Private social media sites for the civil service should save time and money, a senior official has said.

A number of new websites have been launched aimed at helping civil servants find colleagues in other departments and work together collaboratively.

Andrew Stott, the government’s digital engagement director, launched the sites when he appeared at Civil Service Live, the conference organised by the Cabinet Office and Dods, the publisher of www.civilservicenetwork.com.

The project, which Stott described as "the internet for the civil service in private", consists of four main parts, including a wikipedia for the civil service called Civil Wiki, a Civil Blog, and an internal Twitter-like application called Civil Talk.

The project’s flagship Civil Pages – which cabinet secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell has jokingly called "the Facebook for the civil service, without the man in the Speedos" referring to holiday pictures of Sir John Sawers, the next head of MI6, which appeared on the popular networking site.

"We think it is going to save money", said Stott on Thursday, explaining that the sites would prevent knowledge being lost or duplicated.

"It is already showing value", he claimed, explaining how an official developing a corporate Twitter strategy found out via Civil Talk that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) already had one. This, the official reported at the time, "should save hours".

Stott said Civil Pages, an idea that originated during Civil Service Live’s Lions’ Lair competition, would be "a rich directory of personal and job profiles" searchable by name or any word in the job title or description.

User of the site can become members of closed and open communities - everything from project teams to departmental HR directors – with discussions and wiki documents which allow everyone to make amendments and comment.

Alternative systems exist, such as the directory on the government secure intranet (GSI), but Stott said they all had limitations, "a particularly unfriendly interface" in the case of the GSI.

"It is really a difficult problem: how do you find the right person to talk to who else is working on what you are working on, who can help? There is lots of information out there, but where is it," asked Stott.

A survey of civil servants "revealed that people find it less difficult to collaborate with the third sector or the private sector than they do with other departments", he added.

The lack of information for civil servants working on cross-government work areas has led Civil Service Live to develop a similar social networking and collaborative working network at http://network.civilservicelive.com.

On Civil Pages, unlike most social media sites, permission has to be sought to set up a community. Stott said this was not about "trying to restrict in any way", but about making sure the site was really going to help a community.

The site's popularity has exceeded expectations so far, according to Stott, with more than 5,000 users and 65 communities.

Stott said there would be a viral approach to marketing rather than a top down instruction that people must use it. "The civil service are not as proficient in the technology as other people," he said. "We have had some systems in the past", he explained, where "people aren't sure what they are doing and it peters out".

He warned that the new site was also susceptible to failure if people did not utilise it. "Communities that have ongoing leadership have struggled to get off the ground," he explained.

"Please, please, please fill in your profiles,” he begged. “I know you know who you are, but other people don't. You have got to do something to make the system useful to other people and they have got to do something to make the system useful for you," he warned.

Describing the project development as "innovative", he said it showed what the civil service "can do quickly and relatively cheaply if we put our minds to it", said Stott.

They had "stolen with pride from all sorts of people", he said, after looking at the internal communications systems used by IBM and the US intelligence services. "We have tried to, above all, to avoid the big IT project syndrome", he added.

Although Stott and his team asked for £3m, the cabinet secretary only agreed to £1m and £750,000 of that was kept back until it could be proved that the scheme was possible. They were also told to have it up and running within a year.

"We were a bit challenged," said Stott. At the moment the sites are free to use, but future funding will have to be found, he added.

Complex requirements such as security and accessibility have been put off until the initial development and Beta launch are complete, Stott said, in order to avoid spending a lot of time and money on something that may not have got off the ground.

There will be further developments as people begin to use the system and the project managers have held back 80 per cent of the development budget for dealing with problems and ideas that arise from user feedback. "We have tried to get something out there quickly, learn how people use it and then improve it further," said Stott.

"There is no right or wrong way to use it," he said. "People have already started to innovate and other people will find other uses."