Cahoots! News

Cahoots is a Web platform for building technical communities that focus primarily on answering questions and preserving knowledge for the future. Cahoots' model is based on extensive research, surveying, and experimentation, particularly focused on IT administrators (as opposed to developers, who tend to interact somewhat differently).

The primary mode of "community" today is discussion forums, with a growing emphasis on blogs and blog comments; wikis also play a role. However, most admins (over 90% in surveys) _start_ not by visiting given Web sites, but by searching for answers to specific questions. Discussion forums provide a poor means of answering questions, because future searches often hit discussion threads that either don't include an actual solution, or which require future readers to reconstruct the solution by means of the discussion's back-and-forth.

By contrast, Cahoots assumes that most users will start with a Google (or other engine) search, and seeks to answer questions and present information in a fashion that supports easy consumption by future searchers. Like StackOverflow.com, Cahoots supports a more formal Q&A model that formally documents the answer to a question - making it easy for future searchers to get the answer. Unlike StackOverflow, Cahoots supports somewhat more collaborative processes by offering users the ability to ask follow-up questions, and the original poster to offer follow-up responses.

Cahoots also recognizes that a minority of the community excels at not answer questions, but rather creating original content, and gives them a means to do so. "Lessons" (essentially blog posts with a focus on technical, rather than personal, articles), podcasts, Web site URLs, and so forth all help present and preserve knowledge. Collaboratively-edited "knowledge base" articles focus on problem/resolution style posts, but can be edited by the community as circumstances, tools, and techniques evolve and change (unlike OEM knowledge bases).

Cahoots also enables social networking-style functionality. Users can "become a fan" of users who produce useful content (essentially a less-intrusive, one-way analog of a FaceBook or MySpace "friends"). Questions posted by fans are surfaced to those fans' "celebrities," helping bring questions to the attention of key knowledge-holders who may be able to answer those questions.

Users within the community earn "esteem" by positively interacting with the community, and higher levels of esteem enable higher levels of functionality. For example, a minimum level of esteem is needed to enable collaborative editing features, helping prevent "wiki graffiti." There is no way to take esteem for ones self; esteem can only be earned from other members of the community. Cahoots also supports mciroblogging-style "nudges" that help users inform one another of new resources, techniques, tips, etc.

Plans for Cahoots call for highly-customizable e-mail and RSS notifications, helping users stay on top of what's happening within a community.

Unlike current CMS systems (Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, etc), Cahoots does not use a modular system and does not seek to provide a do-it-all platform for running a Web site. Instead, Cahoots focuses on supporting many different types of content (Q&A, blogs, podcasts, etc) that are geared toward knowledge preservation and presentation, while breaking down the barriers between these types of items - they don't live in "modules" but rather all live in the same flat "content space." This ensures that searches can return any type of content which may be useful to the searcher.

Cahoots relies entirely on tags rather than on a rigid static categorization. Tags allow the community to evolve and maintain its own taxonomy. High-esteem users can merge tags (collapsing similar categories such as "activedirectory" and "ad," for example), and can suggest aliases for tags (so that someone tagging an item with "ad" can receive "activedirectory" as a more appropriate choice).

Users within Cahoots can create Groups that are either public or invite-only. Group members can send "nudges" to the entire group, and the group itself can have an "interest feed" consisting of new items posted by specific users or containing specific tags. This allows people sharing an interest in a major subject area to also share a common activity feed of new content, and to communicate with one another more readily - essentially forming subject-focused sub-communities within the overall site.

Cahoots is written using cross-platform technologies: It is written in PHP, uses a database abstraction layer (MySQL, MSSQL, and PostgreSQL should all work when we're done), uses the CodeIgniter MVC framework, and utilizes JQuery for client-side functionality and AJAX. Cahoots should run on nearly any modern Web platform that supports PHP, using nearly any major back-end database engine. Cahoots is open source and is licensed under the GPL/MIT licenses.

As of this writing, Cahoots is in a pre v.1 release state, under internal development. We will begin posting roadmaps and documentation to the site's SourceForge project wiki in January 2009. Free, online, community-based support is provided on the site's SourceForge project page. Feature requests are accepted at http://cahoots.uservoice.com. Professional customization, support, community consulting and building, and other services are available from http://concentratedtech.com.