[consulting] Example of Collaborative Knowledgebase Sites?

[Bill Fitzgerald]

Some thoughts inline below:


George Por wrote:
> Shai and others,
>
> I¹m working with communities that have very much the same need as yours:
>
>   
>> A lot of the knowledge will come out of conversations... Include some social
>>     
> networking functionality as well. So Drupal, I believe, is an excellent
> solution.
>
> The difference is that in my case, there¹s a need for the kind of of social
> networking functionality that Elgg or Ning provides but Drupal doesn¹t. Does
> anybody know of development in the Drupal community, going in that
> direction?
>
>   

We have been building social sites to support learning and collaborative 
knowledge building for the last several years. We used to work with the 
Elgg codebase, but discontinued it for two reasons: lack of client 
demand (ie, not many people were approaching us and saying "we need 
Elgg"); and, more importantly, as clients described their needs, other 
solutions were a better fit. In short, as we mapped client needs to a 
specific technical approach, Drupal was a good fit (as was Moodle, 
Mediawiki, etc, etc).

We have had several clients come to us who started with Ning, and are 
frustrated with it's shortcomings. It has been a pleasure to build sites 
for people that help them escape the data hole that is Ning.

>> So using community tags on advanced_forum is much more like what we'll do for
>>     
> the "knowledgebase."
>
> Does advanced forum support the nodecomment module? Without it, we can¹t tag
> comments, which is a major shortcoming of the Drupal architecture, IMHO.
>   

We did user testing on tagging comments with people ranging from middle 
school age to post-graduate students, and it FAILED. Miserably. The 
biggest question: when should I tag a comment? How will this be 
different than the tags on the original post? Where does this show up?

In short, tags on comments confused the bejeezus out of people. And 
these were smart, reasonably tech savvy people.

Cheers,

Bill
> george
>   

-- 

Bill Fitzgerald
http://funnymonkey.com
FunnyMonkey -- Click. Connect. Learn.
ph. 503 897 7160