Concept Maps…wtf

Warning: boring content ahead, again for you illiterate users just watch the video and look at the pretty pictures.

I have always found it hard to tell someone in detail, technical or not, to do a knowledge transfer. It usually consists of sitting down with someone for a long time while they take notes and look very confused. After hair pulling questions a general concept can be understood, but the details are almost never transferred. Every time I do a coop or short job term it is always the same thing, how do we get what’s in my head out into someone else’s? Well, starting about 12 years ago the solution for this problem was coined with the buzz word Knowledge Management. There have been a bunch of tools that are used, the main stream ones are obviously wiki, blogs, forums, comments etc. One other tool that is not commonly used struck me at a previous job to be quite ingenious.

When I worked a while ago and I did some interesting work with a free tool called CMapsTools (there are a bunch of others out there). The software used to be free, but now it has been aquired and costs and arm and a leg to used. But anyway-the purpose was to easily place out what you know into organized maps or concept maps and link to other detail content. The concept map is just a tree with linking phrases that explain the relationships between nodes, as you can see from their webpage. I, personally, think that a tree structure is one of the easiest and fastest things to understand. Now-it is not the end all be all of knowledge management tools, but it makes the high level overview extremely simple to understand. A wiki backend to link to more detailed descriptions of the major topics can be a very complementary pair. Yeah all very boring but….

…what do you get when you add technology with concept maps? Just watch this :

Yeah, pretty freaking awesome, huh?

Shameless plug: Still think trees are boring and worthless, take a look at the one we developed for eBay categories on getitnext. Aside from some ui improvements I couldn’t have been happier about the way it came out. I would love to hear comments about how awesome it is, otherwise, cram it with walnuts . Just compare it against eBay, which would you really find more useful:

VS.

No contest.

Benjamin Willis – out.