Frances Bell

Those in the UK might like to use this site http://www.dec.org.uk/

I think that is a really difficult challenge, and might vary at different stages of education, primary, secondary, etc (different sub-divisions in different countries).  In UK HE, a number of subject networks were established  for the Institute for Learning & Teaching, now subsumed into the Higher Education Academy, see http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/474.htm 
These networks were established top down with funding, but you may be looking at a community-led model.
Maybe for this a networked model might be better where each "thing" (site, content, whatever) could have multiple keywords (maybe one major).  I experienced this in technology with Lotus Notes and Learning Space.  It was really useful to be able to multiply categorise resources.
In the context of site-sharing it would help communication between clusters - what Etienne Wenger calls boundary-crossing objects.

Good post, David.  I think that trying to classify software and pin down definitions is really difficult - it may be better to work with local definitions e.g. In this paper CMS means .... 
We are working in fairly young and fast-changing field so definitions are bound to be fluid.  Also, most software packages do not fit neatly into a category - look at the (hush my mouth) MS Office desktop tools - Excel and Access both have database functionality so which is the DB package?  OSS communities demonstrate what has always happened, that software functionality changes over versions in response to user demands, and that users adapt the software to uses not imagined by the designers.
I really like moodle, and we are using it for a mix of community building and specific student collaborative activities (definitely not course management) at http://moodle.cabweb.net.  So why did we choose it?  Because it was recommended to us, met our basic requirements, and had a multi-lingual user interface that we thought would be useful on an international project.
The Jeff Veen blog entry makes very interesting reading, and it set me thinking about the moodle community.  Do we have graphic designers contributing to moodle development?

Good post, David.  I think that trying to classify software and pin down definitions is really difficult - it may be better to work with local definitions e.g. In this paper CMS means .... 
We are working in fairly young and fast-changing field so definitions are bound to be fluid.  Also, most software packages do not fit neatly into a category - look at the (hush my mouth) MS Office desktop tools - Excel and Access both have database functionality so which is the DB package?  OSS communities demonstrate what has always happened, that software functionality changes over versions in response to user demands, and that users adapt the software to uses not imagined by the designers.
I really like moodle, and we are using it for a mix of community building and specific student collaborative activities (definitely not course management) at http://moodle.cabweb.net.  So why did we choose it?  Because it was recommended to us, met our basic requirements, and had a multi-lingual user interface that we thought would be useful on an international project.
The Jeff Veen blog entry makes very interesting reading, and it set me thinking about the moodle community.  Do we have graphic designers contributing to moodle development?

We are doing something similar (but for University level students) with a Socrates Minerva project called Collaboration Across Borders.  During the first year of the project we have concentrated on collaborations between groups of students from the partners institutions but now  we are extending our networks.
We have implemented the CAB portal using moodle, and it is at  http://moodle.cabweb.net .  We offer specific collaboration spaces (like course) to be run by tutors, and are in the process of launching the HELP (Higher Education Learning Professionals ) and STudent networks.  We would welcome HE tutors to participate who may wish to organise international collaborations for their students, come to the portal and look for HELP.  The Student network is not quite ready for a public launch but we'll be sure to annouce here when it is.
So please do join us, look around and contact ELena Zaitseva if you need more information.
We are just starting a tutor discussion about the CAB ethos, an important issue in international and multi-cultural collaboration.