Outlining meetings in realtime
I love reading about the history of outlining.
The use of outliners back in the day are completely analogous to how we see people using ThinkFold. There's a lot of useful experiences and lessons that I'm trying to understand and learn from.
One of the key uses for ThinkFold is to allow groups to outline the flow and output of conversations and meetings, in realtime.
As ThinkFold has been in development, I've been using it to make notes during phone calls, so the other callers see my notes develop, and of course, they add, edit and re-arrange the outline with me, using their own realtime view of the outline.
I also recently started to use ThinkFold in physical meetings - I'll project a ThinkFold outline on the meeting room wall, making notes as we go. People interact with the outline by suggesting edits, or taking my keyboard, and we progressively build the outline; allocating actions to people, breaking down a note into further steps and rearranging connections and notes as we talk.
As the meeting ends, I use ThinkFold's sharing function to invite everyone to the outline, so everyone can see, in a single shared space, what was said, noted and importantly, agreed to. It's an incredibly powerful way to work and make meetings more productive.
These are all uses well understood by experienced outliners - this 'live meeting outline' was a key use in the early 90's - in fact there was even a term developed to describe it - technography (which was eventually trademarked!). I came across this interesting message, from 1999, on dynamic outlining:
"It's this image, of the dynamic outline that is key to understanding the power of technography and the value of the outliner as a tool for facilitating collaboration"
Live, shared outlines are definitely one of the key ways that people 'get outlining' - I see smart people go through an epiphany moment when they see an outliner used in this way.
Here's a brilliant write up of experiencing Dave Winer's outliner, More, for the first time in the early(?) 90's:
"During the meeting, a record of our discussions was added to the outline. The attendees caught on, quickly, to the usefulness of this tool. Suggestions were repeatedly made for adjustments or corrections to the outline. We moved sections of the outline around to optimize the categorization of topics, etc. The outline was kept mostly collapsed, except for the part to which we were adding at the time. We could always see the details in the context of the structure of higher levels of our outline."
Reading these stories is really gratifying - I think that we'll enable people to get the same benefits, brought bang up to date with realtime interaction through a web page.