Nadat de proctiviteits software heel veel aandacht kreeg (procesautomatisering, kantoor automatisering, social software, etc) is het nu tijd voor “idea-processing software”. De outliner van Dave Winer (“text on rails”) is er een van, maar er is meer: mindmapping, electronic white boards e.d.

In deze categorie is er ook Tinderbox. Tinderbox is een combi van een aantal ideaprocessing gereedschappen.

Tinderbox is a fine tool for figuring out what needs doing — and what needs doing first.

Let’s take an example: suppose we’re at a planning meeting for next year’s Widget Conference. Everyone at the meeting is anxious, because attendance has been dropping for years. Everyone has ideas. Everyone has opinions. Obviously, you can’t try everything — but, just as important, you don’t want to overlook really important ideas.

One really good approach might begin with a big, empty Tinderbox map. Get lots of ideas — simple, general ideas you can describe in a word or two — and get them down on the map. (A laptop and a projector make a great combination for larger groups)

Soon, you’ll have lots of ideas on the wall. Now, try to organize a little by gathering related ideas into clumps. As you do this, you may find some new ideas — add them in. At the same time, you’ll probably find a few notes that aren’t ideas at all — information sources, statistics, and your competition’s plans may all provide useful input. Change the color of the notes that don’t represent ideas to light gray.

Now that you have clusters, start adding adornments to organize and label the clusters. Some ideas may fit in several places: you might use an alias to clone the idea, or you might arrange the map so one idea can straddle the gap between clusters.

Soon, you’ll have a lot of ideas — and the separate ideas will be nicely clustered and categorized. Your meeting will have a consensus map of the terrain; now, you’ll be in a fine position to pick out the top priorities and identify the best opportunities. Use a bright color to highlight the most urgent action items, and use a different color to highlight goals and initiatives.

Voor gebuikers van Tinderbox is er -zoals voor veel van dergelijke tools- een wiki, in dit geval TinderboxWiki:

TinderboxWiki helps people use Tinderbox – the tool for notes.

Heb je er ervaring mee? Laat het dan eens weten s.v.p.

» TinderboxWiki