We all got blind spots one time or another. Gathering bright minds to share thoughts and ideas from different perspectives and participating in a constructive discourse can enhance our decision making we are faced with everyday. Within Google Wave, BrainGroupy^TM facilitates you in gathering your friends or colleagues or folks sharing the same interest as you where-ever they are to come together virtually and share ideas, analyze, discuss and comment on the concepts, and vote for the ones you think are good.

You can become a moderator for a brainstorming session on topics you're interested in by adding braingroupy@appspot.com into a wave and adding other live participants. As a moderator you've manageable control over the topic, the durations of the session stages, conference call, selection criteria and other features. As invited participants you can start sharing your ideas, as well as discuss, organize and vote after the moderator finishes setting up and starts the session. The moderator is identified by a red border around his/her photo. The participants are each assigned an arbitrary color if anonymity is not set. Otherwise all invited participants have green borders.

A brainstorming session is made up of 3 stages:

• Brainstorming
  Rapid entering of ideas (ideabolts^TM) in the textbox without leaving your fingers from the keyboard. You can also edit directly on your ideabolts^TM but not others. Make sure to hit enter in order for others to receive the updates to the modification. The border colors of the ideabolts^TM match the border colors of the participant photos. The ideabolts^TM are not draggable at this stage.


• Analysis
  Organize by moving and clustering ideabolts^TM. Add and view comments and access external resources by <Ctrl>-clicking the ideabolts^TM.


• Voting
  Vote by clicking on the right button on each ideabolt^TM. The ideabolts^TM are locked down at this stage, ie. you can no longer be able to edit nor move the ideabolts^TM.