Next Step: Consolidating the Cmappers Community

For more than three decades, the refinement and use of the concept map tool has been evolving, with new applications to improve school teaching and learning, new ways to capture and use of expert and tacit knowledge, better ways for searching and organizing information from the Web, and better tools for collaboration locally as well as internationally. While we anticipate this utilization “growth phase” will continue, we seek in this paper to present some ways to move toward building collaborative communities of users who will work to provide guidance to new users and mechanisms for evolving better organized sets of concept maps. We also seek to develop new Web sites to facilitate the latter developments.