I dont want to think about the sheer volume of waste-it notes that go in the bin every workshop or brainstorming session. Not to mention the fact that capturing their contents and posting online e.g. in a wiki is a real pain. Which means that more often than not we don’t. This lack of accessible documentation in turn means distributed collaboration around developing promising ideas does not happen as often as it could.
The unMonastery could only be realised because a small number of us were very disciplined about documentation. If it were less difficult and time consuming to bridge offline conversations and online interactions, I am convinced we could see many more interesting and ambitious projects realised.
We could try to get participants to learn to document online already but there is something about manually sketching which facilitates thinking processes in a way that typing doesn’t seem to. At least for me.
So what could a possible solution look like? A combination of a reusable notebook, mobile app OCR scanner, and the Edgeryders open source platform (drupal social commons). See sketch above. And if we add reusable whiteboard sheets or something like this whitelines solution for reading any white surface (but with OCR scanning so notes are actually machine readable, not just images).
What do you guys think, is this something we could design and do some work on ahead of the event and then prototyped and refined into a working solution during the hackathon?