FreeMind is a very nice application for creating mind maps. It is written in Java (so it will run on many operating systems) and is open source, so there is no cost to use the software. I highly recommend it if you find mind mapping a useful exercise.
I learned about this software in the book Coder to Developer (which I also recommend!).
The anonymous association CEO who writes View from a Corner Office has posted a brain dump from their annual meeting.
I think the post shows very well how association execs are expected to lead/facilitate the big picture strategy thing for the organization while also making sure there are enough chairs in the proper configuration in the meeting room. To me, that descirbes the art of association management in a nutshell.
Spotted this via Seb’s site a while back:
“Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations.”
I think I’ll use that in a presenation soon. I also like the paragraph that immediately follows:
Then again, there are the innovators who will always drive the rest of us nuts because they want to break stuff all the time, and we need them as well, and there are the leaders, people who, dammit, break all the rules, do nothing that Drucker thinks they should, and succeed anyway. And any business that knows how to tap the last two will be out of sight before the starting pistol’s echo has died.
My recent posting activity is from going through all the clippings I have stored up in Bloglines over the past couple of months and porting choice bits here. Installing WordPress seems to have gotten me back in the mood to post.
Last month Simon Willison wrote a post about how web developers need to move beyond advocating web standards for the sake of being compliant to advocating for best practices in general (which leads to standards adoption anyway).
There are plenty of benefits of re-framing web standards in the larger context of best practice. Firstly, discussions get a lot more interesting – as I’ve just demonstrated, there are enough facets to creating effective sites to keep us talking for years to come. Secondly, wrapping web standards in the larger context of industry best practices makes them a much easier pill to swallow. “Our site doesn’t validate” is a turn-off. “Let’s follow industry best practice” is far more appealing.
The best way I have phrased this in my work is to have “code we can be proud of” on our site. If someone goes to view source on our web pages we should feel proud of the techniques we use and that we are indeed using best practices. During our last redesign that phrase seemed to stick and provides focus to our work.
Here is a free plug-in for IE and Mozilla/Firefox that allows you put a rcih text editor into a web form: Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor. This should be great for lots of content management applications. It is also free in that there is no license whatsoever.
If you want a commercial rich text editor, I recommend Ektron’s tools.
Jim McGee posted a summary of some current arguments in favor of a grassroots approach to knowledge management.
Just noticed this article in my referral links (they kindly link to my site at the end of the piece): Case Study: Why the Air Conditioning Contractors of America’s (ACCA) blog is not cool by Debbie Weil in WordBiz Report.
It’s tempting to say the Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) has a cool blog. But it wouldn’t be true.
What ACCA, the trade association for 4,000 heating, ventilating and air conditioning companies, has created is a highly efficient way of communicating with its members.
It’s a nice piece that goes through why the ACCA blog was created and how they run it. I liked the message to their members that Kevin Holland launched it with:
ACCAbuzz is a new way we will be communicating with our members and the entire HVACR industry. It gives us an easy way to post quick news items, commentary, and links to articles of interest. As time goes on, ACCAbuzz will become the real nerve center of our website, because it’s here that our staff and members can keep everyone in the loop, ask questions, and get real-time feedback. In announcing this new site to our members, we called it a “daily newsletter on steroids,” because it just keeps growing, all day long!
Also see the page of association blog links on my wiki.
Webmonkey: The Web Developer’s Resource is back! Looks like they will keep it alive with a lower frequency of updates to the site. I had reported their shut down a while ago. Glad to see them back in the Monkey saddle.
James Robertson has posted another great article on content management systems: Successfully deploying a content management system. This quote sums up what the piece covers:
Our experience has shown that there are five key elements that must be addressed in a content management project:
- strategy
- change & communications
- content
- design
- technology
The following sections discuss each of these five key elements, and give some examples of activities that should be considered.
Recommended reading.
Lou Rosenfeld’s recent post on where to position search and taxonomy management within the organization was a nice validation of how we have it set up at our office. According to Lou:
To rant a bit, it really drives me nuts to hear people talk of “search and IA” (which they often understand as browsable taxonomies). This is an absolutely false distinction, and leads to poor search design, poor taxonomy design, and perhaps worst of all, missed opportunities to better integrate the two to support finding, IA’s ultimate goal. For example, search often is greatly improved when it leverages metadata tags. Metadata therefore should be designed with search in mind. So why separate teams? I don’t see any good reason, just a lot of bad ones.
At ASHA, we have two teams in the Web Cluster (our label for a division): the Content Management Team (CMT) and the Knowledge and Community Management Team (KCMT). CMT has responsibility for IA, visual design, general content development and managing the stream of content that comes from our 40+ content contributors. KCMT is responsible for managing our search engine, the ASHA intranet, the member community, online events and the ASHA thesaurus of terms. Both teams sit next to each other in our office and have easy access to one another. We also have a full staff meeting every two weeks where the topic of discussion is often on how we can improve the overall findability of content and services on our site by tweaking our search, metadata, etc.
While they are technically two separate teams, they operate as one in effect. I’m very happy with how well this arrangement has been working for us.
C. David Gammel, CAE 