Jeff Conklin is a facilitator, consultant,
and teacher. Over the past
15 years he has developed a dialogue mapping
facilitation approach (previously
called
Visual Issue Mapping System, or VIMS) that is based on Horst Rittel's
Issue Based Information System (IBIS). The
technique uses graphical hypertext software (Compendium)
to interactively map the meeting dialog of project
teams working on
"wicked" technical
problems. In addition to using Dialog Mapping
as a consultant with various clients, he teaches
the technique in a 2-day
workshop (see
http://cognexus.org). He is passionate about getting the knowledge of
IBIS and
Dialog Mapping
out to a wider audience, and has just published
his first book on the subject,
Dialogue
Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.
Jeff wrote an early survey paper on hypertext that was published in IEEE
Computer (1987), developed the gIBIS software at MCC in Austin, Texas, and
launched a software company, Corporate Memory Systems, that created the
predecessor to the Compendium software, QuestMap.
That experience, and the company's financial demise, taught him a lot about
the practical side of
collaborative technology. He is also very interested in knowledge
management and organizational memory, and is collaborating with the
Compendium Institute on other collaborative technology extensions of
Compendium. Jeff and I sort of sizzled on the same
wavelength, without however getting to meet, in the discussion
following Jack Park's presentation at
Knowledge Technologies 2001 in
March 2001.
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