Social, collaborative database-does it exist?

Hi Matt and all,

We're trying to imagine an online community built around a permissions based, collaborative database. Database for keeping the factoid columns straight, at the core, but soft narrative and community encouraging wrapper.

Do any of you have some experience with this?

Started looking at rhizome, kind of a db meets wiki.

Probably need to look at J.Knauer's Rhiza Labs, although we are more ¢¢¢ than $$$.

Thank you!

Beth

Beth,

Can you give us an idea of the business goals? What are people collaborating around? Is it a project or cause? What would happen if facts were not straight and not at the core? What would be the impact?

I don't know about others, but these questions are always good to ask.

Have you heard of vBulletin or Socious?

John

Beth,

I think it will depend a great deal on what specifically you want to accomplish... there are quite a few open-source titles out there that could be used in a hosted environment, with your primary interface being a browser.  Almost everything I can think of is going to be biased, because I like LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) a lot.

Drupal.org comes to mind right away. (www.drupal.org)

Another really great place to look for similar open-source software is http://freshmeat.net

Principally, each of the systems you find will be geared to this function, that function, etc.  But I feel confident that an appropriate use case analysis would provide the additional information required to "extend" the database on any of these products and move forward.  (WOrk smarter, not harder, etc.)

What's your time line?  I've been graced with a google wave account in the current sandbox, but it won't be available for the general public until next year.  I have a strong feeling Wave is going to turn a lot of what we do with the Internet on it's ear, and I can see non-profits making HEAVY use of it if it makes good on it's current promises.

Dustin Decker

1 On 1 Security, Inc.

I agree with Dustin.  Drupal will fit the bill for what you describe.  It is a flexible open source database driven content management system with rich permissioning.  Can you give us more details on how you see this working with a little context?

Unfortunately I don't know of a cheap or open source app that fits your needs directly (more specific details on your project would help narrow it down), but if you're looking to make it a public site and interested in a collaborator, you might look at Whiskey Media. They've got a couple of really cool and interesting community collaboration sites that are all based on a really solid framework. They don't sell the framework itself as far as I know, but they might be interested in partnering on the right project: http://www.whiskeymedia.com

Regards,

Oshyan Greene

Assistant Director

Bauman College