Compendium is a software tool providing a flexible visual interface for managing the connections between information and ideas. It places few constraints on how you organise material, though many h... More

Compendium is a software tool providing a flexible visual interface for managing the connections between information and ideas. It places few constraints on how you organise material, though many have found that it provides support for structured working for instance, following a methodology or modelling technique. Our own particular interest is in visualizing the connections between people, ideas and information at multiple levels, in mapping discussions and debates, and what skills are needed to do so in a participatory manner that engages all stakeholders. Validated in both small and large scale projects across diverse sectors in society, it is the result of over 15 years' research and development at the intersection of hypertext, collaborative modelling, organizational memory, computer-supported argumentation and meeting facilitation. Many people use Compendium to manage their personal digital information resources, since you can drag+drop in any document, website, email, image, etc, organise them visually, and then connect ideas, arguments and decisions to these. Compendium thus becomes the 'glue' that allows you to pool and make sense of disparate material that would otherwise remain fragmented in different software applications. You can assign your own keyword 'tags' to these elements (icons), create your own palettes of icons that have special meanings, overlay maps on top of background images, and place/edit a given icon in many different places at once: things don't always fit neatly into just one box in real life. If you're technical, you can exploit our XML scheme, the Derby or MySQL relational database, and public Java classes to connect Compendium to other databases and computational services. (If that sentence meant anything to you, then check out our developer website!) Extending Compendium's support for personal sensemaking, we have a particular interest in what we term collective sensemaking, and have developed a technique called Dialogue Mapping, and its extension, Conversational Modelling. Our experiences with these techiques for capturing and managing -- often in real time and under pressure -- the perspectives in meetings that emerge in open discussion or in collaborative modelling, lead us to claim that Compendium offers innovative strategies for tackling some of the key challenges in managing knowledge and making meaning  [edit]  Less