How to share BrainStormWFO outlines
Joseph Buchignani
BrainStormWFO has many export options. You can also easily convert to MS Word outlines or Freemind mindmaps. Both those programs offer even more export options.
Don't do any of this. People won't read the resulting files.
Unfortunately there's only one good way to share. And that requires you to rewrite your carefully sorted outline as a longform text document.
Sorry, that's how most human beings prefer to digest information. If you're communicating with any kind of decisionmaker, this is what you'll have to do. And it'd be a nice favor to your colleagues and subordinates as well. They don't want to wade through your geeky garbage.
Writing a human-readable outline
We don't have to completely scrap the outline format. Instead, we go back into Org-mode. We'll preserve the big elements of the outline structure, but convert the ticky detail stuff into readable paragraphs, lists, etc.
Paste your outline from BrainStormWFO into a new Org-mode file. Bite the bullet and start recreating the outline structure in Org-mode. There's no way to do this automatically. But you need to edit the whole thing anyway so it makes sense for other people.
When you're done, you'll have a much simpler outline structure that doesn't go as deep, and may have more than 6 entries per heading. That's fine - we only follow the rule of 7 when sorting in BrainStormWFO, not when writing longform documents.
Export automatically to html
Now here's the good part. Org-mode has an awesome export feature that creates an html document with internal navigation links. It's very friendly on the eyes, and easy to read and make sense of. You can hand it off directly to a decisionmaker.
(If you have the latest version of Org-mode, you can explore other export options like PDF and LibreOffice. My Emacs is semi-broken due to excessive tinkering, so I only have the html export working at the moment. I'm too lazy to fix it, and I don't need to anyway.)
Here are the steps to export from a scratch file to a finished html document:
1. First we need to create a new scratch file with a good file name, since the file name will also be the main headline of the html document. C-x f to create a new file, and name it whatever you want your headline to be. The file extension will be .org, not .html.
2. Paste your outline into the new scratch file.
3. Hit C-c C-e to open the export dialogue. Hit "b" to choose the "open exported html document in browser."
4. Inspect the resulting page in your browser. Make sure you're satisfied. Then save it to your hard drive and email it to your collaboraters.
This assumes you're the main editor
This is a method of sharing your highly detailed work with others. It assumes that you are the primary editor and maintainer of the document. If that is not the case, then you will probably want to use some sort of collaborative cloud editing app. In that situation, you will not need to directly share your BrainStormWFO model. Instead, just use it to organize your thoughts. Your final output will be changes to the shared document.
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