This article describes the e-Catalunya project which is an experience that has taken place in Catalonia (Spain) consisting in developing, setting up and using a social network platform to improve collaboration and knowledge management between professional collectives that work on public services related areas.

As a result of the project, an open source platform has been obtained, the ECAT platform, which supports different kind of communities with a highly configurable level of privacy. The platform offers a set of collaboration tools and a powerful administration environment that makes it easy to configure it to suit the different collectives' needs.

Since 2005 it is reachable at ecatalunya.gencat.net . It is considered as an innovative service being a key element in the strategy of the Catalan government towards providing web 2.0 based services in order to improve the transparency of administration and government and to increase participation of citizens.