All posts in the topic Introductions (Short link)
Summary
- There are 3 posts — by 2 authors — in this topic.
- Latest post made by Dan Randow at 2005 Sep 14 04:00 UTC
hi again, All,
I have been working in the online collaboration area since 1998. My
company GroupSense provides services that help our clients to get
successful online groups going. We work in organisations, elearning and
edemocracy.
For the first years of our business, we worked with the technology that
our clients already had, or used freely available technology like Yahoo!
Groups. The principle was (and still is) that it's not the technology
that makes the difference, it's what you do with it. Once we started to
have some substantial projects going, however, we realised that there
wasn't any technology that could do what our clients wanted.
Essentially, that was to have functionality like Yahoo! Groups but a
secure and flexible framework where we could extend the functionality.
So, over the last three years, we've built GroupServer.
GroupSense still specialises in implementing online collaboration
projects, mostly using GroupServer. We are also working hard to make
GroupServer good enough that lots of organisations download and use it,
and ask us to make improvements to it, or make improvements themselves.
I am not a techie, I work with people and groups. Of course, I know some
things about technology so I often work with clients to establish
requirements and then work with Richard, who is a techie, to design
enhancements to meet those requirements.
Again, welcome. It's great to have you here showing an interest in
GroupServer.
What is your experience with online collaboration? What is your interest
in GroupServer?
Hi Dan and everyone else, I have a strong technical background, having been a developer and architect of Unix services for the past 30 years and Internet infrastructure services for the past 10. But I was fortunate enough to be able to retire recently, and I've been spending some of my time helping several groups in my community to collaborate, using tools like Yahoo Groups, Stalker mailing lists, and lately a few kinds of Wiki. In July I attended the first conference of the Network of Spiritual Progressives <http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/> and have felt compelled to help this emerging organization to take advantage of Internet collaboration tools. So I thought I should catch up on what services are available; after a day or two of Googling, I came upon Democracies Online, which lead me to GroupServer. This tool looks incredibly promising, and happens to fit the platform the NSP will be using. So I am hoping that I can be of service in helping the NSP take advantage of this potentially very powerful tool. Presumably I will be working in a more strategic and less technical role -- playing with the inside technology is fun but time-consuming, making it a temptation I have to resist! - Dave Farber from my home in Ojai, CA, USA
hi Dave,
Great to have you here and to hear about your plans.
Yes, GroupServer has some strengths but we have many many plans yet to
implement. To do this, we want to get organisations using it and strong
technical people taking an interest in it :).
It's good that GroupServer "happens to fit the platform the NSP will be
using."
with regards