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Experworks is the place where you and your communities can answer the question "Who do I know who…?"

Originally arising from a conversation at church several years ago, it was noted that it was almost impossible to know what other folks at church did, either for work or play, in order to identify possible resources.

This led to a discussion of how to solve this problem. Each of us has said to a friend or acquaintance, "who do we know who…" when trying to find that trusted source who could meet a need. Trust is essential; most of us have numerous advertising and online sources to seek a solution to problems. Those types of resources are limited, however, since there is no network of trust. Experworks allows communities with such a network of trust to facilitate the exchange of information so that community members can find help with needed knowledge, skills, and interests.

These communities come in various forms: your church, your club, your professional community, your alumni community, your friends. Experworks is designed to allow you to share only those items you want to share within and outside each community of which you are a member.

Each community may be private (only members are aware it exists, membership by invitation), publicly viewable but invite-by-application, or publicly viewable and joinable. Each community defines its own information available to members.

Users join communities and share information about themselves by creating a personal profile. Other members of the same community can find you based on the information you provide. It's that easy.

Yes. Communities decide who's in. There's no public sign-up flow that lets strangers into your group. Members invite people they actually know, and community owners can require approval before invites go out.

This is the core of the trust model — you should always recognize the people sharing the room with you.

Really. Posts appear in chronological order. There's nothing for sale on the page. Your data isn't sold, studied, or shared with anyone outside the communities you've chosen.

Experworks is member-funded — that's why we don't need to be in the attention business.

Experworks lets you share several different types of information about yourself. This includes basic personal information such as your phone number(s), address(es), email(s), and website(s) as well as your educational and work background and interests.

One unique aspect of Experworks: each individual piece of information can be shared with as many or as few communities as you wish. Share one phone number with one community and an entirely different phone number with another. Likewise, share intimate interests with close-knit communities while only revealing what you wish to more general audiences.

To get started, click the gear icon in the navbar (or any of the items in the menu that appears when you hover over it). To add information, click the green circle with a white plus inside it next to the relevant category. Then enter the information, choose which communities to share it with, and click Save.

So what makes for a good profile entry? It depends on the context. "Design and implementation of management information and decision support systems for law offices, including time and billing analysis, time utilization and productivity analysis, and docket control. Data structure analysis, design, and programming for MySQL and Filemaker. PHP and HTML web implementation." is much better than "Software development." The latter makes a good title, but not a good description.

To edit information, click the three dots next to the relevant entry and select Edit. Make changes and click Save.

When describing your interests or other activities, remember to include copious detail. A second example: "I have been extensively involved in politics, primarily Democratic, for more than 45 years. I have participated in a number of ways." is not as good as "I have been extensively involved in politics, primarily Democratic, for more than 45 years. I have participated in a number of ways, including research as a college student to determine student issues, precinct chair, delegate to numerous county/senatorial and state conventions, campaign work, and running as a candidate for office. I am also interested in how we as a society make decisions and the values those decisions reflect."

All the information you provide and share with a community is searchable by that community. Interests you share also show up in their interest word cloud.

To have your information appear in a community directory, share the relevant information on your profile with that community. Only fields you explicitly share with each community are visible to other members of that community.

A community directory is like a phone/address book that everyone shares, where each member is responsible for their own data. Each member has full control over how their data appears in the directory — choose whether to share a particular piece of information with the community, update existing information, or remove data as needed. On Experworks, community directories are fully searchable.

All community members have access to both a compact and expanded directory. The compact directory contains each member's primary phone number and address. The expanded directory includes all of a person's phone numbers and addresses as well as any emails or websites they've chosen to share with the community.

Although your group owner may set specific policies, posts in Experworks are generally intended as communications that might be of interest to the group as a whole, not personal communications. Depending on the source and purpose of the group, event announcements, skill and work requests, and topics of general shared interest are typically appropriate.

The primary purpose of Experworks is to let you find people you already know within communities you trust. Navigate to either your main feed (by clicking the gear icon in the navbar) or a specific community page (by hovering over the community icon in the navbar) and enter any term of interest into the search box at the top.

It's a word cloud containing all the most popular interests in your communities. Click one to find out who you know that is interested in that topic.

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