Thursday, January 27, 2011

Mind Mapping and Larp Plot

Mind mapping is a relatively new phenomenon in the tech world. Basically it involves the collaborative creation of a webbing surrounding a particular event or idea. Generally 4 or 5 people work on a webbing and flesh out all of the details of a project before production work begins. I was messing around with the idea the other day and thought, "How great would this be for my NERO plot team". So I set up a mapping for the Lumberton plot season and started working on it.

The site that I am using is http://www.mindmeister.com , there are many sites that have mind mapping whiteboards but this one comes with a bunch of neat tools like pointers, highlighters and grids. Plus it is free to use, though each member can only have three webbings at a time. I started out by laying down the basic framework of a season, plot arcs, villains, recurring modules and concepts. Then I invited the rest of the team to make contributions. The concept works remarkably well.

In addition to allowing collaboration on the whiteboard, Mindmeister has an instant contact feature which can be linked to Skype. This allows for plot teams to have video conferences while working on the webbing for the events in question, it is really a great idea.

I am pretty impressed with this technology and think that it could have some very positive effects on event planning. Everyone should check it out and let me know what you think.

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