It would be cool if a person could assemble an "overview" or "home" meta-page if you will, upon which they could add whatever content they want, from whatever community, and even from non-CS sources. Perhaps via feeds. It would exist outside the realm of any particular community (is this possible in current CS constructs?).

Then, that person could invite others to "watch" that custom-assembled page (or perhaps they can also add people's names as an option), which would result in the following:

• anyone can send email to the group of whoever is watching or added as a "member" of the custom page

• anyone with access to the page can read the aggregated content - if they want to contribute, they click on the content's title, which takes them to its original spot in its original community

• members with appropriate access can add more feeds to the meta-page

• the fact that someone is a member of the meta-page shows up somehow in their profile

• the meta-page is listed somehow on each member's personal home page

I've been contemplating this issue for a while also.  I believe that the silo-breaker are these common high level cross-silo discussions. The trick is to not force users to double post if the same discussion is relevant in their silo.  Here were a couple of ideas we had:

1) The idea of a tag is that it can live in multiple areas so this should be a good way to cross pollinate content.  I had hoped to create a few high level tagsets and have those act as virtual spaces.  Then if i wanted a document to show up in the cross-silo security area you could just tag it with a tag that is picked up in the tagset and it would live in the silo-breaker virtual space.  The problem I've run into with this concept is that tagsets only filter on the particular spaces content (i.e. it does not recurse down into subspaces).   It would be good to have a virtual space based on tagset so that you could set alerts on such space.

2) Add an option like Add a Link that links documents to other spaces.  That way you could at least have a top level silo-breaker that could have links into common discussions.  The problem here is that it takes extra work and knowledge of the top level silo-breaker space.  It's not as effective because some silos don't want too much attention brought into their silos so they might not want to pull other groups into their silo although they would not mind discussing an issue up in the top-level space.

>It would be good to have a virtual space based on tagset so that you could set alerts on such space.

The idea is that you would be able to register for notifications at these top virtual spaces. For example these would be regular nav spaces (maybe created by an option in the tagset ui):

"General Security" consists of items tagged with the general_security tagset

"General Software" consists of items tagged with the general_software tagset

You could set email alerts on the spaces or on the space that hosts these virtual spaces.

Same with the virtual link idea, it would still notify in both areas.