Self-Organizing Sites
By Hisham Alam
The Web has evolved considerably since the early days of static Web sites. Today, the Internet is a significant channel for conducting commercial transactions, disseminating information, entertaining, and more, resulting in a deluge of online information. Taming this deluge will be the next step in the Web's evolution, and one of the most promising means of achieving that goal is site self-organization.
Self-organization first drew attention through its use in free-form discussion sites (like Plastic.com among others) spawned from software like Slash or PHP-Nuke. But although the principles of self-organization originated in community sites, the same ideas can enliven all types of online projects—not only on the Internet, but within corporate intranets as well.
To illustrate, consider a large product and services company with many divisions, employees, products, and customers. In such an organization, tracking and updating the experience and knowledge of the employees, maintaining information about product field experience and issues, and sharing customer experience across divisions can pose significant challenges.
Information Overload
An obvious solution would be to coordinate this data in a centralized, corporate information repository. Having a single enterprise-wide data store lets you share information rapidly and reliably. It facilitates knowledge re-use, ameliorating the cycle of rediscovering and reinventing. A repository also can provide a central directory for names and contacts, and offer other specific benefits.
