I've been looking into the idea of collaborative mind mapping. Think wiki, but in a mind map. The aim being to create a knowledge pool around some very specific areas, that multiple people could contribute into. Specially areas where there might be a lot of content overlap in different zones or a workflow thats easy to define.
Early examples ( and the ones I want to start working with ) could include :
- Post-compromise content and system audit
- System lockdown for various roles, like home-server or home-nas
- setting up a uPnP server, including storage and performance considerations
- Two node, heartbeat based failover cluster for mysql
I guess its easy to see the theme here, all the tasks are almost things that could be reduced to a howto. I keep thinking there must be better ways to handle this at a small to medium sized team level than using a wiki. Say 3 to 7 active contributors with a few dozen occasional drive-by's - and general knowledge levels of each contributor being drastically different from one another.
One thing that has worked really well in the past, for me personally, is doing these based on and around an issue tracker like TicGit. Before you dismiss that idea completely, think about it. However, that does not scale to > 1 person very well. And its a bit of a pain since the only way to organise those down is into a FAQ or a list-of-things kind of way. I hate both those approaches to organisation.
Mind maps are a logical next step after the step based issue trackers and wiki - however, finding one that works well in a browser, and can have nodes outside the immediate map isnt easy. In a nutshell : I've not found any software that lets me do that. I know xmind and Free Mind both have some ways to share the maps. But neither is optimal for mass public consumption. Pimki seems to have potential, but is too much single person centric. Wikka on the other hand, seems to set itself up as the perfect candidate - integrated wiki and mind mapping. But it needs a java plugin and the content it creates seems to not be openjdk friendly.
Are there any other options out there worth considering ?
- KB
I have been following the mind mapping arena for some time on my blog and would have to say that you should look at Comapping, MindMesiter, Webspiration or MindManager for the Web. All of the programs let you do collaboration and some will even let you embed files and attachments.
Brian,
mindmeister is simply and lets you get the job done with zero config so no shaving the yak so to speak 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software 
I've got no idea of it's collaborative features, but my dad swears by PersonalBrain for mindmapping, he's on Windows but I've noticed it's also available for Mac and Linux. 
try out HiveMind http://linuxlab.corp7.uniyar.ac.ru/projects/hivemind 
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