You’ve just come from a productive community brainstorming session full of lively debate and good ideas. You’d like to capture the essence of the meeting and share it with participants in hopes of continuing the discussion and inviting others into the dialogue. Your copious meeting minutes don’t do the trick. They don’t convey the energy of the gathering, nor do they exhibit the underlying themes connecting the school board with senior citizens, the conservation commission with the business owners, the library with the volunteer fire department.

Enter Wordle, a tool (or “toy” as the website describes it) developed by Jonathan Feinberg, a senior software engineer at IBM Research. Wordle is a simple, free application that creates “word clouds”—some call it “word art”—from text that you paste into a field. Click Go and your bland notes become a colorful, graphic cluster of words conveying ideas, values, goals and action items, which you can customize by adjusting the font, layout and colors. The size of each word in the cloud represents how frequently it is used in the text, so common themes emerge instantly, creating visual anchors and conveying the most important concepts.

Originally designed as a pleasing way to display language, Wordle has been employed in some unexpected ways: by English teachers (think spelling and vocabulary, Shakespeare sonnets, Dr. Seuss!), by nutritionists (what does your weekly diet look like?), by poetry fans (Frost Wordle, Poe Wordle, Piñero Wordle…very different), political pundits (McCain v. Obama debates), weather junkies (seasonal trends) and Internet researchers (search terms, blog popularity, online advertising). And the list goes on…

At a recent event in the City of Golden, Colorado, participants were asked to write, in a few words, what Golden means to them on post-it notes and stick them to the wall. The notes were typed up and dumped into Wordle, creating an evolving word cloud that changed shape and emphasis as more people added their thoughts. The words “place,” “community,” “home,” “beautiful,” “play,” “live,” “history,” “friendly” and “fun” all figured largely in this tangible representation of the residents’ values.