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It’s important, I think, for the Open Source community to recognise that there needs to be a collation of tools to make that one killer app - straying away from the “do one thing and do it well” mentality, sure, but that’s where things seem to be headed. Mediawiki + Unobtrusive Sidenotes + a good WYSIWYG editor + some way to integrate with OpenOffice/KOffice + an email interface for email-to/from-wiki + good RSS Feeds + LDAP/AD Authentication + iCalendar (or some wikiable calendar) + exporting to PDF + whatever else as one package will provide some really stiff competition to Sharepoint, which is only improving in integration with Office with the upcoming 2007 release. You could probably use a bit of AJAX to do a number of the extras. Something like Confluence. Without of course taking Mediawiki too far down the same path as Sharepoint - it’s important that at its core, Mediawiki remains a wiki and not a bastardised spawn-of-wiki-CMS.

Work organizations increasingly adopt shared electronic databases. However, employees' unwillingness to contribute to shared resources undermines the utility of such technologies. Current research is limited to either a utilitarian or normative perspective. To advance understanding in this area, this study proposes a three-dimensional framework. It includes the utilitarian and normative perspectives as two complementary dimensions in addition to a third collaborative dimension. Based on this framework, the study identifies three key organizational processes and advances an additive model to predict employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases. An empirical test was conducted to assess the model in a large manufacturing organization. The test showed both significant overall effects of the model and significant main effects of each predictor variable. The article will discuss the findings and address both theoretical and practical implications. Key Words: information sharing • collective action • organizational knowledge • knowledge management • collaboration • communities of practice • identification