Many people either working or volunteering for the organisation find useful snippets of information on the web. They in a moment of excitement send out an email to their colleges after which it is promptly trashed, forgotten and lost forever.
Information harvesting is often overlooked by organisations. Finding, researching and cross checking from the web is an ongoing process. Often people involved in this share new ideas or thoughts sparked by information they harvest from the web.
We wanted to create a tool that simplifies the catcher, retention and distribution of such information.
We came up with Dutch; a knowledge sharing network tool. Dutch is a part of our research to re-think the way we share knowledge on the web. Our goal is to create a fluid pool of knowledge shared amongst interested people based upon them working together in gathering information from the web.
If you are going to try it the best approach we've come up with is to gather your team and ask them which websites they like. If you are lucky as we were you get a wide variety of websites including social bookmarking, blogs and news services. Ask each member of your team to regularly post up information that they think will be of interest to the team. You should see pools of organizational relevant information form quickly.
There is a demo available from the
Dutch product page. I welcome your comments and thoughts on the tool.