I have posted before under the title Clearspace Y, a phase I coined to cover the simultaneous implementation of Clearspace (Internal) and Clearspace X (External). Indeed, I have by-and-large implemented this with our own Clearspace implementation. It consists of two main sub-spaces, one covering the internal community, the other external communities.

Clearspace Y is not what Clearspace is designed to do since there are some holes in achieving sufficient separation . A good example of this is people information which is visible across the communities. I've had some success with blogs since the blog access control is orthogonal to the space access control. I really like the aggregation of blogs so that you can collate them for different user groups.

The worry of course is publishing something that you don't want to go outside of your Chinese walls - an odd concept for a community I know. However, what's needed is the best of both worlds - privacy and openness. After all even Clearspace has the ability to send private emails and enclosed collaborative workflow approvals.

So, should we have one instance of Clearspace Y to service both communities?

Or, should we think more in terms of federating two or more Clearspace instances?

Perhaps I should declare my own take on what federation means. Federation is where related communities are free to do their own thing but agree on certain commonality for mutual benefit - some content is shared, other content is  not. A common platform architecture and functionality certainly underpins a lot that can be done to share and collaborate.

Federation perhaps has these two aspects: platform and content. Either way the aim is to blur the boundaries and share more. I see this scenario as being more likely in smaller organizations than larger ones.

In technical circles Federation has some specific meaning which can be similar, but I'm not trying to imply some grand technical solution. Rather I'd first like to explore the notion and validity of how two or more communities at a macro level could benefit from being more closely linked.

I can envisage some truly common areas that embrace openness and discovery. One of the most powerful aspects of Clearspace is what I call the churn view or the what's new - be it a blog, discussion or document. It's the froth coming to the top. The heritage from this coming from discussion groups.

I also see the need for private areas - be it internal/external partitions or external/external e.g. a customer project space.

Returning to the churn, its what gets aggregated into this churn that makes it even more powerful - I will to be seen, if I'm interesting, I'll get popular. We'd need the ability to make content aggregateable ( the want that leads to the will), much like we can do with blogs. However, I would suspect that aggregating whole spaces may be too large grained. 

Attractable content also applies to specific shared spaces i.e. two groups want to work jointly on something. I've partly implemented this using sub-spaces, the parent being the common area and the sub-spaces the private aspects. The parent level being the aggregation, if you have access rights to the sub-spaces as well. I'd say for this that space level granularity would probably be OK.

Well there's the thought.