I posed the question on a Knol by Abigail Lewis-Bowen about the possibility of using Tagged corporate intranet information combined with group or role membership to locate possible mentors within your organization.

The answer was very relevant and can be seen here.

The comment that I find intriguing is the use of activity streams to identify what you really are doing at work, as opposed to what your job title or direct responsibility is. I want to explore this further, as it ties directly into the current vision of Claromentis 6.0 and we have had some interesting debates about this concept – we did not call them ‘activity streams’ but I think the concept is perhaps similar.

With Claromentis 6 we will embrace URL based tagging irrespective of the underlying object. It doesn’t matter if it’s a document, a persons profile, an admin panel, Wiki, web page, customer profile, policy  or anything else. The point is that if that URL has been tagged, you looking at it tells us useful information about your interests and so contributes to your ‘consumer side’ Tag cloud.

The debate we had was that this is not how the wisdom of crowds normally works – that concept of course involves getting participation from the user by some concept of voting, or ‘digging’ – and aggregating votes to rate the article. More popular information sets can then float to the top of searches, or be found be specific questions seeking them out from increasingly massive information stores.

In Claromentis 6 conventional participatory crowd sourcing will be adopted – but in addition we will use the simple viewing of information to reveal something about what you find interesting, and therefore enable you to explore, if you wish, potential relationships with other people across the extended enterprise.

Why?

Because we don’t want to emphasize in the corporate world the fact that some people are just more comfortable spending time to vote, create tags and visibly participate – we want to also just find out what you frequently look at.

crowd sourcing

I should point out that each of our clients can chose to just turn all this off – this is not Big Brother – it’s a way to try to reveal potentially interesting relationships based on common interest without needing you to take time out to vote on something – just read similar tagged sets frequently and I am sure we can work out what you are looking for and currently finding interesting.

I will be really interested in how our clients embrace this.

In particular I will be fascinated how this is adopted internationally, given the different legislation, cultural issues and position in the technolgy adoption curve of various countries and communities. Will our USA clients be much more inclined to implement this in their Claromentis systems when compared to the UK for example? Will certain industries never see value in this, will others always embrace it?

Intranet-Extranet intranet software discussions, online collaboration