For knowledge sharing within an organization, you need several tools. Start with these two:

1. Instant messaging (Skype, Lync etc.). An always on medium for transient communications. Separate channels for departments, groups and topics. Quick audio/video conferences.

2. Microblogging for Facebook-style communications (Yammer etc.). Share info, links, documents, calendars and ask questions. Becomes a powerful searchable database of hidden knowledge.

Those are the low-maintenance and easily adopted options. Then, if there are people with time and motivation, you can add blogs and wikis. A reference manager is also essential in a research setting, and modern solutions (Mendeley, Zotero) have collaboration features.

That said, the most difficult problem is always to get people to use the systems. If possible, add new functionality into an existing system instead of introducing yet another service to get better adoption.

We are currently officially on a Skype/Yammer setup but in practice most people are using WhatsApp/Facebook.

Personally, blog is my favourite Web 2.0 tool for knowledge sharing. If you refer to the link below, I have designed multiple blogs for different teaching and learning purposes. Additionally, the blog posts can be shared via a variety of social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Scoop.it. Web-based Cognitive Writing Instruction (WeCWI) at http://wecwi.blogspot.com is my latest edublog which I am working on currently.

http://mahboonyih.blogspot.com

For knowledge sharing within an organization, you need several tools. Start with these two:

1. Instant messaging (Skype, Lync etc.). An always on medium for transient communications. Separate channels for departments, groups and topics. Quick audio/video conferences.

2. Microblogging for Facebook-style communications (Yammer etc.). Share info, links, documents, calendars and ask questions. Becomes a powerful searchable database of hidden knowledge.

Those are the low-maintenance and easily adopted options. Then, if there are people with time and motivation, you can add blogs and wikis. A reference manager is also essential in a research setting, and modern solutions (Mendeley, Zotero) have collaboration features.

That said, the most difficult problem is always to get people to use the systems. If possible, add new functionality into an existing system instead of introducing yet another service to get better adoption.

We are currently officially on a Skype/Yammer setup but in practice most people are using WhatsApp/Facebook.

Forgot to mention that I asked a similar question last year, and received many useful answers:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_kind_of_software_and_online_services_are_research_labs_using_for_social_collaboration_and_project_knowledge_and_lab_management10

Thank you Boon & Janne,

Yes, I agree about the importance of getting people to use the system, and the confusion that appears when adopting different tools, and the more integration between the tools, the better adoption by the users.

I would also add 'Dropmark', where you can share bookmarks,files,pictures, and presentations on a shared wall (yourwall.dropmark.com) and categorize them.

The best will always be the ones that are useful in each particular situation. But I can suggest some interesting ones which may or may not be Web 2.0:

Instant shared blackboard: Twiddla.com

Instant event planning: doodle.com

Collaborative issue-based decision-making: bcisiveonline.com

Content management systems (many are free)

Groupware or Workflow management systems or task management (e.g. BCSW)

Learning environments are not only for formal learning (e.g. Moodle)

Social bookmarking (delicious, faviki)

Information management at an organization can be seen from an enterprise social media framework perspective. Keeping an eye on the requirements for a Social Business, IBM Lotus Connections platform has a lot of futuristic and end-end to collaborative capabilities.

"Why search every low and high,

when good things could not be closer by."

If you are looking for an open system why not using RG? You can share your work with the colleagues you want to collaborate in projects, publish results as datasets that can be commented by a far-reaching community.

Thank you all,

bcisiveonline.com is interesting as a collaborative decision making tool.

@Michael, yes, RG can be a good option, but I think there is no tool can provide all the capabilities that are offered by the other tools, that's why I believe that the best option is to find a set of tools considering the privacy issue and the level of integration between them.

In my opinion Dropbox and in general cloud-tools are very usefull to share information and results with your colleagues and to manage an organization's knowledge. Furthermore your data is always up to date because everyone works with the same files and the changes are updated immediately.

Yes, something very useful in dropbox is that it protects the shared files from loosing any content, especially in the text documents.

To those already mentioned, I would add wikis and blogs. While wikis are more collaborative in their creation, blogs still offer an opportunity for sharing ideas. Folksonomies are a collaborative organization structure used by many large firms and small community groups.

@Rami, you mentioned privacy issues, which in the light of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing seems to change the scope a bit, providing he's right in his claims.

As a consequence of PRISM and TEMPORA and any other attack on individual and organizational privacy, people should shy away from cloud sharing ideas that are of some importance for their organizations. This includes RG, of course. Is it all in my imagination?