Why Graphmind is a premier online collaborative tool

We do this because we believe problems and challenges are best addressed when the people affected by them have had a chance to weigh in on their resolution. Our challenge when designing e-Deliberation was to provide our participants with an effective user interface to support this collaboration. Web-based collaboration is not a new phenomenon, but it is easy to see why traditional web-based collaboration interfaces have traditionally been of limited value. Have you ever noticed how Internet-based discussion forums are a lot like a shouting match? Each person pushes out their idea, there is minimum exchange between posters, and when there is, it often degenerates into flaming and other non-productive actions. Posts are often very curt but sometimes they can be very long, containing multiple ideas, which makes them difficult to respond to. What is being said is often ambiguous, and so is how it connects to what someone else posted, if at all. There is no effort to achieve a meeting of the minds. The posts add up to a heap of contributions, but certainly not to an integrated usable whole. Obviously, in designing the e-Deliberation process and supporting website, we needed a method of thoughtful exchange that would avoid the “heap” syndrome and instead foster a meeting of the minds. We needed an environment where participants can follow formal argumentation protocols (such as Argumentation Maps) if they want, but not necessarily. We needed something that was interactive, so if you post an idea, a colleague should be able to see it immediately and be able to build on it. A solution where each idea stands on its own, but where how it links up to other ideas is also very clear. After rejecting list serves, discussion forums and instant messaging as UI corner stones, we settled on using the Pronovix Graphmind tool. Pronovix partnered with us to adapt Graphmind to our use case and did a commendable job of it. Graphmind, as an interactive mindmap, was an optimum solution to support team-based conversations because:

• Each mindmap node represents a single idea
• The context of any idea is clear based on the mindmap nodes (other ideas) it is connected to in parent-offspring relationships
• Any idea can be expanded upon so it is clear what the idea is all about.
• Any idea can be commented upon to improve its clarity
• How any given idea is linked to other ideas is clear through its parent-offspring relationships with other nodes
• Discussion (pros, cons, questions) about the idea is clearly visible in the form of distinct off-spring nodes instead of being buried in long comments;
• Ideas in offspring nodes can be moved to new parent nodes to help organize the discussion.

Not everyone is familiar or comfortable with using mindmap to express and structure their thoughts individually or in teams. We tell our participants to remember what they were taught in grammar school: each paragraph should contain a single idea. Think of the mindmap node title as the summary of that idea. That summary is what shows up in the mindmap itself. Think of the paragraph itself as the description of the node. You enter that in the Short Description field when you create a new Graphmind post. If you have a substantial thought and you were to write it out, your text would likely be composed of say, 3 or 4 paragraphs – 3-4 main ideas. In a mindmap, these would be 3 or 4 nodes connected together based on how these ideas are related. If an idea provides an example or expands on a basic idea, it would likely be an off-spring node. Anyone looking at a mindmap will quickly see what it is about and be able to contribute to it. That’s precisely the point. We consider Graphmind as an essential component of the e-Deliberation process for supporting both asynchronous and synchronous conversations.