Ask HN: HackerNews for the Enterprise (Social Link, File and Q&A)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2359926

by JarekS • 15 years ago

1 4 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Dear HN,

I think I've identified a problem: There is no central place in the company for employees to share interesting information about business topics, ask questions and get meaningful answers. Currently all of this happens via email.

Don't you think that something like a private HN for the Enterprise could solve this problem (actually I'm thinking of a little bit Quora/HN solution)? Private and secure place where all the company employees go to ask questions, share links and have meaningful discussions about business topics they care about?

The key elements of the system:

1. topics (essentially tags that you can follow)

2. karma points (reward for being active and a way to find out what is more interesting - like on HN)

3. Ability to add links, files (doc templates?images?) and text (questions)

4. search

5. Quora like activity stream sorted by karma consisting of links, questions and other interesting info from topics you follow

Anyone here WANTS this kind of system in their company? Thanks in advance for feedback, Jarek.

PS. 2 mockups are here: http://sygitowicz.posterous.com/social-link-file-and-qa-for-your-company

JarekS2• 15 years ago

http://sygitowicz.posterous.com/social-link-file-and-qa-for-... - clickable link

mindcrime2• 15 years ago

Don't you think that something like a private HN for the Enterprise could solve this problem (actually I'm thinking of a little bit Quora/HN solution)?

Yep. In fact, I'm actively working on building something like that. Although I use Reddit as a comparison more than HN, and the scope goes further than a Reddit/HN clone, that's a big part of it.

If you're interested in looking at what I'm doing, it's all open source. See:

(project site):

http://code.google.com/p/neddick

(Github repo):

http://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick

(demo site):

http://spdemo.fogbeam.org:8080/neddick1/

(warning: the demo site can be abysmally slow at times, but I'm not promoting this real heavily yet, so I haven't put a lot of effort into make the demo real stable and performant.)

2. karma points (reward for being active and a way to find out what is more interesting - like on HN)

That and any notion of "gamification" is one thing I haven't done much with yet. I'm still undecided on the extent to which it has value in an organizational setting.

My approach is also less Quora like (I started before I discovered Quora, or maybe there would be more of a Quora influence), and is more like Reddit. But I'm working on another piece that I've been describing as a "sort of mini "Facebook" that will deal with managing social graph connections, and will have support of more of an "activity stream" type of thing.. I'm envisioning a very pub/sub model where you can subscribe to "things" you find interesting, whether that means "subscribe to this tag" or "subscribe to updates from this app" or "subscribe to status updates from this user," etc.

JarekS2• 15 years ago

Thanks! I'll take a look at this right now!

mindcrime2• 15 years ago

Cool. The demo can be kinda flaky right now. And one thing that's misleading, is that you have to be logged in to do certain things (like voting), but if you're not logged in, it doesn't give you any feedback if you try to vote - it just silently ignores it. This project is still in a very alpha stage... it's almost more of a Proof of Concept than anything at the moment. But I think it has a lot of potential.

If you want to talk more "offline" feel free to drop me an email.