Online Community Models? 8
buzzcutbuddha asks:
"I have been tasked with creating/finding a Collaboration and
Knowledge Management tool for work, and while there are some good
commercial ones out there like
Intraspect and
Microsoft
Sharepoint, but I want to look at it from another angle. Most
people are aware of online community models like
Slashdot,
Kuro5hin.org,
Everything2.org, it's
Perlmonks derivative, and
Wikki Wikki Web. Some
may even remember SixDegrees from
before it was retired. But are there any other notable online
communities that have similar functions to the systems described
above? I'm looking for a way to let people load documents or link
to documents, discuss the documents, moderate the submissions and
comments, and do searches. At this point, the underlying technology
is not important."
Here's One (Score:2, Interesting)
Users upload documents, rate them, discuss them and such. It's an interesting concept that bears mentioning.
Another online community that doesn't involve document discussion and the like is Metafilter [metafilter.com].
I'm confused (most of the time). (Score:2, Informative)
A site with sections and story queue is good. Open moderation to stories and comments is its' own problem though kuro5hin seems to function quite well. Comment moderation categories just opens the door to quibbling over whether it's genuinely offtopic, or funny - allowing respondants to HiLaRiOuSlY acuse the moderator of being on crack. Ha! Crack! Genius! Not tired at all!
E2's messaging is good.
Zope's slash rip-off (I forget the name, it used to run on technocrat.net) allowed file attachments. That's useful for any distributed software development team.
A wiki, like any flat data structure, doesn't push old content into depths (something the slash-a-likes are guilty of, being linear, though for a news site it's probably necessary).
Drupal.org [drupal.org] and Half Empty [half-empty.org] are kinda nice engines. I'm working on my own ("in every mans life there must be one php/mysql weblog - and this is mine").
Interface wise I have a preference for calenders. I like URLs that are clean looking. I like engines that aren't crufty like PHPnuke.
Re:I'm confused (most of the time). (Score:1)
I'm more concerned with the model, features, and concepts behind the community.
Thanks for the suggestions, they're good ones to follow up one.
OpenACS (Score:3, Interesting)
LiveJournal? (Score:2)
It's ability to easily follow multiple journals, including posting comments to various entries, and it's "communities" make it seem somewhat like your talking about.
Additionally, all the source code that runs it is available.
Having people keep "work journals" of what they're working on makes it easy to keep track of who's doing what, and the communities could be very advantageous in a work environement.
Also looking (Score:1)
Beware Everything!... okay, not really :) (Score:3, Insightful)
No, I love the Everything Engine [everydevel.com], and I'm even a code contributor.. but if you're seriously thinking about doing this with Everything, make sure you allocate a lot of time to it's configuration.
The initial instal is cake, but getting pages, templates, themes and whatnot together does take a lot of time. Of course, the effect is nothing short of amazing when it's finished.
You first need to ask yourself what sort of a community you're trying to create; news logs like kuro5hin and slashdot have very differnt community dynamic from places like PerlMonks or E2 and you should probably choose based on that.
And, of course you don't want to drop the possibility of completely rolling your own engine. If you have a grasp of a web-suitable language like Python, Perl or PHP or the like, you could actually hack a small scale content presentation system together in about the time it would take to assemble and Everything based site. If you're into DIY.