As I mentioned last week, I attended the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo 2009.

On my return to work, I was asked to present my views of the Symposium to the rest of the management team.

Luckily, I had my hand drawn Mind Maps to help me summarise three days of presentations into a one page Mind Map that I could present in about half an hour.

We use Mind Map Software at work, which allowed me to project my Mind Map onto a big screeen and work through it interactively during my presentation.

Collaboration is the key to the future

The main theme of Gartner was ‘Planning in uncertain times’. My summary of the solution to this problem was ‘Collaboration’.

This does not only apply to software development, but any sizeable project.

Strangely enough, there wasn’t a single Mind Map in any presentation given during the three days. It just goes to show that there is still a lot of work to be done by us ‘Mind Mappers’.

Collaboration in Mind Map Software

Interestingly, one of the biggest changes to Mind Map software in recent months, is their ability to share Mind Maps. Most of them have a web publishing facility today. Some even have online collaboration features.

I think this is going to be big in the future of Mind Mapping.

Social Software leads the way

The biggest contribution to collaboration today is the Social Software that most Web users use on a daily basis. In case you don’t know what Social Software is, Facebook, Twitter, Wikis and Blogs are all examples of Social Software.

This is part of what is known as Web 2.0 technology. With Web 2.0 technologies, content becomes dynamic. People can comment on, and sometimes even edit, content written by others.

In this way, we are able to share our collective knowledge to create solutions better than we could have produced as individuals.

Let’s hope that Mind Map Software goes in the same direction as the ‘Facebooks’ of this world, giving us good collaborative software that is easy to use and does not cost us an arm and a leg.