Organizations have a lot to keep track of: contacts, contracts, policies, procedures, customers, calendars, todos, research, files...   If you don't manage your knowledge, it can cease to be knowledge at all.

One strategy for keeping it all straight is to plan for every kind of information you're ever going to have and arrange slots to fit it all into.  In the data world, this would be a structured data solution.  So long as there are no surprises and you manage to think of everything that might come up for your organization beforehand, that solution works perfectly.  In other words, it never quite works. 

Another route is to avoid formal structure, amass information in one central space, and try to label things really well and write lots of reminders to yourself about where you're putting things.  A popular example of this unstructured data solution is the wiki, as on  Wikipedia.org.  So long as you don't need to be able to use your data like in a database -- things like automatic updates, rich queries, filtered noise, and dynamic reports -- your organization will have no problems.  In other words, you've still got problems.

WagN seeks to offer the best of both worlds.  An open-source ruby-on-rails web-based application originally designed for keeping track of information about the social and environmental impacts of companies and their products, WagN is maturing into a general-purpose tool that simply and elegantly grows with your organization to meet its data needs as they become clear.

WagN divides the world into "cards."  A card can contact a phone number, a date, a piece of programming code, a todo item, a product identification number, a biographical paragraph, a multi-page report, an image, another card.... just about anything.  It's easy to create and edit cards through a web browser, and to browse through all the earlier card revisions, just like with other wikis.  But with WagN, you can also relate and filter and sort and cards just like with a database.  So instead of having to look through whole pages for the little piece of information you need, you can go straight to the piece!

With WagN, you neither overcommit to an organizational scheme nor forgo structure altogether -- you organize as you go.  If, for example, you start by keeping basic information for your organization's business contacts, for example, but find you need to add a little note here for a phone message, or a number here for an amount owed, or a date there for a birthday, you can use WagN to develop a system for those things as they come up.  As topics are repeated, they get greater and greater emphasis on the site, reinforcing patterns so that structure emerges alongside the need for it.  You don't have to hire a data specialist to rework your database and add new interface and retrain your whole staff.  You just add it.

Grass Commons puts a premium on both freedom and flexibility and  on community and collaboration.  Since WagN is open source, you can also feel free to adapt the software itself to fit your own needs.  You own the data, and you even have fine-grained control over who can view and edit which cards.  And of course, the whole point is that you're free to organize and re-organize your information as you need to without having to resort to drastic, expensive software overhauls.  But all of this freedom is best spent on collaboration, and that is both the essence of the tool and the deep hope of its creators: that WagN will help us cultivate and share collective wisdom.