Client-side rendering of collaborative idea networks

When distributed teams brainstorm and discuss ideas toward solving a non-trivial problem, it is essential to maintain the temporal and content connections of the discussion, identify to ideas for response, and track conversations to determine emerging problem solutions in order to achieve greater benefit from the collaboration. Our Web 2.0 technology visualizes these connections, identifications, and emerging solutions in the form of a network graph display of connected idea nodes representing posts whose internal content can be viewed by hovering over the node of interest. A user can respond to a post by clicking on it and using the provided post template. Current methods of server-side graph rendering consume too much time when the graph reaches a certain size, limiting user interaction because of refresh delays of the user and other team member posts. Since the objective of the forum is to be nearly as efficient as a chat, we devised a novel method of client-side graph rendering that integrated seamlessly with the existing technology and provided extraordinary timing improvements independent of the depth and breadth of the graphs.