[consulting] Example of Collaborative Knowledgebase Sites?

[Shai Gluskin]

Drupal consultants,

I've been away. Thanks for the thoughtful comments, advice, links etc.

Regarding tagging/usability and a knowledge base. I really appreciate the
usability comments about tagging from Bill and other comments etc.

"Knowledge base" might be a bit too grand a word in my situation. Right now
there is an active group of folks who gather around a list serve. A list
serve is so limited. The users never go to the archive. Even if we were
simply able to change the groups behavior to do the same kind of posting
they currently do, but on a Drupal forum -- I feel the "knowledge base" part
would be vastly improved simply with core's Drupal search and Core's
node/comment threading. Though I plan to experiment with community tags,
this group will likely be hiring a part time community manager who would be
*paid* to tag content.

The first issue I'd deal with on this front is that it is a huge leap for
people to switch from a list serve to a web forum. Now I'm investigating
Mailhandler and Listhandler modules in addition to subsciption module/
comment_notify etc. to figure out the best way to replicate a list serve
situation for those who are most comfortable with that and don't want to log
in to anything or go to the web for this purpose.

Re *wikis*: I use a simple test to decide whether a wiki makes sense in a
particular situation: thinking from the perspective of the user of the
knowledge, is the identiy of the author and/or knowledge about the author's
background relevant? If yes, it's not a good candidate for  a wiki. If the
answer, "no" the author is not relevant, then a wiki is likely a good idea.

In the situation I'm asking advice about, much of the knowledge/wisdom being
presented is coming out of the personal life-experience of the person. By
assoicating the content with its author in very clear ways, the users are
helped to contextualize the "knowledge" and thus better apply it (or not
apply it) to their own situations.

This is precisely why there is also a need for some of the functionalities
of social networking, such as user profiles. Since the knowledge shared is
so closely tied to the person from whom it comes, it is only logical that
such a web site would make it easy for folks to learn about each other's
lives -- *in the service of making the knowledge more useful*. And that is
why some aspects of social networking functions on sites is so important --
even though Facebook, the mother of all social networking, will implement
all of this stuff in a much more sophisticated way. It's worthwhile to
replicate aspects of Facebook, *but only when there is a reason to do so*,
as I believe there is here. In short, people are not connecting to become
friends (thought that certainly happens), but because knowing
users/contributers of the site makes the value of their contributions more
valuable.

best,

Shai
Content2zero <http://content2zero.com>


On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Bill Fitzgerald <bill at funnymonkey.com>wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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