The National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) aims to improve the quality of life for people of all ages who experience mental distress. Working beyond the National Health Service, NIMHE helps all those involved in mental health to implement change, providing a gateway to learning and development.

Following an open and inclusive consultation process across the country, NIMHE commissioned Headshift to help develop and implement the organisation's knowledge development strategy, starting with the specification of an innovative online knowledge community.

The idea is to share know-how, experiences, performance data, scientific information, policies, news, stories and contacts within a collaborative online environment, where users can find and interact with other people concerned with mental health, to create contextualised, practical knowledge that can help us improve service delivery.

Crucially, this system must support multiple, often conflicting perspectives on the same knowledge domain to reflect the diverse stakeholder communities supported by the project - from service users to clinicians to civil servants. For this reason, we have been required to think about new and innovative solutions for handling distributed metadata, which is a key feature of the project.

In addition to creating a key piece of organisational infrastructure supporting NIMHE's wider knowledge strategy, the project is also forging links and partnerships with a range of compatible third-party organisations in the public, private and voluntary sectors, focussing on content and audience development opportunities and providing long-term sustainability.