Scholar for Knowledge Workers

An online environment for knowledge communities, harnessing collective intelligence and nurturing collaborative learning. Scholar has five publishing spaces where people work closely to create knowledge and learn— Creator, Publisher, Community, Bookstore, and Conference. You can use just one of these, or several or all of them together.

The Scholar Idea

‘Scholar’ is an idea as old as humanity. A scholar is a seeker of knowledge, a learner, a thinker, an innovator. Common Ground has created a web environment to support knowledge communities of all kinds. Scholar environment is a space designed specifically for creating, evaluating and sharing knowledge and to support learning.

Scholar moves beyond the fragmented and chaotic world of emails, social media posts and documents—the world of personal computing as we know it today. It brings to you into the world of a new, smoothly integrated communication and collaboration paradigm we call ‘interpersonal computing’.

Making the most of the latest ‘cloud’ computing technologies, you can use Scholar to create shared works, and get various forms of feedback on these works as you create them, including reviews, annotations and surveys. You can create projects in publishing communities where the members of the group collaborate. You can publish these works to the web, share them with each other or with the world. Your community members and (if you allow them access) the public can talk around your works, or about other things of interest to your knowledge community.

Scholar is the ideal place for the creation and publication of new knowledge, from informal posts that prompt conversations among peers, to formal peer review and publication of journal articles and books. It represents a quantum leap beyond the old fashioned document formats, change-tracking routines, and file-shuffling publication systems.

Creator 

A semantic web processor and multimodal web authoring space.

Creator is a next-generation semantic web processor, leaving behind the world of typographic markup invented by Johannes Gutenberg and his successors in the second half of the fifteenth century. Information architecture in Creator must be explicitly designed, naming structural and semantic feature, such as emphases and the organizational elements of a text. This is instead of the typographic language of fonts and point sizes which clutter word processors. With its revolutionary ‘structure’ tool, you can rapidly plan texts in Creator, as simple as dragging and dropping different elements of the text as your ideas evolve.

Creator also ends the ghettoization of different communication modes. You can just as easily add videos, sound, images or any other file as you can type text—all at once, and all together in the same space. Creator is like a blog, a word processor, a video site, an image site and a file upload site. But because it is all of these things, it also something different. It is a genuinely multimodal space for the representation of ideas and knowledge.

Another powerful features is its parallel ‘work’ and ‘about the work’ spaces. These are divided by a curtain which can be pulled backwards and forwards depending on your focus for the moment—the work is on the left, and on the right are tools that support social and feedback dialogues about the work including Review, Annotations, Survey and Checker using advance natural language processing methods to make change suggestions.

Using Creator’s collaborative web environment, knowledge workers are able to produce everything from short articles or videos with comments to works as long and complex as reports and books. They can include videos, image, sound, datasets and any other file in their texts. They can then share their finished works with the world in print or electronic formats.

Publisher

A space for organizing projects, where members of knowledge producing communities can interact closely with each other as they develop their works.

Publisher allows you to design and manage publishing projects. As a publisher, you can decide who will be involved and invite them to join in. You can plan who does what, in what order, and by what deadline. You can ask people to review, annotate or complete surveys on the work, either anonymously or with the creator and the person giving the feedback knowing each other’s identity.
You can also customize your publishing tools: create a review format, suggest annotation criteria or design a survey. You can save these to use again in a later project, or share with others to use in their projects.

Publisher is the most comprehensive, easy-to-use and systematic knowledge evaluation and project management infrastructure available today. It is ideally suited for knowledge, design, and cultural communities – professional or amateur – supporting powerful of modes of community evaluation.

Community

A web forum and social media space, supporting vibrant peer-to-peer interactions in knowledge communities.

Community is all of the things we have come to expect in today’s social media, but in one, seamlessly integrated space. As much it is reminiscent of existing social media, Community is also subtly different. It has an activity stream that does not restrict the lengths of posts. It connects people using the logic of ‘peers’ rather than ‘friends’ or ‘followers’. You can share personal profile information as widely as a community allows, but also supplement this with a portfolio of your works—both published works and unpublished works in a ‘shares’ space. You can create new community groups in which you assume the role of ‘community admin’.

Academic research groups, amateur interest groups, businesses, publishers, community organizations and teaching departments can use Community to stay connected with present and past community members, and make connections with new members.

Coming soon: Bookstore and Conference.

Bookstore

Where creators and publishing communities share finished works with their communities, or offer them to the wider world.
In Bookstore, individuals and communities can decide which of their finished works they want to make available within their community or to wider world through the web. Electronic materials can be made available for free or at a price, and libraries can purchase subscriber access for priced material. Printed books and other physical products can also be offered through Bookstore.
Bookstore is a fully functioning service for innovative self-managing knowledge communities as well as traditional publishers. It provides an avenue for authors and publishers to take their work directly to the world—for free or at a charge. To charge or not to charge is a strategic decision to be made by the bookstore owner. Bookstore can also serve as the basis for sustainability strategies in which non-profit groups, businesses, research institutes or teaching departments create a supplemental revenue stream.

Conference

A space for managing in-person or virtual meetings.

Conference is designed to serve conferences which have a focus on participant knowledge sharing more than the traditional conference mode of presenter knowledge transmission with audience passively listening. Includes calls for presentations, program scheduling, conference registration, and pre-or post-conference publication using Creator and Publisher.