets shown there. They look something like a merger of a data model, a concept map and an MS Access-style visual query.
I can see that the visual part is a small portion of the engine behind SDS.
The semantic web would be great, but I’ve begun to wonder if we have any chance of getting all those who build web pages to comply with the requirements of making a page comprehensible to semantic discovery software. I’m not really clear how the semantic web that you describe relates to Berners-Lee’s vision. Maybe you could fill us in on that.
I wonder what your thoughts are on MindManager 8, now that it can link to databases? I haven’t had a chance to play with that yet. Presumably it could also link to Excel, whether directly or through ODBC.
Thanks for adding to our discussion.
Vic
I have a multitude of ideas that I wanted to share, but I am having technical difficulties sending and posting the mindmap file for this purpose. I shall try again in few hours. Thank you for giving us opportunity to do so and it is also with wonderful initiatives and sites such as this one that we will be able to exponentially grow the interest in mind mapping s/w and applications and bring them from a niche to a mainstream status.
With gratitude,
Darina S
Thanks for emailing me the map Darina.
Vic
Mind maps should come with better organization, they should have an app just to manage them and sort by priority, subject, tags, date. It should be viewable by HTML and interactive if you want to let others add comments near your bubbles.
Would also be very useful if you could work on a time-line! So you could say this is what we are working on NOW, and then there would be blank room until you have an expected completion date for certain tasks and ultimately the whole target. You could move up and down the time-line viewing ideas you tag as important, and tagged by others as important. You could expand as you zoom in on a certain time frame and focus on what is important during this time.