Connect with your professional colleagues

Share, PeerConnect’s social networking space, is where community members to get to know each other, an important dimension of community-building. Members interact informally to post and discuss news, views and information. It works like other social networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp etc. – but is designed specifically for professional interactions, with a high content-to-noise ratio to maximize its usefulness.

Tackle your challenges collectively

Consult, PeerConnect’s consultation forum, is where community members facing a challenge can tap into their colleagues’ knowledge to obtain experiences and insights for help with problem-solving. Where Share uses a fast-turnaround format, Consult relies on email to encourage in-depth, thought-through discourse.

Consult leverages PeerConnect’s diverse membership – professionals from governments, non-governmental and civil society organizations, academia and research institutes, donor sponsors, and the private sector – to obtain the full range of perspectives on any issue. Its guiding values are collegiality and trust. Collegiality is how members relate to each other – as professional peers, irrespective of the organization they work for or the level of their position. And collegiality helps build trust, which is critical for knowledge-sharing because only if you trust someone will you value the knowledge they have to offer. Unlike other sites, here there are no gatekeepers – you are the judge of the quality of the advice; sound advice increases your trust of the contributor.

Turn your insights into actions

Collaborate, PeerConnect’s collaboration forum, offers workspaces and tools for teams of community members – called “Action Groups” – to develop product ideas generated from Consult deliberations.

Member challenges posted to Consult can inspire creative solutions - policy ideas, research proposals, business processes, guidelines, etc. - and motivate sponsors to convene Action Groups for product formulation assignments. These products have excellent prospects for success and impact. They derive from a clearly identified need, are fully informed from the range of member perspectives, build on existing products to become the “state of the art,” have a sponsor to champion their introduction and dissemination, and enjoy Community buy-in when rolled out.

Put community knowledge to work

Engage is where your community leverages its power to make something happen in the world. It is not one platform like the other PeerConnect services; rather, it is a portfolio of Action Group products and offerings contributed by PeerConnect members that benefit a target group through collective community action. Any member can suggest a promising application or business process to be included in the Engage portfolio for others to test, implement, improve or adapt.

Build and access the Google for Knowledge

Collect is PeerConnect’s publicly accessible global repository of knowledge assets compiled from all the communities that PeerConnect supports.

Knowledge assets - experiences, reflections, readings, relevant experts and organizations, tools, technologies etc. - are the essence of PeerConnect’s value to professionals wanting to be more effective or impactful. Collect knowledge assets are indexed by community, source, keywords, contributors and other metadata, so that items can be cross-referenced by any attribute. The vision, as PeerConnect installations proliferate, is to build the “Google for Knowledge” – a global knowledge base where anyone can quickly find just the resources and contacts they need.