Clearspace enterprise 2.0 communities
The office 2.0 conference is using Clearspace as their website…finally all these conferences essentially about knowledge sharing and collaboration are practising what their all about.
Check out the other web 2.0 tools the conference organisers are using for Office 2.0 2007.
Supernova 2007 has their own website, but asked the community to store and tag information in certain places, and it’s all aggregated at Wink…Reboot 2007 used a social network as their website….see links here.
Check out another post of mine where I have listed a few social network services, all these could be used as a conference website.
Clearspace
Download app (free for up to 5 users)
It’s not really a social network, in the way that you can add friends and send messages or comment on their wall, but it is a mini blogosphere and more.
Apart from blogs, it has forums, document collaboration and version history (called wiki-docs), people search…tags and feeds all round.
Basically it looks like you can set up communities, and within these communities you have forums and documents.
It seems blogs are separate from communities, but you may be able to send a blog post to a community (great idea)…this is the toss up, whether to have blogs within a community, or what I’d rather, give people blogs, and let them send their posts to any community if relevant…perhaps a moderator of a community can be the filter, if that may be your concern.
The front page streams recent content by all communities, this can be filtered by blogs posts, discussion or documents, otherwise you can go straight to a community and use the same filters.
Also check out the tag cloud (with filtering) and members page/user space (with filtering).
I’d like to see a users own tag cloud.
I like that you can browse and search for people, but what about searching just in the expertise field (looks like you can), better still an expertise tag cloud (people tags).
The only essentials missing from Clearspace is some of the social networking features such as friends, wall, private messages, and also IM, and other modules like social bookmarks, presence blogging, and Q&A.
In all, not a bad enterprise tool, especially free for small orgs.
One more point
There are 2 paths happening; networks and collaboration, both of these are different, but both leverage on knowledge sharing (even though with networks you may publish content for personal use, but still others can get value, I suppose it’s moreso the easy tools that let you share thoughts and views in no time at all).
Clearspace has user spaces which is a network of people, even though if you are one of those people you can’t network yourself (add friends), but you can grab a feed.
It also has communities or groups or channels where people can contribute to forums and collaborate on documents.
On this last point, what if you want to discuss something with a person or select people, or collaborate on a documents, without having to belong to a community?
What I mean is something more on-the-fly, a one off.
But still the result of this interaction is kept in a folder as an activity that took place, and which you can go back to.
Eg. perhaps a Q&A shoutout to select people, even something like CircleUp, and many office 2.0 sites allow you to invite others to collaborate on a document (even IM while it’s happening), this is almost leading to web-conferencing…and then a related area is group task management (to manage the tasks and people within a time scale).
Soon I’ll look into Foldera, which is great for activity collaboration, without having to be a formal community, and Lotus Activities (part of the amazing Lotus Connections), which is a phenomenal service for on-the-fly collaboration using various tools in evolving your activity (eg. answer an email with an IM, etc..)
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
Disclosure: I work for Jive.
> It seems blogs are separate from communities, but you may be able to send a blog post to a community
Blogs are separate from communities, you can aggregate a blog into a community. Right now the option to add a blog to a community exists only in the admin console, but eventually we’ll have that on the front end as well.
> I’d like to see a users own tag cloud.
You can see a users own tag cloud by going to their profile page:
http://example.com/people/aaron
> The only essentials missing from Clearspace is some of the social networking features such as friends, wall, private messages, and also IM, and other modules like social bookmarks, presence blogging, and Q&A.
All of which are on the roadmap in one way or another.
Cheers,
AJ
Comment by AJ — July 18, 2007 @ 7:23 pm