Who is the 
Martin Prosperity Institute?
The Challenge: 
Inspiring Academics to 
Collaborate & Share
The MPI Portal 
v1.0
(drumroll, please!)
Why v1.0
(mostly) Failed
What we learned, 
and what we're doing next
A sneak peak of 
our latest prototype
Meanwhile, some of our other social media experiments didn't fail
We are an academic think tank that studies global prosperity in terms of location, place and city regions.

Led by Director Richard Florida, we take an integrated view of prosperity, looking beyond economic measures to include the importance of quality of place and the development of people’s creative potential.

We’re part of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

SharePoint was an Easy Win (for now):
Free!
Already installed on server
Compliant with our IT dept
Great document mgmt
Version control
Integration with MS Office
Secure
Multi-level user access
Accessible via web
Quick to implement
Free!

Research Directors
Operations Team
Research Team
Growing community of 
international research affiliates
Requirements
Quick 'n Dirty
Evaluation Process
Good Enough,
For Now
What Works:

•Great integration w/ MS Office
•Web-based interface is available anywhere
•Version control is very good
•Easy to roll back to previous versions
•Easy to see who edited the document last
What Doesn’t:

•Requires users to log in repeatedly; no single-sign-on
•Dependent on IE browser; other browsers render the page incorrectly
•Limited features, especially when wanting to add feeds and other external content
•Heavy simultaneous use causes it to freeze; 
•Users have to remember to access all their work via SharePoint
•Limited social media tools
•No fun!!

We began by thinking about content, and organization, which are both important;

Diving in without any planning or strategy provided us with a great way to learn about how we work, both online and offline;

SharePoint works, although it’s not completely successful;

We didn’t think enough about the most important component: people.

There is
Joy & Sorrow with
Iterative Design & 
Rapid Prototyping
Moving towards Social Knowledge Management
KM is not just about managing knowledge; it’s about mining the social interactions that create knowledge.

We want to capture knowledge, and then place it in a context to the people who have created it, and use it.

SharePoint Strengths:
It’s already installed, and our files are already there
Our users are familiar with it
Our IT dept supports it (MS platform)
Lots of space
Excellent security
Confluence Strengths:
Better user experience (UX)
Easy to add social media 
Easy to add external content
Personal spaces that are easy to customize
Lots of plugins
The Best of Both:

Cross-product searching
Content sharing between SharePoint and Confluence
Take advantage of the easy-to-use Confluence interface, and still have our documents and data supported by IT.
Thank you for your attention.

Find me at:
E: kimberly.silk@rotman.utoronto.ca
Twitter: kimberlysilk

Social Knowledge Management in an 
Academic Research Environment:A Case Study

Presented by Kimberly Silk, MLS
Data Librarian, Martin Prosperity Institute
Report released to Premier February 2009
Project begun May 2008
15 on-site researchers
22 off-site academics contributing working papers