Seven Great Communities for Sharing Ideas on Collaboration in the Workplace

UPDATED 8/19/08: Welcome new readers from the Wikinomics blog! This is a quickly growing new site covering collaboration in the workplace using IT. Please check out the About page as well as some of the top articles on Twitter as a brand-altering force and taming the torrent of online news. Please subscribe to the news feed to get future Sharing at Work articles.

This summer I’ve tried hard to find good online communities to learn and share about workplace collaboration and knowledge sharing. Here’s a list of some of the communities that have become a part of my regular reading. There are plenty of blogs I read on the topic as well but most of them don’t have quite the feeling of community as these sites. You’ll undoubtedly have some favorites of your own that aren’t listed here, so do us all a favor and share your best links below!

Wikinomics Blog
This is my #1 daily stop for discussions on collaboration. They’ve got over 20 member bloggers and at least one external contributor (Grow Your Wiki’s Stewart Mader). What makes the Wikinomics blog great is its wide variety of voices and interests, from the internationally known authors behind Wikinomics to a cadre of eager interns. Wikinomics could be even better for me if they enhanced their onsite collaboration options for readers, whether that be through a more robust commenting system or even a forum.

Local Meetups
Meetups are a great way to take your interests offline and meet some locals who share your interests. The Memphis SMB group is a local offshoot of the global “Social Media Breakfast” movement and I am very glad to have gotten in touch with such a diverse group of passionate contributors. Go to SocialMediaBreakfast.com right now and find or start a group in your area!

Twitter / Twitter Search
Local online media expert Dave Barger from the aforementioned SMB Memphis group has turned me on to the unique power of Twitter searches to quickly tune in to the latest ideas and discussions on almost any topic from technology to business to culture. I am keeping a close watch on Twitter searches for “collaboration”, “knowledge sharing”, and “wiki”. I’ll share the most interesting “tweets” I find here with you. Be sure and contribute to the growing Twitter community by starting your own account and engaging with the people who share your interests.

Mashable

To me Mashable is the Slashdot of Web 2.0. Hit Mashable for hourly articles on social media news and issues in business and throughout our culture. There seems to be a large social network-style community attached to Mashable that I’ll want to dive into soon. I’ll let you know what sort of goodness we can expect from this community.

actKM Discussion List

This email-based discussion list is a good change of pace from the sites listed above. You’ll find knowledge management practitioners from all over the globe helping each other out with KM problems like “help me create an open collaboration space for Australia” and “changing firefighting culture”. Registration to the list is free and open to all. Click the image at right to see what I’ve gotten out of the list this month.

UPDATED – Reader additions below

Dosh Dosh (thanks to skippytpe)
Dosh Dosh bills itself as “a blog offering internet marketing and blogging tips, alongside social media strategies. Best consumed by bloggers, entrepreneurs, web publishers, marketers, freelancers and small business owners.” This site looks to have a few articles a week and a fairly lively base of commenting users. Recent headlines: “The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems“, “The Key to Effective Viral Marketing is Emotional Engagement“. I am not quite comfortable embracing a marketing campaign on that level here but I recognize that many social media enthusiasts are marketing for their employers or personal businesses.

Social Median (thanks to Dave Barger, who also linked some good blogs in the comments below)
Social Median calls itself “a social news network that connects people with personalized news and information.” I’m seeing a digg-style news aggregator with the expected social media theme. Some people might interpret “digg-style” as a slight, but I figure the aggregation style is just a tool and the unique value is in the community of users that grows up around it. You wouldn’t be surprised to find that Social Median’s articles give their niche a much better treatment than Digg can, would you? Thumbs up. Update #2: Looks like there’s more to Social Median than just Diggness – TechCrunch has some good info on the filtering algorithms in use at SM.

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