

Ask HN: How does news and media get shared within your workplace? - jeffvlahos

An &#x27;Ask HN&#x27; that I hope leads to a &#x27;Show HN&#x27;:<p>I&#x27;ve created an internal tool at my workplace, Upstatement, for our ~10 employees to be able to share web articles and our daily findings to everyone in the office in a non-interruptive manner. It gets good usage, and I&#x27;m curious how my idea might transform or scale to be useful for other companies.<p>It&#x27;d be extra useful if your response hinted at:<p>&gt; Do you feel as though you may be missing out on a wealth of interesting news and media your coworkers may be consuming without sharing internally?<p>&gt; When you find an article of interest, do you send it or share it directly with others in your workplace in any way? Do you share it on social media or to other general public channels?<p>&gt; Are there any communication tools used in your company for sharing found media? For better or for worse? Email? HipChat or other messaging platforms? Newsletters? Shared account applications?<p>&gt; What types of resources, if any, are provided by your company to discover and&#x2F;or share engaging content with others? How does news and media relevant to your company culture spread? Does discussion ensue?<p>Thanks for any thoughts and responses!
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Jeremy1026
My workplace barely shares workplace related news (server outages, scheduled
maintenance, etc.) so we certainly don't share general news. I don't think
we'd ever adopt a solution like this either, for the above mentioned reason.

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mindcrime
I definitely have a take on this, as this gets to the heart of what our
startup does. Two of our products very specifically involve elements of "how
to share things in an office setting".

If you'll indulge me a moment of what might be taken as self-promotion (it's
not really intended that way though), I'll tell you about what out thing does,
as a way of explaining some of my thinking on how a company can / should do
this sort of thing.

For starters, we have a product, Neddick[1], which looks a lot like Reddit.
You can submit links, discuss those links, tag them, vote on them, and rank
them by different criteria. We support the notion of "channels" which is our
equivalent to "sub reddits" in Reddit lingo. But in addition to manual
submission, we allow the configuration of _n_ RSS feeds, and any given
"channel" can aggregate 0.. _n_ feeds. So if you wanted to, for example,
define a "marketing" channel and point it all the popular marketing blogs, you
could do that. Or you could create a "techies" channel, point it at Hacker
News, Techcrunch, GroovyBlogs.org, etc. Whatever makes sense.

OK, so given a Reddit like thing, where we are starting to do some different
stuff is here... we are implementing what we call "triggers" and "filters" to
give a user more control over what happens with content in the system. Filters
let you filter a channel down to only those entries that match certain
criteria (title keyword, body keyword, score, submitter, etc.). Triggers are a
similar notion, but they fire in reaction to events like "new entry posted",
"entry tagged", "entry voted on", etc., and allow users to hook an action to
the event. So you can arrange to, for example, have an entry emailed if it
hits a certain score or receives a certain tag.

We also have an explicit "share" button that we attach to entries that allows
you to share the entry via email, XMPP, or via a RESTful POST (in
ActivityStrea.ms format) to a URL. Right now we are focused on using that
feature to allow users to "share" entries to our other product, Quoddy[2],
which is an Enterprise Social Network. As an ESN, it lets you do all the kinds
of things you might imagine an ESN doing, and we're working now on Semantic
Web integration so we can do automatic content enrichment, etc.

So yeah, I'm a big fan of technological tooling for sharing information and
knowledge in an office setting. Now, the kinds of things we're building, I
think, start to have the most value once an organization gets to a certain
threshold of size/complexity (say, 500 employees or more). A 10 person company
might be able to get by with just an email list or something a lot simpler
than our thing. Honestly, we're building mainly for bigger companies, as our
ESN has SOA/ESB integration, BPM integration and a lot of "enterprise" stuff
(which stands to reason, seeing as it's an "enterprise" social network! :-) )

Obviously I think that information / knowledge sharing are important, or we
wouldn't be working on this stuff. But here's where it gets more interesting
in my opinion... if all you do is share links, blurbs, whatever, you gain
_some_ value from that, but you don't gain the maximum value from it. You can
email your office a link to a great article about, say, a new programming
technique that you think should be adopted, or a new marketing approach, and
it's very easy for it to just disappear into the ether, for various reasons.
We think this kind of information sharing should have deeper hooks into how
people actually get work done, and should support tooling to help A. keep
things from getting lost, B. route just the right information to just the
right people, and C. provide context to help support decision making. That's
why we thing things like BPM and ESB integration are important to an ESN..
imagine if somebody shares a link to a document, and when you view it, you get
pointers to open workflow User Tasks which are related to that document, or to
recent business events which have some connection to that document. Or,
imagine if you have a button you can click that takes the link that got
shared, and actually starts a workflow around it.

One thing about this stuff though... culture is huge. Some companies are a
good fit for this kind of stuff, and some aren't. Companies that are very
"flat" organizationally, that promote empowered employees and widespread
collaboration, will love this stuff. Companies that are heavy on top-down,
command & control hierarchy, that are very divisive politically, where
knowledge hoarding is practiced, etc., won't use this stuff even if you
implement it.

Anyway, if you ever want to bat some ideas around offline, feel free to shoot
me an email. Information sharing / knowledge management / collaboration are
kind of my passion, so I'm always interested in talking about this stuff.

[1]: [https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick](https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick)

[2]: [https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy](https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy)

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jeffvlahos
Thanks so much for sharing your experience. Looking forward to taking a look
at the tools you've been working on. Self-promotion as a result of sharing
some really great experience and examples is totally acceptable =)

I haven't reached the 50+ employee level of thinking for this problem yet,
nevermind 500+. It's interesting to hear about the diverse paths and channels
of information you're providing in order to service a curated experience to
that big of a crowd. Thanks again!

