Guiding principles for VizThink  Some of you may have noticed that I have been knocking on a lot of doors lately, asking people to participate in the future of VizThink in one way or another.
One of the questions I have heard pretty frequently is "What are Vizthink's guiding principles?" and "What is the vision/mission for VizThink?' To try to answer these questions we have created a draft document with the help of some of our members. I have posted the current draft on the VizThink forums, here. There is no charge to participate in the forums, although you must register to post. Thanks in advance for your feedback -- and please, share your thoughts! Comments
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brianhickam says:
VizThink friends,
Our group (Jeff, Laura, and Brian at the University of Toledo) is very supportive of this move to generate VizThink Guidelines and reach out to others.
We'd like to suggest that VizThink's desire to bring folks on board and to raise awareness with the general public would be greatly facilitated by focusing on "sectors" in addition to disciplines:
i.e. corporate, non-profit, and academic individuals and groups.
There are, for instance, computer scientists and graphic designers with visual thinking affinities in all three sectors. This approach would be a good way to foster and nurture participation. The confluence of perspectives would help VizThink communities to grow.
Networking within and via these sectors would help VizThink discover like-minded people (inside and outside academe) and those who might join in once they were convinced of the "increased effectiveness and performance" visualization and collaboration can offer and the "connections and breakthroughs that might not happen otherwise". Attracting participation from academics wouldn't be too difficult as scholars in higher education are already well connected.
Cross-disciplinary and cross-professional collaboration is a very hot topic right now. Many university groups are working with local, regional, and federal governments, businesses, and other universities to solve complex issues.
Many individuals and groups are addressing such issues without the benefit of visual thinking. As we know, visual thinking and learning is a great approach to finding solutions to and communicating complex issues. With raised awareness about VizThink, many of these academics could be folded in with our communities.
Perhaps strong local and global communities of VizThinkers (generalists and specialists) would be comprised of folks from all of these areas, combining theory and practice? Some communities could be mixed along sector and disciplinary lines; others more limited in scope – as there are benefits to both.
We believe that VizThink's objectives of surviving and flourishing would be facilitated with strong connections to the higher education, business, and non-profit worlds. In other words, since there are so many disciplines involved, it would be nice to have a single place (VizThink) to go to that would collect links to all the products, services, books, articles, blogs, tweets, etc. that have to do with visual thinking and peripherally related fields. It would be a first stopping point for anyone wishing to do research in or apply visual thinking to their area(s) of interest.
Thus VizThink would become a "home" to scholars and practitioners alike. Anyway, think about it. We would be happy to assist with putting all this information in a format that is easy to visualize and search.
p.s. A form of “income generation”:
While the economy has changed things a bit in higher education (and everywhere), there is still grant and foundation money at universities that could pay for events. Perhaps Ryan and Chris could be paid for speaking engagements that are sponsored by the local communities?
Another benefit would be a form of cost savings: universities (both public and private) could offer VizThink community participants free rooms for meetings, workshops, etc.; server space for knowledge banks, wikis, etc.; and resources such as journals, magazines, books, and software.
We hope these ideas prove useful,
Brian Hickam
Jeff Jablonski
Laura Johnson
Posted 7 months ago. ( permalink )