Collaborative projects as social networks

Institutions, large and small, are increasingly using Internet infrastructure, services and applications to decentralize staff and operations, evolving from a closed to an open house, networked environment, where more and more informal knowledge needs to be shared and managed. At the same time, with a very large percentage of corporate processes being formally supported by information systems, there is an ever increasing gap separating the institutions´ explicit and implicit knowledge silos. In this talk, we describe a social network infrastructure currently in use in a number of corporations and the way in which we are integrating the notion of project as an integral part of the system. We also discuss how such combination of formal/informal knowledge management can be an essential feature of collaborative work in corporations and development efforts in general.