Transitioning the world through collective intelligence

Collective mind mapping

I woke up few days ago thinking of a way to contribute to The Transitioner.org. I felt hugely inspired and terribly limited at once. The inspiration came from the fact that I had a deep feeling of being surrounded by brilliant people dedicated to help the community grow to its highest potential. I felt thrilled and up-lifted by the entire paradigm shift happening in our way of thinking, without even mentioning the love and wisdom that follow. My limitation came from the fact that I did not know how to help. Which form? What is already there and what is not? How could I know? How could I contribute without overloading others with information they already know? I breathed and thought about mind mapping, a simple yet powerful tool I have been using for several years to dig into creative resources. I asked myself how we could use it within The Transitioner. Many of you might already know, others might not, and for those who do not, I decided to move ahead and write this paper.

Basics of Mind mapping

Rather than writing my own description of mind mapping, below is the collective and more accurate description straight from Wikipedia: “A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
The elements of a given mind map are arranged intuitively according to the importance of the concepts, and are classified into groupings, branches, or areas, with the goal of representing semantic or other connections between portions of information. Mind maps may also aid recall of existing memories.
By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework.”

The figure below illustrates one example of handwritten mind map:

My personal experience with mind mapping is that it allows to put us is a mode of idea generation rather than debate and argument. The non linear structure of the diagram and the use of several colors trigger different parts of our brain and therefore offer a powerful mechanism for ideas to flow through the paths of least resistance. The heuristic map is a natural projection of radiant ideas. It offers a universal way to liberate the brain potential. During a mind mapping exercise, all ideas are welcomed. It is always so amazing how quickly each time we end up with a colorful tree full of diverse ideas and concepts. Everyone contribute to the best of his or her own capabilities at that moment while being inspired by the collective set of others ideas. It is only when the idea generation phase is finished that we start debating, rearranging or pruning the tree. For those who haven’t been using this before, I strongly recommend it. It is a powerful tool that encourages collaboration and helps tapping into our collective intelligence. Its major limitation, however, is that it helps collective intelligence in a collocated space. All contributors are within the same room around the same board.

So, what about tapping into our collective brains at a larger scope where the contributors are not physically collocated? Can we have access an open source tool that will allow us to experiment the power of mind mapping at a global scale. Can we imagine each person having the possibility to add or delete branches at its own discretion? A kind of wikimindmap. Of course, it is technically feasible. I went ahead, and did a quick, but non exhaustive, research to figure out what software tools are available out there:

www.bubbl.us
Bubbl.us is a simple and free web application that allows online brainstorming. It offers creating colorful mind maps online, sharing and working with friends, embedding mind maps in blogs or website.

http://www.mindmeister.com
MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online. Several package offerings, at a cost.

Let's use mind mapping to support CWIC!

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Comment by Julien Fortin on July 30, 2009 at 10:20am: Hi, you can also try mind4u.com which is a nice collaborative mindmap.

Comment by Vincent on July 14, 2009 at 5:49pm: I am still on this topic of mind mapping as it strikes me as extremely important. In particular, I feel that an actual limitation for my self and this community is the deployment of holoptism. There must be something, a sort of an hybrid between mind mapping and blogging, to help us.

I continue exploring. Here is an interesting link 11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services.

Comment by Edouard NAU on July 7, 2009 at 6:31pm: @Amine Kabbaj I am competly agree with you regarding google wave, that will probably became the most popular tool for CI ( And I think most people won't realize they are acting in a CI way.. )

Comment by Edouard NAU on July 7, 2009 at 6:28pm: I guess we all heard about TED here , but I would like to point out 2 new short video that might bring some more fuel to the fire of mindmapping...

This one about " how brain creat meaning " the end of the video is the most related to the topic..;

And we also mentioned earlier about what is the best way to teach to children, I think this video is also a perfect exemple of learning by Action

Comment by Eduardo Streeter Silva on June 24, 2009 at 10:00pm: Have used mindmeinster and is not bad... many of the ideas and basic concepts of the stuff we have done, have been projected on a mind map. It is a very good tool.

Cheers!

P.S. I´m very interested on the Flowplace thing... anyone has more news about it?

Comment by Vincent on June 16, 2009 at 11:15am: Google wave looks promising. I still feel a rigidity and dream of being able to freely move objects around while keeping links as to create and share my own map (see more here).

What parallels could be drawn between mind-mapping and the concept of Namespaces (see Michael Linton's presentation)?
How could the work about open money and the flow place be used for mind-mapping if we view currencies, Namespaces under a different angle? How does currency relate to idea, community of practice to knowledge field?

There is something tickling me about all this, a sense of communality.

Comment by Amine Kabbaj on June 9, 2009 at 11:36pm: How come I didn't read this post before ;-)...
thank you Mohsine for what you had triggered !
the example of GOOGLE WAVE is quite impressive and seems to answer (in a short future) a lot of these questions ?
what do you think ?

Comment by Duncan Work on June 5, 2009 at 5:23pm: BTW, Bubbl.us looks interesting, as do some of the other collaborative mind-mapping tools, and it would be fun to play with one of them together to answer a particular question.

Comment by Duncan Work on June 5, 2009 at 5:20pm: I don't know of a tool that does realtime social network mapping, but that sounds like an interesting list of capabilities. I'd like to know more about how you would want it to work.

There may not be a tool that already exists (or that could be quickly cobbled together) to do all that you want. But there are some tools available that could do *some* of what you want; though someone may have to be manually fiddling with it and inputting data, etc., behind the scenes. Have you asked Valdis Krebs if he has any ideas?

I like the idea of engaging in a collaboration here that involves some interesting tools and methods. My preference would be to first choose the purpose of the collaboration; and that the purpose be something that not only demonstrates a particular tool, but that helps us collectively begin to understand more completely how to amplify collective intelligence to solve a particular problem. Once we have identified the purpose of the collaboration, then choosing the right tools and methods will be easier. A collaboration around use of currencies would be great. I don't know enough about them, but I'm interested in various ways to make global and local economies more sane, and currencies are one tool among several for doing that.

So what is a burning question that we're likely to make some headway on, by collecting our intelligence?