"Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of online knowledge marketplaces where you can sell your personal knowledge. You can see its roots in the crowd sourced Q & A trend that spawned sites like Quora, Aardvark, Stockoverflow and others. And sure, you can go to Google or Ask.com and get your questions answered for free."
-Jennifer Hicks, The Rise of the Knowledge Market, Forbes, June 27, 2011.
In February of this year, Phase2 Technology acquired control of the popular Drupal-based Open Atrium system from its creator, Development Seed. Open Atrium is a team collaboration solution built on the Drupal CMS. Open Atrium is often used in team situations, including intranets and project management environments. The system comes with a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a to do list, a shoutbox, and a dashboard to manage it all.
We tracked down the Phase2 Technology team to ask them about their plans for Open Atrium. CEO Jeff Walpole and Product Manager Karen Borchert were kind enough to take the time to answer our questions.
Phase2 is very excited to be involved with Open Atrium, but we did not want to move too quickly to change something so many people use and love without first serving the community and providing maintenance to its underlying module stack. Earlier this year, we released support packages around Atrium that allow more users the ability to implement and use Atrium with the help of our team's services. In the months since taking over Atrium, we've been delving more deeply into the involved and vibrant Atrium community to try to understand best what users are looking for in this product. We've talked to users about everything from technical needs to theming to documentation to community involvement. We've built some training around Atrium that we've conducted with some clients, and we're currently preparing a stable 1.0 release (it is officially still in "Beta" status). One thing that is certain is that we are looking to this community to be part of that road map and part of the growth of the product. We want to start by giving the community a more public place to see and find contributed Features that they might use for their own Atrium instances. And then we want to see more community involvement in building and improving Atrium in the future.
Peter Barron is an Intranet Connections Fan; he provides significant feedback on our blog, Linkedin and Facebook pages and speaks candidly about our software as it applies to his organization. Over the past ten years, Peter has managed the Rio Rancho Public Schools intranet, which is internally called “Rionet”. With over 20 school district departments that use the rionet, Peter targets applications and widgets that make the intranet process fast and easy for thousands of users.
The use of content management systems in government is a personal and work interest of mine. There is actually a lot of diversity in what governments need their CMS to do and I'm curious to see how well the panel handles that diversity. Tony White, Ars Logica, is the moderator for this panel.
Leaders from Featured CMSes will be on-hand during this panel discussion to participate in a live analysis of the CMSes, asking probing questions of each, to determine how their represented Content Management System (and supporting community and infrastructure) best meets the demands of today's governmental needs, whether at a municipal, state or federal level.
Represented on this panel are: Lee Middleton (SilverStripe), Shaun Walker (DotNetNuke), Brian Colhounyan (TERMINALFOUR), Benjamin Mack (TYPO3), Ken Wasetis (Plone), Jeff Kline (Accrisoft), and Casey Neehouse (Umbraco). The following questions were asked either by the moderator, Tony White, or audience members. The panels' answers to these questions are paraphrased.
What features in your CMS make it a good choice for government?
"The more I learn about Enterprise 2.0, the more inclined I am to encourage companies to throw caution to the wind: buy (or build) some well-designed lightweight tools that take advantage of emergence and game mechanics, find a few leaders willing to lead by example, and go live."
- Andrew McAfee, Enterprise 2.0 the Indian Way, AndrewMcAfee.org, April 7, 2011.
"Information technology should enable government to better serve the American people. But despite spending more than $600 billion on information technology over the past decade, the Federal Government has achieved little of the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT. Too often, Federal IT projects run over budget, behind schedule, or fail to deliver promised functionality. Many projects use “grand design” approaches that aim to deliver functionality every few years, rather than breaking projects into more manageable chunks and demanding new functionality every few quarters.
People are increasingly interested in making healthy and environmentally friendly choices at work and at home, and your intranet can support this way of life. Use your intranet to engage and educate employees on greener lifestyles with our top ten tips.
Top Ten Tips for a Greener Intranet
Tip #1: Create a Green Community sub-site
Spearhead your campaign with a Green Community area of the intranet, and then add in collaborative apps like the ones below.
Tip #2: Suggestion box
"In a space currently dominated by proprietary technologies, managing the long-term preservation, provenance, and accessibility of digital content is often downplayed or ignored."
- Cheryl McKinnon, CMO of Nuxeo, From information overload to Dark Ages 2.0?, OpenSource.com, October 29, 2010.
Sheri Bigelow, Happiness Engineer at Automattic, gives tips on providing technical user support to WordPress bloggers. Her tips easily can crossover to other customer support tasks in the information technology field.
"Until we learn that, in an increasingly content-centric world, we cannot continue to base automation efforts exclusively on a technology-centric model, agencies will continue to invest millions of dollars in programs and have little to show for it."
-Barry Schaeffer, Federal IT program failures: It's the content, stupid, Federal Computer Week, September 23, 2010.