Understanding how to organize data and information across an organization is essential. KARL uses communities to organize data for organizations.
KARL is used by various types of organizations from NGOs to Commercial Companies. These different types of organizations have utilized communities for organizing different types of data. We have setup a live demo of KARL to demonstrate some of these different types of data.
NGO's Use of KARL Communities
NGOs often have many communities in KARL to manage collaboration on their initiatives. NGOs often focus on humanitarian causes. By using KARL, a NGO can create a community or multiple communities to bring together individuals and groups to work on a wide array of issues:
- Human Rights
- Education
- Natural Disasters such as
- Hurricane Relief
- Flood Relief
- Earthquake Relief
- Homelessness
- Youth Outreach
Each of these issues could be setup in KARL as their own community or a NGO might setup a specific communities to focus on the issue in a specific region or area, such as "Haiti Earthquake Relief Efforts." The choice of how specific or broad the community's reach is up to your organization. These communities allow for faster collaboration on a specific topic with a distributed group of individuals working together.
To show this type of use of community, the KARL Demo has an example "Community Outreach" community. This is just one community to show how a group can use a KARL community for a cause or issue.
Commercial Companies use of KARL Communities
Commercial Companies might use KARL communities to match the workflow of the company's teams. We at Six Feet Up use KARL internally for our own company's teams and projects. We have many projects, both development and hosting, that have a group of employees working together to make a project succeed for our customers. For us, we might use a community per project to collect a variety of project information including:
- Project Requirements
- Discussions on recommendations and issues
- Project specific dates such as
- Project Start Dates
- Delivery Dates for Deliverables
- Documentation of Project Related Tasks
- Documentation of Customer Provided Information
- Documentation of Project Related Processes
- Lessons Learned
We enjoy this use of a KARL Community as it ensures we can keep documentation and discussions grouped together in a searchable manner even after the project is complete. This gives us the capability to find lessons learned and best practices across multiple projects as needed.
In the KARL Demo, we have setup an example "Project XYZ" community to show the usefulness of communities for projects.
Communities for Internal Groups
Whether an organization is a NGO or Commercial Entity, most organizations have teams of individuals that work together. Communities can be created to bring together individuals of your organization to accomplish specific goals or work. This could range to include topics such as
- Marketing,
- Grant Writing,
- Financials,
- Business Development
In addition to project communities, we at Six Feet Up also have communities for our teams (Development Team, System Administration Team, KARL Team, Marketing Team, etc) which allow us to share information within teams in a central location.
KARL Communities are a great way to bring together individuals on specific topics, projects, or tasks. Since tools such as blog, wiki, calendar, and files are available in each community, your organization's members will be able to focus on the information for the community instead of a unique new tool for a specific community.
What about you?
How do you organize your information for teams or topics? What technologies do you use for sharing and collaborating with distributed teams? Is it effective?
