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Last night’s Can­berra Linux User Group meeting marked a nice return to meeting up with like-​minded people since LCA. Dad actu­ally pre­sented for the first time yes­ter­day eve. The topic. Mind mapping. I brought a new friend along to it who I met via college. I think the pre­sen­ta­tion topic was an excel­lent one to begin the year with, espe­cially for the couple of new­com­ers that showed up to the meeting, most of which seemed rather intrigued by the topic.

So, what is a mind map? Simply, ‘a mind map (or mind-​map) is a diagram used for linking words and ideas to a central key word or idea. It is used to visu­al­ize, clas­sify, struc­ture, and gen­er­ate ideas, as well as an aid in study, problem solving, and deci­sion making. It is similar to a seman­tic network or cog­ni­tive map but there are no formal restric­tions on the kinds of links used. Most often the map involves images, words, and lines. The ele­ments are arranged intu­itively accord­ing to the impor­tance of the con­cepts and they are orga­nized into group­ings, branches, or areas.’ [wikipedia]

I rec­om­mend that if you take notes, engage in lec­tures, lessons, plan any­thing at all, you take a look at mind mapping. The wikipedia article linked to above excel­lently defines and covers the topic. I’ve started using it and I find it an awesome way to make and keep notes, plan assign­ments and given work as well as even revise for tests. There has been some research done on the topic and the results indi­cate that given the non-​linear work­ings of the mind using mind mapping is a more effec­tive way to revise, take notes and remem­ber infor­ma­tion than more tra­di­tional ways most people are used to. Mind mapping is easy to do, with or without a com­puter and requires no more than what one would nor­mally need to take notes during say a lecture. As for com­put­ing tools, things get more complex, as usual.

Nat­u­rally, given our love of free soft­ware I’m going to stick pre­dom­i­nately with the open source apps out there. While actu­ally looking at the list, the number of apps in the field of mind mapping is exten­sive. I count 12 pro­pri­etary tools and 5 free/libre open source tools, two of which are Qt based, one comes on a livecd desktop, and two are rather web based. Dad pre­sented to the group yes­ter­day both kdis­sert, which is a KDE app whose name is derived from the word ‘dis­ser­ta­tion’ and vym, just Qt based whose name comes from ‘view your mind’. Both apps func­tion quite well, kdis­sert coming with better work­flow func­tion­al­ity (gen­er­ate OpenOf​fice.org, LaTeX and HTML doc­u­ments from the mind map, of even a Java applet), while vym could export into XML and had a pret­tier linkage system and seemed to allow cross linking/multiple linking to items.

Now since I’m a happy GNOME user, I noted a com­plete lack of a GTK or GNOME mind mapping appli­ca­tion. Con­sid­er­ing what a won­der­ful tool mind mapping is, it’s appli­ca­tions as not only student and teacher lec­tur­ing, plan­ning or note-​taking methods but also how easily mind mapping could be used for devel­op­ment of any­thing really, includ­ing open source appli­ca­tions, pre­sen­ta­tions and so forth, I think a GTK/GNOME mind mapping appli­ca­tion would be just awesome. Given the nature of the app, even a lot of non-​technical people from clug started asking ques­tions which to me in the end sounded a lot like feature requests. I’ll mention some of the ideas or pos­si­ble great fea­tures that were men­tioned:

• Col­lab­o­ra­tive sharing/working of/on the mind map such as Inkscape’s similar feature in this regard
• Mul­ti­ple object/item linking
• Export into a large variety of formats such as XML, PDF, raster image, SVG, Java applet, ODT and OpenOf​fice.org files, HTML and so forth…
• Use of stan­dard action buttons asso­ci­ated with objects/items (such as a “this step is impor­tant icon”, or “this idea/concept/step/item/… is good or bad icon”…
• Perhaps a stan­dard­ised open source mind mapping file format spec­i­fi­ca­tion
• Attach­ments for items/objects
• Linking to other exisit­ing mind map files, as to ref­er­ence or inte­grate them

As you can see there are quite a few ideas that were raised, whether as ques­tions, sug­ges­tions or as a demon­stra­tion of dad’s talk. I think that an exten­sive free open source mind mapping appli­ca­tion would be one of the most useful, commonly-​used and pow­er­ful apps in the area of pro­duc­tiv­ity. Having such an appli­ca­tion would be an awesome addi­tion to the work­flow process for pro­duc­tiv­ity apps, espe­cially through such fea­tures as the ‘Gen­er­ate doc­u­ments…’ one in kdis­sert.

So I guess this is a call for anyone else out there who’d be inter­ested in perhaps working on open source mind mapping tools. A lot of work has already been done, though it is heavily scat­tered over several apps, some of which are more com­plete than others, but gen­er­ally all have some put forth some great ideas. Maybe it ism pos­si­ble to merge projects, start a new stan­dard one with some of current devel­op­ers in the field. As for such things as artwork, the Tango Project have recently now begun working on a stan­dard Art Libre Set, start­ing with icons ‘to fulfill the need of a typical graphic appli­ca­tion.’ I could def­i­nitely see this extended to include all text editors, and even­tu­ally pro­duc­tiv­ity apps. There is no use using app A to begin your process to your final work while you need to use app B, C, D and E which all feature dif­fer­ent icons for such things as save, cut and so forth.

I would really like to see a func­tional, exten­sive mind mapping tool for the Linux desktop in the future, and I guess through this I am happy to be involved, help with such things as UI work, stan­dard icons (Tango Project) and so forth. I’ll look into getting in contact with various people involved within this area and seeing what their opin­ions are, how far their respec­tive projects have come to and pos­si­bly see about working together on this. If you’re reading this and inter­ested, please do leave com­ments!

Cheers and kind regards,
Pascal Klein