mindmaps on wagn

[Ethan McCutchen]

Hi Wagneers,

There has been a real uptick in requests for Wagn mindmapping lately -- I was asked about it twice last night and once this morning, none of them related. 

So I wanted to let you know about some cool work that's been happening on wagn card visualization.  A generous and talented coder named Vine has been helping the Group Pattern Language wagn do some mindmapping of their patterns.  I can't explain things any better or more thoroughly than he did in his awesome documentation, which includes some images if you click through:

http://sbcglobalpwp.att.net/v/i/vinebr/mindmap/overview.html

(Sorry for the re-post, developers)

Eventually this will be the kind of thing we'd like to have in modules, but for now we're going to try to find a workaround so we can get this code in Wagn 1.3, which we hope to have out next week.  (ish) 

Kevin Vaccarello and others have been pushing us to think even further ahead about how visualization might actually become an interface for building structures in Wagn.  What do you think?  I triple-dog dare you to create a mockup of how that might work!!

- ethan


--
Ethan McCutchen
One of the Wagneers, Wagn.org

Patterns.  They're not just for quilting anymore.

[jean russell]

This is super awesome and exciting. I hope the mindmapping can be a step into transcending hierarchies. Mindmaps don't allow us to close triangles - showing the interweaving of things together. And I think wagn does allow for this kind of relationship.

I dream of network maps and venn diagrams. And a huge bow to John Abbe for the venn diagram dream, which he planted the seed for.

Thanks,
Jean

--
Jean Russell
309.262.6629
nurture.biz


"Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference." -- Buddha

[Ethan McCutchen]

Jean, John, and Tree all make the "All-Viz" team.

:)

[Gerry Gleason]

Hey, I want to push you hard in these areas too. I think this will be a
key source of strategic use cases towards Wagn 2.0 and beyond.

Mock-ups are more work than this justifies. You should be able to
understand it with character graphics for examples and make the UI
pretty latter if you get the core design elements right.

How about a few use case proposals:
1. Use something like search/pointer cards to supply data elements to
simple graphs and pie charts.
2. Embed Wagn links and inclusions in SVG content. Clicking the
controls open/pops up a slot controller.
3. SVG cardtypes including SVG editor module that interfaces with card
slots in the browser.
4. Graphical view options to generalize what Vine has done and make it
more Wagn integral so you can edit items right from the Mindmap view.

Gerry

On 11/17/09 1:15 PM, Ethan McCutchen wrote:
> Jean, John, and Tree all make the "All-Viz" team.
>
> :)
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:49 AM, jean russell <jeanmr...@gmail.com
> <mailto:jeanmr...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> This is super awesome and exciting. I hope the mindmapping can be
> a step into transcending hierarchies. Mindmaps don't allow us to
> close triangles - showing the interweaving of things together. And
> I think wagn does allow for this kind of relationship.
>
> I dream of network maps and venn diagrams. And a huge bow to John
> Abbe for the venn diagram dream, which he planted the seed for.
>
> Thanks,
> Jean
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Ethan McCutchen
> <et...@grasscommons.org <mailto:et...@grasscommons.org>> wrote:
>
> Hi Wagneers,
>
> There has been a real uptick in requests for Wagn mindmapping
> lately -- I was asked about it twice last night and once this
> morning, none of them related.
>
> So I wanted to let you know about some cool work that's been
> happening on wagn card visualization. A generous and talented
> coder named Vine has been helping the Group Pattern Language

> wagn <http://grouppatternlanguage.org/> do some mindmapping of

> their patterns. I can't explain things any better or more
> thoroughly than he did in his awesome documentation, which
> includes some images if you click through:
>
> http://sbcglobalpwp.att.net/v/i/vinebr/mindmap/overview.html
>
> (Sorry for the re-post, developers)
>
> Eventually this will be the kind of thing we'd like to have in
> modules, but for now we're going to try to find a workaround
> so we can get this code in Wagn 1.3, which we hope to have out
> next week. (ish)
>
> Kevin Vaccarello and others have been pushing us to think even
> further ahead about how visualization might actually become an
> interface for building structures in Wagn. What do you think?

> * I triple-dog dare you to create a mockup* of how that might

> work!!
>
> - ethan
>
>
> --
> Ethan McCutchen
> One of the Wagneers, Wagn.org
>
> Patterns. They're not just for quilting anymore.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Jean Russell
> 309.262.6629

> nurture.biz <http://nurture.biz>

>
>
> "Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you
> did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do
> makes any difference." -- Buddha
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ethan McCutchen
> One of the Wagneers, Wagn.org
>
> Patterns. They're not just for quilting anymore.
>
> >

____________________________________________________________
FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks & orcas on your desktop!
Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium

[Ethan McCutchen]

Nice use cases!  It would be cool to have more grounded user stories to go with them, if any of you have them.  Meaning a narrative that connects to a real-world usage.

Additionally, I think what Kevin was getting at (and what I can't fully visualize yet) is a way to build structure via the interface.  What might it look like to use visual interface to, say, create a Company card type or a database about Plants?

fwiw, napkin proposals, stick in sand, character graphics, facepaint ... it's all mockup to me.  Not asking for fancy pants.  When have I ever asked for fancy pants?

-e

ps.  I'll see what I can do about getting you on the All-Viz team, Gerry.  Sometimes these things get held up in deliberation.  You're already on the All-Multilingual, the All-Extensionlessness, and All-Module teams, so the Grand Council may decide to distribute the love.

:)

[Gerry Gleason]

Good point on mock-ups. Is what Kevin proposes anywhere we can take a look?

