Blog: Knowledge Management

Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients.  It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.

Included in the spaces suite is a core set of feature definitions that provide features for things like the blog and book modules. Additionally there are feature definitions for a calendar, a shout-box, and a case-tracker. When you create a group with Spaces enabled it changes the creation a bit, limiting the kind or group you can create to simply 'public' or 'private' and allows you to select what features should be available inside that group. If it's only appropriate for your group to have a blog, you can limit it to that. If your group needs a more substantial feature set, say a blog, book, and calendar, you can configure that for the group.  Spaces also lets you change labels in a group, so if a set of users doesn't want a 'blog', but needs a 'discussion' they can have it without need to to change any code or use the locale module. Here  is how the setup looks:

Kicking off the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva

I just got out of a working group where we outlined best practices, key issues, standards, and recommendations for Innovation to Improve Humanitarian Action, which will be presented at the Global Symposium +5 that  starts tomorrow here at the Place des Nations in Geneva. This meeting is a follow up to the Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange in 2002 and aims to identify best practices and preferences for information management and exchange based on the past five years of experiences in the humanitarian relief community.

I will add the official notes to this post as soon as I get a copy (hopefully tomorrow). The working group followed a very exciting process with people from the United Nations, academia, and private sector all working together closely to identify underlying patterns that can help encourage innovation with in the the humanitarian community.

Some other highlights of the day were meeting Jeroen Ticheler, a GIS expert from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. He showed me some really neat maps from the Open Layer project, which is out of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. These maps are simply beautiful. I recommend that you check out a few of them here.

Also I got to play with SPOT, a personal GPS tracker that I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on when it comes out in November. Once they are a little smaller, these will be great to give to team members to map where they are and go. To display this information you can just embed a Google map into their profile and have the map pull in the geo RSS feed from the SPOT service.

I will be in Geneva for some meetings until the end of the week and hope to spend all my free time at the conference, so hopefully I'll have more updates soon.

Baseline Magazine Looks at How the Bank Does Knowledge Management

I received a nice email this morning with a link to an article on knowledge management and was pleasantly surprised to see that it named the World Bank as one of the top five companies that gets knowledge management. What great credit for the organization.

We’ve worked on several different knowledge management projects with the World Bank, from an intranet for its communications team to a community portal for its Global Development Learning Network to a news tracking system to help them follow development news, and have always been impressed with their ideas and commitment to using technology to better handle information.

From the article:

"Amidst the World Bank's recent management brouhaha, a more significant event has gone overlooked - the bank's dramatic transformation from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that uses knowledge-sharing technologies to fight poverty and disease in developing nations. The enabler of this transformation: the bank's overhaul of its antiquated I.T. infrastructure and construction of a truly global network."

The World Bank certainly has developed some great new technology and systems to improve knowledge sharing and connect their worldwide team, so it’s great to see them get a shout out like this. I wonder how much of their forward thinking here was credited to their use of open source software and Drupal in some of these systems. Well, that didn’t make the article, but I’m still curious : )

You can read the whole article here.

Uses the BuzzMonitor as an Example of Good Filtering Tools for Development Agencies

Ethan Zuckerman, the man behind Global Voices Online and working with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, kicked off the last day of the Web2forDev conference yesterday here in Rome with a great presentation.

He had many great points on how organizations need to look at the web as an ecosystem, where websites are not stand alone pieces but are interconnected to everything else online. And that their communications plans need to look at it this way too. Ethan got straight to the point by saying, "You can't go to a party and stand in a corner and expect eveyone to just come and talk to you."

He went on to address the very practical ramifications of needing to interact with so much information. This is hard and can be intimidating, and only going to get worse. He explained that this creates a need to better monitor and filter information, and then gave an example of a tool that does this. I was pretty blown away to see that his example was BuzzMonitor, the news monitoring system we built for the World Bank. How awesome is that. And best of all, he repeatedly said "it is not the tool, it is the people." I couldn't agree more.

After his talk, I had the chance to catch up with him and chat about some interesting topics. More on that later.

Bring People to Your Portal Painlessly

There’s one website I read nearly every day, and that's MIT Technology Review. The site emails me between 3:00 and 4:00 am, usually well after I’ve shut down my computer for the evening, with a list and brief summary of interesting stories. This is one of the first emails I open when I log back into my computer in the morning and, more often than not, it baits me over to the MIT Technology Review site.

Our Team Aggregator Catches Some Buzz

Salon.com has an awesome story today about Pierre Wielezynski's work helping the World Bank become better listeners. The article explores why he came up with some of the functionality that we built for him in the BuzzMonitor, or what is now being called the "Super Aggregator."

From the article:

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them. (The decision to open-source BuzzMonitor need not be taken as some kind of altruistic move by the bank. By using base code that is protected by the free software GNU General Public License, my understanding is that the bank was required to make any modifications or add-ons freely available.)