Shared Mind Mapping with Mind Meister

While brain stoming with Julian about the implications of ‘always-on augmented reality’* on human communication, I decided I needed a way of collaboratively drawing mind maps so that we’d have some sort of concrete record of the ideas coming out of our conversation. Normally, I make notes of my own, but they’re hard to share meaningfully – what I really want is a shared whiteboard of some sort.

I’d not looked at networked collaboration tools in a while, and googling, I was pleased to find MindMeister, a collaborative mind-mapping that suited my needs well. It has the following nice features:

• Copes with multiple people editing a map simultaneously
• Supports really big maps fairly well
• Has lots of nice notification tools for maps that are likely to be tweaked and developed over time
• Is free, at least for the functionality I required.

Anyway, if you’re collaborating with people over distance and you’re doing creative work, this might be worth a look to you.

Got any other cool collaboration tools you’re using? Let me know!

* I’ll write more about this later – I’m trying to differentiate my thinking from the burgeoning mass of AR demos involving a webcam, ARToolkit, and a bunch of markers. AR has so much more potential than these suggest, and I find them constraining.