The Onomi Project: A Case Study in Enterprise Social Bookmarking

Onomi: Social Bookmarking on a Corporate Intranet: MITRE tried social bookmarking on their intranet. They took Scuttle, an open-source bookmark management system (a lot like del.icio.us, but installable), modified it a bit, then unleashed it on their 5,000 employees.

This white paper explains what led to the experiment, and the steps they went through setting it up.

In order to assess the value of social software, we have embarked upon a 6-month pilot, or trial period, where we are striving to reach critical mass through marketing strategies and targeting influential figures with large, social networks. Our goal is to demonstrate the utility of social bookmarking within our corporation and to explore some of the social influences and behavioral evolution.

Sadly, I’ve found little discussion of what actually happened. The experiment began in in mid-2006 and was set to last six months, so it should be long done by now. The only discussion of the results I’ve seen is this post at Portals and KM:

They created a core group of individuals who set the foundation for creating tags. These core people will keep the system robust. A larger group uses the system but does not add to it.

[…] The average tagger has about 35 bookmarks and uses 3 to 4 tags for each item on average. They have promoted it in several ways. The posting of banner ads on the corporate intranet have led to immediate increased use. They also held meetings to promote the system. They posted use cases for the system to give others ideas and motivate them to use it.

I’d be interested in other information about how this experiment ended.