The Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University is America 's oldest conservatory. It's a warm, happy, crazy, chaotic place. It's certainly not the kind of place where "centralized management" is a welcome idea.

To get to the heart of the Peabody , we enlisted the help of George Peabody himself. Peabody once said, "Our task isnot to bring order out of the chaos. It is to get work done in the midst of chaos." This became our direction. It was the most obvious way to marry the two seemingly disparate ideas of institutionalism and individualism. By allowing the individuals to express themselves, we would be able to harness their enthusiasm and expertise into a very telling institutional message without them even realizing what we were doing. Why tell the world how wonderful our faculty is? Why simply place photos and quotes on a page? Why not have the world interact directly with them?

We created a custom decentralized content management solution which embraced the culture and personality of the Peabody. This system allows EVERYONE in the Peabody community to publish content as easily as creating a document in Microsoft Word...and its web based. It takes the idea and technology of the web log and multiplies it by 1,000.

We then created a piece of functionality which allows people to share content between sites. By promoting sharing, we began creating links between people organically. We even created a piece of functionality which allows users to navigate the site by moving between people and their associations rather than by typical content categories...kind of a six degrees of Kevin Bacon kind of thing.

Finally, in order to push institutional goals even further, we created a series of rich media documentary features which highlight extraordinary members of an already extraordinary community. Macromedia liked the site so much in fact, that they decided to name it "Site of the Day" as an example of how to use their products to communicate effectively.

We are happy to report that the great decentralization experiment is working. Peabody has gone from 2 web publishers to over 200...and individual success stories abound. In fact, one of the lesser known Peabody faculty members has seen the number of incoming students who request to join her studio double since she began publishing personal content over the web.

It has, for all intents and purposes, brought individuals together while supporting institutional goals. Due to the success of the phase I launch, we are currently working with Peabody to optimize and expand their online communications initiative.