The interdisciplinary workshop "Social Software @ Work" was held on September 28th and 29th, 2009, in Düsseldorf, Germany, to promote discussion and an exchange of knowledge between information scientists and information management practitioners at companies and public institutions. Presentations covered a wide range of topics, such as corporate blogging, the impact of social software on corporate culture, teaching and knowledge management via social software, social information retrieval systems and personalized search. These proceedings present six papers that approach these issues in an exemplary fashion.
'People Tagging' zum Kollaborativen Kompetenzmanagement" [Collaborative Competency Management through People Tagging]. The authors present how folksonomies can be used to collaboratively describe and characterize employees and their competencies to enable finding the "right" people. Their approach is complemented with a community-driven ontology editor that employees can use to customize the tagging and competency vocabulary according to their needs. •
In "Social Software, Wikinomics & Co: Fitness-Programm für Organisation, Kultur und Kommunikation von Unternehmen" [Social Software, Wikinomics & Co: Fitness Training for Companies' Organisation, Culture and Communication] Michael Scheuermann takes the bird's eye view of the workshop's main topic "social software at work". He focuses on the challenges and opportunities of using social software in enterprise settings and takes a closer look at the implications for companies' structural organisation, business models, corporate culture and communications. Additionally, he discusses the competencies and strategies pivotal to optimally using social software in corporate settings.
A complete overview of the workshop’s presentations and participants can be found on the website www.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/social-software. Presentation slides are available via www.slideshare.net/event/social-software-work-sosoft09.
We would like to thank our speakers and participants for the active exchange of ideas and the many fruitful discussions as well as Elsevier B.V. and the Institute for International Communication (IIK) for sponsoring this event.