This won't be a wide spread thing. In most corporations, people won't want to piss off the boss-man by voting his answer down. Reputation is ego and ego in the work place gets ugly.

I disagree.

I work for a large (65000+ employees) telco company, and our in-house problem/solution reporting database is totally broken. The search function is crap (it's based on predefined keywords, not really on free text). It has a voting system, but the votes are not used to classify the quality of the problems/answers. They are only used to track how active an engineer is browsing the database. You can randomly select problems and write nonsense commnents, the net effect is the same.

With a corporate Stack Overflow there would be no employee/boss conflict, since in my company all the users on a given domain are at the same hierarchy level.

When I discovered Stack Overflow I inmediately thought how good this would be to replace our corporate tool.

And in really big technical organizations, it can be worse than that. It isn't just the boss man that you could tick off. And there would be the stigma of asking a question that your peers could judge you on.

Voting should of course be anonymous, just like it is here. The effect of this would be that votes would be a good measure of reputation because there are no politics involved in the voting, only opinion on whether the answer is good or bad.

I actually had some of the same thoughts thinking how StackOverflow might work in an organization. Hopefully it wouldn't get too bad, but it could bruise some egos to discuss programming problems openly.

Overall, though, I would have liked to see a Stack Overflow inside some of the larger organizations I've worked at.

We're actually pushing into the corporate space with ErrorHelp-- but there's a lot less ego involved there (everyone runs into random unknown errors, really). Answers grow passively rather than being something people have to read each day to provide answers.

Such a system doesn't necessarily have to involve voting.

Yes it does. The whole point is to separate the good answers from the bad answers.

No it does not. Editors can pick the best answers, replacing the voting mechanism.

I've been wondering if there's space for a sort of HN/PivotalTracker mashup, an intranet 'news'/'stories' board for improvised quick-iteration project management.

Story/tasks wouldn't decay with time, but only by being (1) finished; or (2) deprioritized with regard to others. Karma could be two-sided: points for proposing the right things, and (even more) points for actually implementing them.

(There'd be ways to estimate effort; split oversized items; claim/merge items to avoid redundancies; calculate community 'velocity' over time; etc.)

A few anchor project/community managers might have admin powers to pin certain overriding goals at top, or 'dead' digressions, or change the relative payoffs for proposing vs. doing, etc.

That is, what if a community much like HN compulsively hit 'reload' and earned karma not around ephemeral (often attention-abusing) 'news', but instead around incremental goals on a shared project?

How fundamentally different is Google Moderator? You have accounts voting questions up and down.

Add the answer component and that would be it, no?

It has poor searchability. I worked on it and I still wish grievous bodily harm on those who use it for FAQs.

If I had my way, we'd throw away the current GWT implementation for a version that used unobtrusive JS and was a good netizen. Of course, if I had my way all the time, I'd also have a pony.