After a long wait and lots of fiddling on my part, I launched our new internal social network today. Called “Connect“, the site aims to leverage all the usual good stuff about social networks. We really have a need to help build skills repository and let people get to know one another and that’s tough to do with over 300 employees in a dozen or so departments. Connect aims to help bridge those gaps and allow folks to asynchronously discover other people who might have a common interest or who possess a skill that they need.
Connect also will serve as a collaboration space, enabling groups and committees to share documents and have discussions about projects without having to rely on e-mail threads and shared data directories. Because the system is Division-wide, it should foster and enable inter-departmental collaboration.
Connect runs on elgg, an open source social network platform. Many thanks to the fine coders at Elgg for their work. With time we should be contributing plugins back to the community.