Giving people the tools they need to share knowledge and advance open society through social software.

Welcome

We are a network of people that have come together to give you the tools you need to share knowledge and advance open digital society.

RSS

Why 'Barnraiser'?

Barn logoWhen an Amish family needs a new barn their community gathers to build a barn in a single day, a tradition called barn raising. In building a barn together in a day they achieve something that no single family can do.

We share that spirit as we build for society.

  • I've rejected advertising in the past because of two simple reasons. Firstly anyone creating a social website should not have advertising as their primary revenue generator and secondly it does not work as a primary revenue generator.

    Taking Facebook as an example Valleywag.com reported that Facebook users click on an advertisement 0.04% of the time - yes, just 400 clicks in every 1 million views.

    This however does not stop the high level of questions I receive about advertising and using it to sustain a project or website. Given that I am intrigued as anyone I have decided to place Google adverts on our home page and build network.

    I will report back to you regularly with a status on that together with tips on how you can implement advertising in our product range.

    Any revenues gained from Google adverts will go towards the costs of our hosting.
  • 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.

Free social software

  • Dutch
    Share information quickly and easily with Dutch; our knowledge sharing network tool.
  • Roundhouse
    Import blog entries from the whole blogsphere into your blog stream with Roundhouse; our social blogging tool.
  • Prairie
    Forget all those different username and password combinations once and for all with Prairie; our Internet identity server.
  • AROUNDMe
    A collaborative networking suite.

Highlights