Group Facilitation using Compendium™ Idea Mapping Software
Compendium provides a methodological framework, plus an evolving suite of tools, for collective sense-making and group memory. Validated in both small and large-scale business projects, it is the result of over a decade's research and development at the intersection of collaborative modeling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation.
Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling several of the key challenges in managing knowledge:
· Improving communication between disparate communities tackling ill-structured problems.
· Real time capture and integration of hybrid material (both predictable/ formal, and unexpected/informal) into a reusable group memory
· Transforming the resulting resource into the right representational formats for different stakeholders.
Compendium centers on face-to-face meetings, potentially the most pervasive knowledge-based activity in working life, but also one of the hardest to do well. I have been trained in this powerful tool for group idea tracking, consensus-development, and meeting documentation. I have used Compendium for focus group meetings, project workflow management and sharing ideas via PC-teleconference.
Compendium creates shared maps of meetings, with each person being able to see immediately that her idea has been captured, supported and/or challenged. References can be added to link ideas to supporting documents, audio and video clips, web resources, etc. Ideas can be hyper-linked across maps and tracked as they flow through a project’s history.