Publishing brainstorms

Brainstorms, either individual or group, usually produce a wealth of outcome, often much of which is not used and is filed in a drawer or thrown away. This presents two problems: a lack of historial record that could be of value in the future to people trying to understand decisions and thought processes; and it wastes creative output.

The barriers to publishing the output of brainstorms include: that the output is often written on paper, so effort is required in scanning (including OCR issues) or typing-up; the protection of intellectual property, where the output includes ideas you might use; and that the output often lacks sufficient flesh on ideas to make them valuable to others.

One possible use for output (where mind maps are used) would be to have a single online mind map in the public domain that takes keyword or keyphrase mind map inputs and uses these to strengthen and extent the map (a set input format would be needed, as would conventions on keywords and keyphrases). This resource could then be used by people - they enter a key word and can have a mind map displayed to them, varying the extent of the map (number of nodes away from the centre) and filtering on the strength on a connection (based on the number of uploads that reinforce that connection).