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.
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!
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
[2]: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy