Mind Mapping at The Future of Web Apps

I spent last Thursday and Friday at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London. I thought it would be useful to not only share my experience of the conference but also how I was able to use Mind Maps and Memory Techniques to get the most out of it from the point of learning, engagement and fueling ideas for the future. Here is the mind map I created before I wrote this blog, took about 5 minutes.

The Setup

I’d like to start by saying that the guys that put this conference together really know their stuff – Carsonified. They had some great speakers and the sessions were just the right length making the whole 2 days feel pretty rapid.

It all began with the welcome pack, the good folks at Carsonified made the nice gesture of including an ECO friendly pad in the their welcome pack which was quite earthy and tactile with some inspiring images and quotes on the first few pages, “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere” and Einstein really knew what he was talking about with this little nugget. Now, you maybe thinking “It’s a pad, what’s the big deal!?”. Well, it may not sound like much, but it engages us by getting our senses, emotion and imagination involved.

Mind Map Essentials

Now, mind mapping at a conference or in a lecture is different from mind mapping a book or brainstorming in a meeting. The main factor is time, it’s all very rapid. So here are my tips on Mind Mapping style for a conference. Firstly stick as closely to the Mind Map Laws as possible:

In particular:

• You probably won’t have time to use Colour (which is a major element in any useful mind map), that’s not a problem here though as you are going for structure and key points, you can add in colour later to re-enforce the information
• Make sure you create 1 branch for your extra thoughts. It can also be used if you run out of room elsewhere on the map
• Aim to use 1 word per branch (not always possible in these situations but that should be the goal)
• If the speaker starts to lose you, you get bored or fade away, start doodling on your map – drawing a picture etc – this kicks in your imagination and brings your attention back to the information

Since the Mind Map is contained on a single page it makes a fantastic reference for each one of your talks.

The Sessions

I managed to pack in 13 in 2 days. So, here are the Mind Maps I created, with a short summary (if you were there then the maps may spark off some memories for you). Some of them are not as artful as the kind I would create when I have more time but nonetheless they do the job.

Kevin Rose – Digg
Great opening, talked about various social filters, users, recommendations and taxonomy

Edwin Aoki
Basically talked about the fact that customers just want to ‘do stuff’ and that apps should be open source and that developers should drive the community.

Suw Charman
Suw stood in at the last moment. I loved this talk, it was all about users behaviour around social sites/apps. Suw didn’t have any slides, for me it wasn’t a huge deal as the mind map kept me visually stimulated. Suw went into detail about compulsion, made comparisons between I can has cheezbuger and dilbert. She gave a great explanation of operant conditioning.

Matt Biddulph
I didn’t know a huge amount about messaging but this was a great insight into it’s usefulness and how the various parts fit together.

Alvin Woon
Got to admit at points Alvin’s presentation style was losing me a bit (it was also that ‘time of the day’). Mind Mapping through this helped me stay focused and on reflection there was some really good points made about the challenges you face localising a site, image replacement and relevant Geo-features.

Blaine Cook
More on messaging, XMPP (jabber), pubsub and their uses. This got me hooked into finding out more about XMPP.

David Recordon
David from Six Apart gives a really good insight into OpenID, Oauth and OpenSocial – seems like opensource is definitely the way to go

Tim Bray
Brilliant start to the second day. Tim started by saying that he had torn up the speech he was going to do and then preceded to say the there were ‘tough times’ ahead, then focused on work, opportunities and ‘you’. This was actually a pretty inspiring talk and got the day off to a great start. Oh and nice hat.

Adam Gross
Adam from Salesforce talked about Cloud computing and showed a demo of their app. This looks pretty interesting so I signed up for a dev account.

Simon Wardley
For me this was one of the highlights. It was about commoditisation, different methodologies (XP and Prince) and how to survive change by ultimately giving the time which is needed towards innovation. Simon’s presentation style was superb and the way he used the slides was spot on. This talk was fun to map!

Brett Taylor
I’d never seen FriendFeed before this, great talk about what it is and how it works. I signed up the next day and it’s making managing my ’social network’ a lot easier.

Andrew Turner
Wow, this man can talk – he’s a rocket scientist and his mouth moves like one. Mind Mapping this was a challenge but it did make me laugh. There was some great stuff here on Mapping from storage to resources to visualisation and the open source tools which are out there. This is definitely something I’ll be digging deeper in too.

Elaine and Paul
Loved this talk on scaling the synchronous web. Elaine and Paul basically told there story of how they dealt with massive success in a short period of time and their 4 point strategy to dealing with scaling. Very good.

Memory Techniques (File it all away)

To pull all of this together and consolidate it in my mind, the next step was to create a simple filing system (I just used 14 locations at the event itself) and to each location I associated the name of the talk and the speaker. For example my first location was the registration booth, so I imagined Kevin Rose Digging his way through it – you get the idea? This only takes about 5 minutes to file away the 14 talks.

By this point I’ve also coloured in the Mind Maps which engaged my imagination and makes the maps themselves more memorable. So when I think about the 10th talk I saw, in my mind I see Simon Wardley being very Innovative, therefore I know it’s the talk he did on innovation. I then remember the various parts of the mind map which sparks off memories of the event itself.

To sum up, I’ve been using Mind Maps for years and it’s at times like these you really get to experience their usefulness and application. As far as conferences go, this one was top and hopefully I’ll be heading along to the Future Of Mobile in November, Mind Maps in hand.

Tagged as: memory, mind maps