Please Update
This seems to be a popular set of tools and techniques for collaboration.
[edit] Communication
Email is the most widely used online communication technology among people of all technical skill levels. We recommend that organisations use email lists as much as possible because they are (1) more effective way than cc’ing to communicate with multiple people, (2) new email lists are easy to create and (3) email list archives can be made accessible to the public.
Social media is an extremely popular way to communicate with people and, we believe, an appropriate place to use proprietary solutions while open source projects like Diaspora and Status.net mature. There's a tremendous amount of content on the web about effective use of social media. We suggest looking around.
[edit] Techniques
Every discrete organization project should have it’s own email list, and every email list should have at least one person who is responsible for reading every message in the list and adding relevant information from these messages into the organization’s documentation resource.
[edit] Documentation
“Wiki” means easy in Hawaiian and has become the term describing easy collaborative document editing platforms. Wiki’s democratize the process of documentation, lowering the barriers of entry for contributors while providing highly functional version controls so errors can be easily tracked and fixed.
- MediaWiki is the most widely used FLO wiki platform and is used by Wikipedia.
[edit] Techniques
Every wiki should have at least three sections:
- Email list hightlights: aggregates the important points from the email list conversations.
- Research repository that develops resources useful to members of the organization.
- An unstructured area for document collaboration
- Project pages that outline tasks and milestones for the organization.
[edit] Web Platform
Content management systems (CMS) allow people to build and maintain content driven websites without having to use computer code. If you can use a word processor, you can use use any of the world’s most popular FLO content management systems. These systems have a large, stable development community and plug-in architectures that enable the CMS’s functionality to be extended in a wide variety of ways.
- Wordpress is the world’s most popular CMS platform. It’s designed for blogs but it’s features can be extended.
- Joomla is a popular CMS system that is more polished but less dynamic than Drupal.
- Drupal is the most popular CMS for PHP developers. It is very dynamic and extensible.
- MODx is a popular free, open-source CMS know for it's flexibility.
[edit] Techniques
At the very least, an organization’s website should publish a regular digest of the activity taking place within the organization accessible via the website’s RSS feed. RSS feeds allow other services to “syndicate” your organization’s content. For example, if someone wanted to subscribe to updates from an organization, they could add the organization’s RSS feed to their feed reader or use a simple widget on an organization’s site to receive automatic email updates containing the digests contents. Additionally, fans, partners and community news outlets could add the organization’s feeds to their own website. RSS will become increasingly important as we weave feeds together to create a real time picture of progress within certain organization verticals. Beyond RSS updates, organizations should post basic information on their site. Read more about “principals of organization website information architecture”.
