Dave

Here comes Noot – the public sector social business tool

I’ve written loads in the past about the importance of using social technology in the workplace, especially in the public sector.

It’s great for tearing down silos, sharing knowledge, making the most of talent, completing projects successfully and maybe making life a bit more interesting.

One bit of technology I have had my eye on for a while is a bit of open source loveliness called Open Atrium, which is based on the popular and powerful Drupal framework.

What really caught my attention was that it was announced recently that the White House were using it to collaborate with. This is a bit of software that means business.

So I was delighted when I started talking with my good pals Harry and Rupert at Neontribe – web developers and user experience legends from Norwich (and who are organising RewiredState Norfolk this weekend, which you really ought to get to if you can). It turns out that they live and breath Drupal, and whats more, had started to get enquiries about OpenAtrium themselves.

Noot

We put our heads together and came up with Noot. Noot is a hosted Open Atrium offering aimed squarely at the public sector here in the UK. The Neontribe gang handle all the technical stuff, while Kind of Digital provides the consultancy and training to make sure customers get the most out of their investment.

Noot provides you with:

  • Groups, allowing people across your organisation or from partner organisations to get together and collaborate.
  • Discussions, so folk can talk to one another.
  • Collaborative authoring, allowing people to jointly create and edit documents.
  • Project and task management, helping to get stuff done
  • File uploading and sharing
  • Yammer or Twitter style status updates

…and a bunch of other cool stuff. What’s more, we’re going to be actively listening to users and developing more features to provide the functionality people really need.

So whether you just want to get people in your organisation talking to each other, want to manage cross departmental projects better, or start doing some serious partnership collaboration, Noot could well be the technology that suits your people and your process.

We’re still tidying things up, getting our marketing messages right and figuring out just how much we are going to charge for this thing. In the meantime, do follow Noot on Twitter, and bookmark the homepage so you know where to go to find out more.

If you’d like a demo or an early chat about Noot, you know where I am.

I like MyFarm!

Now, when I started writing about micro-participation, I never envisaged the possibility of micro-farming, but there we are!

MyFarm is a great initiative from the National Trust, effectively making games like Facebook’s Farmville real.

Participants pay £30 a year to be involved, and get to vote on various decisions affecting the farm. It’s a bit like an agricultural version of MyFootballClub, which saw a bunch of people from the internet buy Ebbsfleet United.

The benefits are increasing knowledge about farming and the countryside – and also to help people understand where food comes from.

It’ a great idea – and a brave one too.

Goodbye Delicious, hello Pinboard

So following the news that Delicious has been bought from Yahoo!, by the guys who did YouTube, I decided it was time to set myself up somewhere else. It might be that Delicious thrives under its new owners – in which case fine, I can always switch back. But I didn’t want to leave myself exposed, and so I’ve switched to Pinboard.

My account is here, in case it’s of interest.

Pinboard seems to be the geek’s choice of bookmarking service and there have been loads of recommendations for it, largely because it is a no-frills version of what Delicious did well – saving, describing and tagging web links.

It seems fine and I’m currently working out how to get the occasional link posts added here. Hopefully it won’t cause too much bother!

Whither WordPress?

I did wonder whether there was a way of doing all my bookmarking within a tool I already use, though, and WordPress seems to potentially fit the bill – not least because I host it myself and so have total control over my data.

After all, I don’t really use the social features of social bookmarking – and tend to rely on it as a publishing tool.

Here’s what I’d like to have: a WordPress plugin that creates a new content type called bookmarks, that has a bookmarklet to make it easy to save them, with a title, description and tags.

It would let me publish them to the blog either as I save them, bundling them into posts of ten links, or maybe a single weekly post. An option to ping them to Twitter would be nice too, and maybe a dedicated feed of just bookmarks. Oh, and I’d want to be able to import my Delicious or Pinboard bookmarks to, so I’ve just got the one database.

Does something like this exist? Or does anyone fancy making it happen? I’d be eternally grateful…

Bookmarks for April 6th through April 27th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

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