Social bookmarking and intranet at the Mitre organisation
June 5, 2006Thank you to Sylvie Bars, Arkandis, for the post on The Mitre Corporation, and their work in Social bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet. Although Sylvie writes in French, her long quotation is in English and the link at the bottom of the post lets you download a pdf in English about the project.
I’m convinced that social bookmarking will play an increasingly large role in intranets.
June 7th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
I agree that the concept of user generated vocabulary as a means of assigning metadata to content could no doubt be extremely powerful within organistions and on their intranets.
However there are few challenges:
1. The organisation has to relquinsh control of vocabularly (most will resist)
2. Users are not altruistic in nature; social bookmarking works because it is primiarly a better way to manage (and find) personal bookmarks – the social element is entirely secondary. Within the context of intranets then, this means that content will be sporadically tagged and highlighted, rather than systematically (perhaps no bad thing as most interesting / useful content will generally surface over time).
3. It requires investment in technology and more importantly user-education.
But yes, potentially very powerful for organisations.
Hope you are well Jane,
Karl
June 7th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Great to hear from you Karl, and very nice web site!
I think we have to differentiate between social bookmarking and folksonomy or user-generated tagging for ALL content on an intranet.
The first is easier to achieve, I believe, although the only organisation where I’ve spoken face to face with someone involved in it was the BBC when I was in London last year for Online Information.
I should check back with the person and see how it is going. They had something similar to del.icio.us running as an experiment on their intranet.
Have you – or has anyone – heard about other organisations actually doing it?
BTW, I don’t think user-generated tagging will or should replace enterprise meta data systems; I see them as 2 complementary angles.
June 8th, 2006 at 11:19 am
Karl, I don’t think organisations have to relinquish all control – personally I still see a place for a more controlled taxonomy that is “owned” by the organisation. However, the process for changing/updating can and should be informed and driven by what is being bubbled up from the socially created folksonomies.
Also, sporadic is ok !! I think it’s key to understand that you don’t need 100% adoption or 100% committment – it’s perfectly ok to be slightly inconsistent in what you tag/bookmark…especially once a critical mass is formed – I tend to think about it as a sampling process.
Jane – another example of social bookmarking (and I’m sure you’ve already heard of it !) is dogear – the IBM internal social bookmarking pilot.
Also, I’m keeping a list of “social” tools that can be used in an internal environment over at my blog – you might find it useful !
http://www.scalefree.info/2006/03/list_of_tools_f.html