I really like the idea of using the web to bring people together and work on problems out in the open, rather like David Wilcox and Simon Berry did in their bid for the Innovation Exchange project.
They used Drupal, a group blogging platform that does tonnes of other stuff, which is great for enabling people to throw ideas out and let the community respond to them. It’s got pretty low barriers to entry as pretty much anyone can hit the ‘create content’ button and dump their brains onto the screen. There’s an immediacy about this approach that I like a lot.
But I am also a fan of the wiki as a form of collaborative working, and wikis do have advantages over something like Drupal in terms of getting a ‘product’ finalised. What it doesn’t have is that immediate ability for people to be able to chuck thoughts out to gauge a reaction as to how useful they are. Editing a wiki page has a seriousness that writing a blog post doesn’t have.
I suppose what I am after is a decent wiki for Drupal, so that all the good stuff in the blog posts and comments can be moulded together. Google Sites could do this perfectly, as its ‘Announcements’ page template is effectively a blog. But there are too many limits of public involvement in Sites at the moment for it to become usable in this context.
If anyone has any suggestions for something I am missing, I would love to hear about it!