Socialtext

This information and communication technology (ICT) initiative "takes a bottom-up approach to collaborating and empowers people to develop their own solutions." Socialtext claims that traditional groupware and knowledge management tools use top-down constraints: pre-defined roles, workflows, and categories. Socialtext uses technology as a tool to enable people to form groups flexibly, and build lightweight structure "on the fly, as part of getting their job done - without needing design or coding skills." Furthermore, Socialtext is built on the premise that - with spam increasingly crowding inboxes - the use of group email messages to share information and spur collaboration has become a less and less efficient way of intra-organisational communication.

Specifically, as an alternative to email, Socialtext uses the same technology behind the wiki (click here for a related summary). There are several particular products available for purchase; non-profit pricing is available for academic institutions and non-profit organisations. Among the options are Socialtext Enterprise, which "provides enterprise strength and wiki simplicity for large businesses." Socialtext.net provides a web-based hosted service for teams in small- and medium-sized businesses. Socialtext Eventspace is designed for conference organisers who want to extend the reach of the conference beyond the place and time of the event; improve networking and community for attendees; and collect feedback and ideas for future events from attendees. Kwiki is a free, open-source wiki that provides data and customisation migration paths to and from Socialtext solutions. These and other options are described in more detail on the Socialtext website.

Technology.

As of this writing, over 200 global organisations use Socialtext to "accelerate project cycles and help groups communicate more effectively than with email, while fostering trust, transparency and group memory."

In September 2005, Socialtext was recognised as "Best of the Web" in the Collaboration category by BusinessWeek. "The Web isn't so much a place anymore," explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, 'They Google, Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.'"