Experimental Directory Service

Many organizations maintain contact information about other organizations and individuals that they work with. Much of this information is publicly available, but difficult to find, and located on many different web sites, so people collect it in personal address books, in their heads, etc.

For example, I happen to know that the main UK organization that campaigns on the Tobin Tax is War on Want. I also know that the name of War on Want's Tobin Tax campaigner is David Hillman, and I have his email address somewhere. If you were looking for a UK Tobin Tax campaigner, you could probably find all this out by doing some web searches, but it might take you a while, and you might get some false positives before concluding that Hillman is really the person you want to talk to.

So let's say my organization occasionally participates in Tobin Tax campaigns. We might find it useful to have an online directory, with entries like this:

• Organizations
  • War on Want
    • Note: Runs the main Tobin Tax campaign in the UK. We've participated in some of their events.
    • People
      • David Hillman
        • Note: Runs the Tobin Tax campaign.
        • (email address)

It would be good if everyone in my organization could contribute to this directory. After going to an event and making some contacts (e.g. meeting the person who is responsible for XYZ in some other organization), they could immediately add those contacts to the directory. This would go a long way towards public ownership of knowledge.

The 'notes' entries would be the key to making it useful, by showing the relevance of the entry, possibly by including (as above) information about relationships between organizations and individuals.

I think this might be easy enough to do by providing a web-based LDAP browser/editor. Here's one we might consider:

• phpLDAPadmin