I’ve always recommended using MindMeister as a collaborative mind mapping/brainstorming platform. It’s great for group brainstorming or for sharing ideas in easy-to-parse formats. It recently got even better, though.
There’s a new feature called “Opinions” (announcement post) available in every mind map. You can click a node and vote yay or nay on it, add comments in conversation form, and even automatically increase the weight of nodes in the map as they gain votes. This means that in addition to live brainstorming, you can present a map to a group and let them make suggestions, answer polls, and build ideas without editing the existing map. It offers an efficient way to collaborate in a mind map after the brainstorming is done.
This is, for me, a huge step. I’d never realized how much I needed this when sharing maps until I tried it. If you’re a MindMeister user, you’ll see the “talk bubble” icon in the sidebar for each node. Once a node has been voted on, you can also click the small icon that appears in the node to open a new sidebar with activity, comments, and voting information. If you haven’t tried MindMeister yet, here’s my affiliate link. Go check it out!
