All posts in the topic Kiwi Intranets 5 years - now you can own your own
Summary
- There are 4 posts — by 3 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Dan Randow at Jul 21 11:52 NZST
For 5 years we've been using Online Groups to keep Kiwi's interested in Intranets connected. Dan and his team at OnlineGroups.net have been providing this service to our community - and just recently they have delivered Group Server Beta for free download Huh ? Group Server is the software which allows our Kiwi Intranets group to run - We email the Kiwi intranets group our message - The message gets added to the web forum AND emailed out the members of Kiwi Intranets - The same thing is possible via the web forms on the Kiwi Intranets site - Everyone gets notified how they prefer AND a permanent, visible record of the email trail is discoverable by others to learn from Dan's hard work and great piece of software can now be put inside your organisation If you download the open source Group Server beta you can have that same discoverability of email within your organisation http://groupserver.org/downloads/ The benefits I see are great - You have the data inside your organisation, - The data is only accessible to the people you want to have access to it - The software is free, and the code available - If your organisation's cycles are longer than staff turnover you immediately solve the issue of new people starting and not knowing the history of a topic, group server makes the information discoverable Have a think about the benefits you may accrue from having the tool we use for Kiwi Intranets *in house*, again New Zealand is leading the world. Thanks Dan for the past 5 years.
Thank you for mentioning that, Dorje. I am really glad to be hosting Kiwi Intranets as the conversations here are always interesting and relevant to our work here at OnlineGroups.Net. As it happens, we released the second beta of GroupServer 1.0 today. http://groupserver.org/downloads/ There is a description of it on our blog. http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2010/07/13/groupserver-1-0-beta-is-released/ For those in Kiwi Intranets, I wouldn't recommend downloading and installing GroupServer, unless you are a system administrator. It is much easier to try it out by starting a site on our hosted service. http://onlinegroups.net/sites/ Once you have a site, you can start as many groups as you like. For those who are happy with a cloud-based option, our system offers the advantage over say Google Groups that we are here to provide customisation. And, as the software is open source, you have the option of moving your site in-house at any time. Some people may consider the use of email to be somewhat old school. My view is that we have not seen the last of email yet. It remains the technology that is most used in people's attempts to collaborate. Likewise, you could question why we are building an email list server -- which are also somewhat old school. The reason is that they solve the elephant-in-the-room problem with email: it sucks as a group collaboration system. I've described this on our blog. http://blog.onlinegroups.net/2008/05/19/why-fight-email/ We are positioning GroupServer as a mailing list manager with the web integration of Google Groups, while providing the administrative control of open source systems like Mailman. We are working on a migration path from Mailman, and looking for some Mailman sites where GroupServer could add value. If you know of organisations using Mailman as a collaboration platform, I would be very interested in hearing about that. with regards,
Hi Dan,
Congratulations on reaching 1.0 beta, and for releasing it as Open Source. I
wasn’t actually aware you had done this (and back in 2008 no less) as I mostly
just lurk on Kiwi Intranets. Very cool stuff.
Your blog entry on “Why Fight Email” makes it appear that conversation is the
only form of knowledge construction which is a fallacy of epic proportions. The
use of tags and file storage is a start but not a drastic improvement over
existing forum, list server technology as the same problems still occur, eg
content still gets buried down in the archives and has no way of bubbling up
and getting refined by the community, hence the same questions get asked (how
do I, what do you think of, etc etc) and the community doesn’t build up it’s
knowledge base very effectively.
If you look at Wikipedia for example there are about a half dozen different
types of core users, such as those that prefer to edit than discuss, those that
focus on factual points, admin tasks, etc. You need to unleash this force so
that not just those that converse well can contribute but others that could
participate in different ways are or have the opportunity to contribute.
I know that in prior discussions you have talked about wiki features and
probably rightly so have not pursued that for version 1, although I do wonder
why you put in a chat feature instead :P
Not to say that a wiki feature flat out is the answer as the KM problem is
deeply rooted in classical hypertext theory as an almost NP hard problem; that
of knowledge and how to represent it on screen, which is something the
Engelbart’s and Nelson’s (few and far between) of this world have been trying
to solve for decades.
To be honest the only half decent solution I have seen is Google Wave which is
a hybrid of IM and wiki and even that involves a funky new protocol and
probably HTML5 Websockets.
But seriously tho, some way to edit the existing content needs to be addressed
going forward if you wish to allow for more advanced collaboration.
Tim, great to hear from you! I entirely agree that structured content is neccessary to knowledge construction. You are also right that, with GroupServer, content can be buried in archives. There is, however, a way that it can bubble up. Try searching the Kiwi Online Groups site for "sharepoint", for example, http://kiwi.onlinegroups.net/s/index.html?s=sharepoint or perhaps looking at all your posts, Tim. http://kiwi.onlinegroups.net/p/3dnimVL0ZIi3x37Hea806k Here is a post in "SharePoint as a Social Collaboration Tool?", http://kiwi.onlinegroups.net/r/post/5lkUtsEGV3PUODVlw2uLm where you make the interesting point that Sharepoint has moved towards social collaboration from its origins as a document management tool. On that page, if you are logged in, you can add to that topic. If you do, that topic will float to the top, in both the email and web interfaces. For this exact reason, we at OnlineGroups.Net we encourage people to try to find an existing topic for your post, and add to that. http://kiwi.onlinegroups.net/help/participation/contribute/#contribute-write-good-subject-lines Of course, that is difficult, as most people use only email to participate, and do not expect email to have knowledge-base capabilities. Actually, we have included the wiki-like feature in 1.0. You can try it out on the Kiwi online groups site. http://kiwi.onlinegroups.net/about/change.html The intention with that is to provide basic support for both CMS and Wiki use cases. We have not yet added the file upload http://groupserver.org/r/post/5TFqtp1cqVsltpMjFx2eJZ or page-management http://groupserver.org/r/post/5sAiabNOcpIkRftM2Iwv4h interfaces. Currently, the technical direction is set to converge with Plone and Django, so we will review whether we pursue our own page-editing features or not, before too long.
This site is provided by OnlineGroups.Net, where you can start your own free online groups site, using the open source web-based mailing list manager GroupServer.