As we were discussing social learning this week, several people asked, where do I start? Jay Cross was talking to Dan Pontefract this week in San Jose and one of the lessons learnt by Dan was that micro-sharing (e.g. Twitter) is probably the best place to start. I can understand. Blogging takes time and you have to write a coherent train of thought. Staring at a blank screen can be daunting. Wikis only work when you have a group of people with a common purpose and a need to collaborate. Micro-sharing is easy, especially since it’s limited to 140 characters. Who doesn’t have time to tap out 140 characters?
Of course, the big question from anyone in a medium to large organization is the need for privacy. The usual answer is to use Yammer, which limits access to people with the same e-mail address. This works for company stuff but how do you get people from several organizations to collaborate?
Status.net, based on open source software, offers a range of options, some free and some fee. I’ve just set up a private site which is invitation-only. It’s free for 25 members and then costs $1.00 per user per month beyond that. Not bad at all. You can also download the software for free and host it in-house.
I set up a private community site today. It took only a few minutes and I was able to customize it fairly quickly. This is a great way to pilot micro-sharing with very little risk.
Once the site is established, the admin can invite people to the community. It takes only a few minutes to create a profile. The “public timeline” shows everyone’s posts so there’s no need to follow people, particularly with a community of only 25 people. The site-wide notice for the administrator is handy, so that a semi-permanent message can be displayed for everyone.
Status.net – I like it; though I haven’t figured out the automatic URL shortening feature yet.
Miio (http://www.miio.com) is another option because it allows both public and private group creation (as well as public and private messages).
Hi Harold,
Open Atrium is also very good. Either public or private, free of course as it is a module in Drupal. I use it with my support sites as I work with clients. It introduces online tools, particularly the collaboration features. It’s also serves as a central repository for our project documentation.
Here is a screen shot http://bit.ly/furHSg