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April 16, 2008

Comments

Steven

Have you considered organizing communities into role-based, project-based, department-based, and business process/activity-based groupings?

Chuck Hollis

We did -- briefly -- but discarded it. The high value seems to be coming from interactions that span traditional definitions.

Your model works well for document-oriented collaboration (we use a varient of it), but -- conversations -- well, that seems to be different.

Oliver Marks

Oh boy, I've been down this path before...I spent what seemed like an age doing content taxonomy planning with the American Management Association.

Like catching a greased pig, it works for one group of people but not for others.

While doing horticultural pruning of Sony PlayStation's wild west of freestyle created, 'guideline free' mass of legacy content I opted for the 'divide into big buckets, then identify smaller areas within them' approach.

Not exactly a tree model since so many things are inter related and associated with multiple applications but a start.

So much of organizing groupings is dependent on the end users needs. The PlayStation users are divided into technical and non technical - techies like lots of macros and tolerate ugly ui's while non techs need a well thought out UI and group/content logic before they will dip a toe in the water and then get in and swim if they like it.

An 'index' page (as in last pages of a book) approach as well as search field seems to work well with people also...

Great post Chuck!

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