Looking for web-based software to help share information and documents for information hungry non-profit.

December 6, 2006 10:05 AM

I work for a non-profit and am trying to come up with web-based software solutions for two problems that we face on a daily basis. 1. We need a way of sharing huge amounts of information (mostly press articles), without descending into information overload. 2. The various staff who do my kind of job around the country are also constantly looking for ways to share new ideas and strategies. For this, I'm looking for a secure way to share documents, that can be tagged with different identifiers. More below (apologies for the long question)

Background info: There are about 30 different people who do my job, spread throughout the country. For question #1, we gather lots of good information from Lexis-Nexis and other news tracking software. What we need is a good way to share it, without overwhelming each other. Two possibilities came to mind:
a. secure website to post to, and tag articles that people could browse.
b. listserv - but somehow one that avoids us having to set up individual listservs for every individual topic and also avoids the problem of everyone getting everything. For example, is there a way to have a listserv, where people only get documents tagged with subtopics they are subscribed to?

#2. I'm wondering if Google Documents could work with this and just upload the documents, include collaborators, and then tag appropriately. I'd really appreciate any feedback on this or other thoughts? I'm sort of looking for flickr for documents.

posted by krudiger to computers & internet (7 comments total)

What about a CMS like Drupal? It should do what you want out-of-the-box.
posted by mkultra at 10:36 AM on December 6, 2006

Onfolio used to be good for this sort of thing. People could capture and share collections of documents and web pages, with tags and annotations. Unfortunately that featureset has been gutted post-acquisition by Microsoft. I think though that there are other products that might be competitive.

You might also consider a private blog or installation of a del.icio.us clone in conjunction with some sort of private web based document sharing.

People could save their documents to folders on the web server, then create a blog entry with a short description and tagging. Wordpress (to give one example) can generate feeds for individual categories (or tags with the appropriate plugin) People could then use RSS reader to keep up with documents from the tags of interest.
posted by Good Brain at 10:39 AM on December 6, 2006

Simplest would be a restricted forum and a Wiki or simple CMS thingy for organizing article links.

Lotsa free forum and Wiki solutions out there.

I assume copyrights would prevent you from copying whole articles into your system.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:39 AM on December 6, 2006

Maybe Basecamp would work for you?
posted by lemuria at 12:06 PM on December 6, 2006

I own a small non-profit and Basecamp has been the best solution so far. A friend who is really into project management suggested either Achievo or dotProject, which you can demo here (along with a couple others). This would allow you to incorporate tasks, a calendar, etc into it as well if you wanted. I haven't made a decision yet on what to use, but will be watching this topic - let us know what you decide!

(FYI - I also use vBulletin and it is great..something like phpBB might work)
posted by goodwillstacy at 8:08 PM on December 6, 2006

Joyent's Connector?
posted by pollystark at 3:02 AM on December 7, 2006

Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate the advice.
posted by krudiger at 10:06 AM on December 7, 2006