Re: Impact of outliners - technography

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 158

Posted by nubuckaroo
1999-08-16 19:29:02

Well, of course there’s a whole discussion devoted to it at the other Discuss site, but technography would likely be impossible without an outliner.

I recently had the pleasure of hosting Bernie DeKoven at my command for a technography workshop, and I was very impressed with his use of the outliner in Word to facilitate communication.

If you’re not familiar with the subject of technography, it’s probably too difficult to explain it all here, but there is a great deal of material elsewhere in Userland and a Bernie’s site at http://www.technography.com.

I had been using Word’s outliner in a somewhat unsophisticated way in our attempts to practice technography at meetings. Watching Bernie do it was an education in its own right. MS really needs to look at some of the wierd behavior of the outliner, it is often a distraction. But it is very powerful when you can embed tables, hyperlinks, graphics and send the outline to a PowerPoint presentation in a few mouse clicks (I know, More had it first). It is even more powerful as a collaborative tool over the internet.

Certainly, at the individual level, using an outliner gives us greater control over the information we choose to manage and I’ve used them since ThinkTank. But I’m almost convinced that it’s an individual preference. Some people “get” outliners, most don’t. In that context, I think their relative lack of success in the marketplace is understandable.

But in the collaborative environment, they become essential. Managing and presenting the thoughts and ideas of a group of people in a meaningful way is challenging (impossible?) without the structural tools an outliner provides. I think as technography becomes better known as a discipline, we may see renewed interest in outliner applications.

Dave Rogers

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