I need to know better what "building structure" means. Forms and stuff
like that? In other words better interfaces for templates and
eventually patterns? Or editing graphical objects on a canvas? I was
trying to get at that in one form with the SVG items, imagining a tool
that could create flow-charts or mind-maps object by object on a canvas
and creating Wagn content and links along the way.

Gerry


On 11/17/09 2:11 PM, Ethan McCutchen wrote:
> Nice use cases! It would be cool to have more grounded user /stories/

> > <mailto:jeanmr...@gmail.com <mailto:jeanmr...@gmail.com>>>

> wrote:
> >
> > This is super awesome and exciting. I hope the mindmapping
> can be
> > a step into transcending hierarchies. Mindmaps don't allow us to
> > close triangles - showing the interweaving of things
> together. And
> > I think wagn does allow for this kind of relationship.
> >
> > I dream of network maps and venn diagrams. And a huge bow to
> John
> > Abbe for the venn diagram dream, which he planted the seed for.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jean
> >
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:43 PM, Ethan McCutchen
> > <et...@grasscommons.org <mailto:et...@grasscommons.org>

> <mailto:et...@grasscommons.org <mailto:et...@grasscommons.org>>>

> > nurture.biz <http://nurture.biz> <http://nurture.biz>

> >
> >
> > "Act always as if the future of the universe depended on
> what you
> > did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever
> you do
> > makes any difference." -- Buddha
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Ethan McCutchen
> > One of the Wagneers, Wagn.org
> >
> > Patterns. They're not just for quilting anymore.
> >
> > >
>
> ____________________________________________________________
> FREE 3D MARINE AQUARIUM SCREENSAVER - Watch dolphins, sharks &
> orcas on your desktop!
> Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/marineaquarium
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Ethan McCutchen
> One of the Wagneers, Wagn.org
>
> Patterns. They're not just for quilting anymore.
>
> >

____________________________________________________________
FREE 3D EARTH SCREENSAVER - Watch the Earth right on your desktop!
Check it out at http://www.inbox.com/earth

[jean russell]

Looked through the link overview - and I was really pleased with the functionality here. Fantastic work Vine!

I would like a zooming in and out feature to simplify the rats nest of connections...the closer you get the more detail you get about the intricate connections.

I show a map of this way of seeing attached. This may be significantly down the road from where we are now. I don't know. But I am eager to learn.

Thank you,
Jean

--
Jean Russell
309.262.6629
nurture.biz

[John Sechrest]

One of the folks on the Yak List did a version of a wiki long long ago
that had a panel that showed the relationship
of the node to other nodes. It was very interesting and very useful.
I have pined for it some in other contexts.

What WAGN brings to the party is different "types" of relationships
that might be displayed.
So we might want to look at the relationship between nodes with
different "filters"
And you would like to have some knobs that determin how deep in the
nesting to go (or not)

Unfortunately Mind maps are a bit too simplistic for what I look for.
They are often untyped links and they are often not directional.
And so you can't represent all of the things you want to represent.


Instead of NODE1 -------- NODE 2 , I find that I need to have NODE 1
-----(type)------> NODE 2

At lease for some of the things I want to represent.

So I can see several different graphical views of a WAGN site that
each would have value.

I think there is a real significant opportunity here.

are you thinking of this as a dynamic Panel associated with a view of a node?

Or are you thinking of this as a view of its own of the whole site?

I think you will end up needing both.

Can we make the nodes and types hot, so when you click on them, you
get to a new view?

I have oodles of thoughts about this.

What is a simple way to take one giant step forward with this?

--
John Sechrest .
Corvallis Benton .
Chamber Coalition .
420 NW 2nd .
(541) 757-1507 . sech...@corvallisedp.com
.

.

[jean russell]

Thank you John.

What I wrote to Ethan this morning is that I am collaborating with Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com. He has software that does the graphing of nodes and networks. Also, the newest version, done in Java, allows the nodes to have links (so clicking on them would feed back into the site or other url).

We are thinking of nodes as the name and the pluses as the connection.

I see this as plugging the two pieces of software together, but I am so blind to what happens on the back-end of the process to know how hard or easy that would be.

I am also in conversation with Valdis about adding the venn diagram element.

Maybe Gerry or another coder can say how hard that might be.

Warmly,
Jean

[Gerry Gleason]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't appear to have anything that is
open source. While it may be very interesting, unless you can get
Valdis to make an open version for us, it isn't of much use.

There are probably at least three pieces here: 1) Wagn features to
generate node sets from searches and other standard card fare. 2)
Network graphing software. and 3) Glue to connect it together. That is
to convert the output from 1) into input for 2), and then put the
resulting output into the Wagn rendering framework.

Vine created a simple 2) to visualize networks of nodes from card
contents, but really 2) could be a number of distinct visualization
tools including the sorts of network topology analysis the Valdis is
well known for.

A lot of the most creative parts will be about 3), rendering the data in
interesting ways, and Jean's image gives just a tip of the variety you
might want in terms of visualizations. The nice part about this part is
that it is more on the edge, so people can innovate a lot here without
breaking anything critical.

Gerry

On 11/17/09 3:59 PM, jean russell wrote:
> Thank you John.
>
> What I wrote to Ethan this morning is that I am collaborating with

> Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com <http://orgnet.com>. He has software that

> sech...@corvallisedp.com <mailto:sech...@corvallisedp.com>

> .
>
> .
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Jean Russell
> 309.262.6629

> nurture.biz <http://nurture.biz>