Enter Partnerpedia from Constructive, a developer of partner management solutions. It combines social media, online collaboration and partner management, and is available free online. It targets freelancers and small businesses wanting to better manage their partner relationships.

The value proposition for web workers for partnering is rather simple — you can pursue deals that require multiple skill sets and larger staffs than an independent freelancer typically musters. Think of classic partnerships like the writer and graphic designer, or the web programmer and the web designer, that fill crucial skills gaps for a project. Partnerpedia aims to be the management tool of choice for these sorts of partnerships.

Set Up Your Partner Network
You don’t have to be a partner marketing manager to take advantage of this service. In fact, you don’t even need to be a marketing person! After creating a login on the home page, there is a simple process to go live and start managing your partner relationships:

Add My Company. You have the option to find and connect to your employer if it’s already live on the service. If your company’s not there, you can create a company profile through an easy-to-use, wizard-driven process, up to and including creating a partner application form for your company.

Find Contacts. Search site members for contacts that you know personally and professionally through this simple search form. There is also the option to invite contacts who aren’t already on Partnerpedia.

Find Partners. You can search Partnerpedia for potential business partners via a detailed and decidedly non-IT centric search form. I see this as a real plus, because there is a whole big world of partner requirements out there not in the IT industry.

Manage Partners. Your partner community requires proper care and feeding. The Manage Partners feature lets you monitor all your partner relationships throughout the full life cycle of your working relationship.

Start a Collaboration
The strength of Partnerpedia is its collaboration tools. Starting a collaboration with a partner enables you to share documents and hold online discussions.

You also have the option to make the collaboration public. However, all stakeholders should have input into the security you put in place with any online collaboration tool. This is especially true with potential and existing business partners, because in many cases you’ll be dealing with sensitive corporate information.

Final Thoughts on Partnerpedia

This is a well-designed service and I had a positive experience with it during my evaluation. My two lingering concerns are its potential reach to build a robust partner community that can benefit web workers and the lack of help content for members who aren’t badge-carrying partner marketing people and as such, may need guidance constructing their first partnering agreement. However, I want to give Constructive the proper amount of time to cultivate the Partnerpedia ecosystem before I pass final judgment.

How do you find and manage business partners?

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I plan to spend a week visiting family in Ohio over the holidays. I will have hours on the plane and in airports, and I’ll have even more time in the evenings after the rest of the family is in bed and my body is still on Pacific time. I could spend it curled up and relaxing with some fiction printed on dead trees, but how productive would that be?

With any luck, you might also have a few slow days during the holidays: clients are on vacation, the family is driving you nuts, and you’re caught up on “real work.” What now?

I even have a wish list that I hope will help me turn this into a productive holiday.

Work on my eBook. The writing is the easy part for me, and I have it mostly written. The tough part that I’ve been putting off includes editing and fleshing out the weak areas.

Do a few more Yahoo Pipes screencasts. It would be great to record and edit a few extra episodes and have a queue of podcasts for later when I don’t have as much free time. Last weekend, I recorded two screencasts that I just might be able to edit / encode during my travel time.

Spend time on business development. The holidays are not the best time to email people and schedule meetings to talk about new business, but I’m hoping to come with a plan and a list of people to contact after the holidays.

Catch up. I guess I could even spend a few hours replying to some people in my email backlog and cranking through a few neglected items on the to-do list, but only as a last resort when I can’t find anyone to play Scrabble.

Did you notice that my wish list is filled with items that can be completed with little or no internet access? I have the additional constraint of spending my holiday in a rural area where dial-up internet is common. So far, companies aren’t even planning to have cable and DSL in that area for many years (if ever). Even my EVDO access is barely faster than dial-up on the older cell networks.

Despite these constraints, I was able to come up with a plan.

What about you? How do you plan to use your holiday time?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks