Continued Communication Project – Collaborate in creating a mind map for RM in a Web 2.0 world

Continued Communication is an international multidisciplinary group investigating communications in the 21st century, conceived and led by ELizabeth Lomas as part of her PhD research with Northumbria University. The group is critically evaluating how to maximise the business potential of communications created through computer mediated technologies, which incorporates any IT systems with the potential for dialogue.

In anticipation of the presentation by Katharine Stevenson and Jon Shepherd at the UK’s Records Management Society Conference next week (when Katharine and Jon will be demonstrating and discussing some of the implications for RM of new communication tools such as Google Wave, Ning, Moodle and MindMeister), the Continued Communication team would like to invite you to add your ideas and questions to a collaborative mindmap looking at the question:

“What are the challenges, solutions and questions for Records Managers in a Web 2.0 world?"

You can log in and add to the mindmap at: http://www.mindmeister.com/44873728/rm-web-2-0-challenges-and-solutions

If you are not already a user of MindMeister then you do need to register a username, an email and password to edit the map. MindMeister is then free for individuals to use and you can edit other maps and produce your own (although there are certain limits on the free service in terms of map numbers). Sign up at https://www.mindmeister.com/home/signup_editions

Editing the map is easy as the process of adding comments is fairly intuitive – click on the box you want to link to and then click on 'add', a new box will then pop up for you to type into. Boxes can be dragged, remapped and linked and you can edit existing comments. Like a wiki, all changes are tracked so feel free to edit text. MindMeister has its own help on the site but feel free to get back in touch with any queries.

The results of the mapping will be used to inform the Continued Communication Group's research and will be shown at the RMS Conference - the group hopes to continue the map throughout the Conference. The map will also be available online for a couple of months so that around the world we can reflect on the professional future (opportunities and risks for Records and Information Managers) around the globe as information creation, storage and management shifts.

Elizabeth can be contacted at elizabeth2.lomas@northumbria.ac.uk