Online Community Models?

buzzcutbuddha asks: "I have been tasked with creating/finding a Collaboration and Knowledge Management tool for work, and while there are some good commercial ones out there like Intraspect and Microsoft Sharepoint, but I want to look at it from another angle. Most people are aware of online community models like Slashdot, Kuro5hin.org, Everything2.org, it's Perlmonks derivative, and Wikki Wikki Web. Some may even remember SixDegrees from before it was retired. But are there any other notable online communities that have similar functions to the systems described above? I'm looking for a way to let people load documents or link to documents, discuss the documents, moderate the submissions and comments, and do searches. At this point, the underlying technology is not important."

Comments

OpenACS

[mlinksva]

Check out OpenACS, continuing development of ArsDigita's Arsgitia Community System. They've had discussion, commenting and other community/collaboration features for years and there are people working on adding more wiki and weblog-like functionality.

Beware Everything!... okay, not really :)

[Xunker]

No, I love the Everything Engine, and I'm even a code contributor.. but if you're seriously thinking about doing this with Everything, make sure you allocate a lot of time to it's configuration.

The initial instal is cake, but getting pages, templates, themes and whatnot together does take a lot of time. Of course, the effect is nothing short of amazing when it's finished.

You first need to ask yourself what sort of a community you're trying to create; news logs like kuro5hin and slashdot have very differnt community dynamic from places like PerlMonks or E2 and you should probably choose based on that.

And, of course you don't want to drop the possibility of completely rolling your own engine. If you have a grasp of a web-suitable language like Python, Perl or PHP or the like, you could actually hack a small scale content presentation system together in about the time it would take to assemble and Everything based site. If you're into DIY.