Social Glass

We’ve been doing some work within my group to build an E2.0 (or at least a partial E2.0) collaboration system. Initially we’ve concentrated on using open source technologies for budgetary and other reasons. The solution is currently very wiki based although we’re starting to make use of Enterprise Search and Social Bookmarking.

But in doing my research on open source options, it strikes me as odd that no one has created an open source E2.0 application that integrates Mediawiki (wiki), Wordpress (blogging), bbPress (discussion), elgg (social networking) and scuttle (social bookmarking). All of these are PHP-based and open source, so integrating them would seem like an obvious thing to do.

I know that Avenue-A-Razorfish has tweaked Mediawiki to integrate more E2.0 features, but it doesn’t seem that they’ve released the fruits of their effort to the public.

The technical challenge to overcome with integration of disparate applications would be:

• Single Sign-on: Users login once and are then logged in to each application
• Integrated Tags: Each application has its own concept of tag. Tags need to be shared.
• Look and Feel: Styles and themes need to be the same across the suite to give the appearance of cohesiveness.
• I’m sure there are more…

Spikesource did something similar with Suite Two which is worth checking out if you haven’t already.
Maybe I’ll rise to the challenge, brush up on my PHP programming skills, and give it a shot.