I sat down recently for lunch with Darren Gibbons and Gordon Ross of OpenRoad Communications, a small Vancouver firm focusing on the design and implementation of corporate intranets and internal communications strategy.

As part of their work with clients over the past several years and their experiences in designing and adapting intranets, they developed a hybrid wiki, blog and CMS platform called ThoughtFarmer.

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ThoughtFarmer

Beyond wikis – Knowledge Sharing for the new enterprise

ThoughtFarmer combines structure and social networking with easy wiki authoring, helping companies share knowledge and strengthen community.

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ThoughtFarmer has gained some significant clients over the past year or so, including NESTA (National Endowment for the Sciences, Technology and Arts – the largest single endowment devoted exclusively to supporting talent, innovation and creativity in the UK), IDEO (the globally renowned industrial design firm) and most recently eHarmony.

I’ve known about ThoughtFarmer since its early days, and wrote up a descriptive entry in the recent book "Making Knowledge Work – the arrival of web 2.0", published by the ARK Group (UK).

I wanted to delve a bit further into the why’s, what’s and how’s of ThoughtFarmer, to find out more about the appeal it held for client organizations who are serious about tackling the issues and dynamics of Enterprise 2.0.

I ran through the following 4 questions with Darren and Gordon in a question-and-answer interview format.
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1. I understand that ThoughtFarmer is an hybrid collaborative platform comprised of a wiki, social networking capabilities and various modular elements that traditionally have formed part of an enterprise’s intranet platform. Is that correct, and can you offer us a more concise description ?

D & G – Yes, it’s a hybrid, which is actually becoming a fairly standard architecture or configuration for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platforms.

Our conception of ThoughtFarmer and its initial design came out of our work with clients helping them implement intranet publishing tools. As Web 2.0 tools and services became more prevalent, we realized that it would be natural to incorporate these into an intranet publishing and knowledge-sharing application, and so we set about designing and building what became ThoughtFarmer 1.0, a platform to support easy user publishing and the sharing of pertinent information and knowledge in an intranet environment.

Our first client, IntraWest (at that time owner of Whistler Blackcomb and other ski resort properties), essentially provided us with the design principles. They wanted a platform that would make it easy to:

- publish and maintain current, up to date and relevant content
- create and sustain a content repository that would also serve as the company’s central knowledge repository
- strengthen workplace community by bringing forward and exposing the relationships amongst colleagues who were spread out geographically, and
- minimize any additional work (the "thing" would have to be self-sustaining and create no additional employee headcount).

Interestingly, these design principles came out of the (admittedly progressive) HR function, who insisted that we focus on the needs of both the organization AND the users. Initially, IT said "Use Sharepoint" but that involved some fairly significant customization and user training efforts.  HR said "that’s a non-starter", and so off we went.
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2. In your opinion, what most clearly differentiates ThoughtFarmer from the other recent arrivals on the Enterprise 2.0 scene that combine wikis, blogs, social networking, enterprise search, etc. ?

 D & G – We think that the answer to that question has to be "ease-of-use".  The core design principles can be summarized as "Simple" and “Social”

Simple – we got rid of as much jargon as we knew how – for example, everything a user posts is a "page" -  and we provide the users with a fair bit of simple but clear structure.  There are lots of simple "tools" that help users re-structure and shuffle around the content, such as by re-labeling or sorting the content,  through the use of easy-to-manage tagging.

ThoughtFarmer offers full text search, making it easy to find all sorts of content, and the newer version (2.5) incorporates such useful features as activity tracking whereby everything that takes place is logged for easy future reference.

Social – we also focused on "Social" as a design principle, which essentially means that every feature and the pages on which the activity takes place follow the axiom "simple rules for complex spaces".  We’re big fans of Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and worked to introduce attention filters that allow for the customization based on the cognitive capacity of individual users.  ThoughtFarmer features something we call activity tracking, which is based on Hall’s theory of proxemics (the study of the human use of space within the context of culture).  We implemented a sllder-based attention filter that enables zooming in and / or out and lets a user see all the projects in which she or he is a member and all of the related project content and activity on the intranet. 

We believe that his is a deeply humanistic design principle for knowledge work in social settings.

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3. I understand that for a small not-Silicon-Valley-based Canadian Enterprise 2.0 startup, you have had some impressive initial client wins. What is the implementation of ThoughtFarmer you are most proud of, and why ?

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D & G – We’re proud of the fact that some very innovative and innovation-oriented companies have chosen to use this application designed by a small Canadian communications firm. We’ve only just recently been able to talk about the fact that IDEO (designers of the Palm V, the Swiffer, the Apple Mouse and many other innovative products) chose ThoughtFarmer.  IDEO evaluated every Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform they could find, and chose ours. They are currently using it on their main intranet and are rolling it out to their offices around the world..

4. Is it plug-and-play, or does it’s implementation involve customization and set-up depending upon a given enterprise’s overall information systems architecture .. or is this even the right question ?

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D& G – Yes, it’s essentially plug and play, although of course every organization will have different requirements and a different IT architecture with which ThoughtFarmer must operate. But to offer an example, a recent installation of ThoughtFarmer at eHarmony (involving more than 250 employees) required only 5 days to install the platform, train the employees and migrate all the pertinent content.
ThoughtFarmer is Microsoft-based (SQL server and .Net), and is "IT-shop" friendly. OpenRoad is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and ThoughtFarmer was recently certified for Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 by Microsoft’s product testing labs.
Even though we like to consider it "plug-and-play" the design does not preclude customization and specialized integration with complex corporate IT architectures. ThoughtFarmer can also be used as a collaboration-oriented module within larger-scale intranets, and of course a wide range of other business applications can be integrated into the core ThoughtFarmer platform.

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Tags: ThoughtFarmer, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, IDEO, eHarmony, Microsoft, Sharepoint

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