Community Platforms: What makes a good one?

Posted on 18. Nov, 2009 by karthick in Reports, Reviews

How do you categorise and cherry pick the best community platform? What would be the baseline that you would target? This the purpose of the post and what follow sis an analysis of what we have put together.

The breakdown.

First a definition is in order. What is a Community platform?

A community platform refers to the community platform “tool”. This is a tool (open source or otherwise) that enables people to build their own community networks or groups. So if I wanted to start a community for Kawasaki Bikes or Micheal Jackson dance moves club, what is the community platform tool that I should look into?

That’s my purpose in the series of blog posts that will follow. I plan to analyse a bunch of various tools, each bringing it’s unique features to the table, and then see what would broadly fit your (and well mine too) needs.

The Methodology of Analysis.

When one looks at a community platform, there are a range of things that comes to mind almost immediately. The first and foremost guiding principle in all of these platforms is the vision of the platform. To allow for user engagement and to do it seamlessly. That’s the broad picture, however , there are a lot of things that have now almost become standard (thanks to the large social networks like Orkut and Facebook) for communities in terms of features and new companies entering the market (for community platforms) as well as the ones already existing have to introduce them as basic options. So these features would be bundled in one area and then we have some features that we need to look at. Without further ado the 10 points that we are looking at.

1.User Features
This would be a no brainer. If a community cannot provide features that allow for sharing within a group of people, there’s not much to look into. Features I would say are important to look at? Here’s a quick check list of other features a community platform should look at incorporating.

* Detailed profiles (adding avatars and information)
* Formation of Groups
* Addition of friends and members to the group
* Relationship types between profiles (choose person as friend/buddy/casual acquaintance)
* Gallery option – Photos, Videos, Audios upload and download options
* Forums or Message boards for community discussion
* Blogs (individual and group authorship)
* Instant Messaging or offline messaging.
* RSS feeds – importing and exporting from groups or profile tracking updates.
* Search – within the community and specific groups.
* Widgets to enable display of relevant information
* Wikis and collaborative document sharing options.
* Tagging of posts, blogs, communities and threads.
* Event organisation and reminders.
* File Sharing for all types like .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .zip
* Email notifications for new users registered and any personal interaction.
* Polls to curate content or discussion within members.
* Bookmarking of discussion threads, profiles, updates etc.
* SEO’ed URLs of posts or groups (to a public community)
* Embedding options for content from other social networks.

Pretty exhaustive right? I’m sure you can add to that list to let me know what I missed out on. You’d also be amazed as to how quickly all of those points mentioned above are becoming benchmarks for good community platforms.

Functionality
Every community platform should have good functionality and should be enabled. Broadly this means the framework they are built upon and the availablility of that framework. Would open source frameworks then score higher than all? Not necessarily. We need to see how functional the community is once it’s set up. How easy are the interpersonal relationships between various groups. What is the cross flow of information? Can it be scanned easily?

Admin Controls

Good administrator controls allow for moderation of groups and communities and sharing and keeping access controls that help the community to be moderated well. Broadly these are some of the features I would look at.

OpenID/Social integration – One easy access login to the community.
Facebook/twitter API integration- the rage is to use your facebook and twitter logins making the integration necessary.
Theming/design – Any good community needs to offer users the chance to build custom themes and design.
CMS extensible functions – Allowing the platform to act and enable content management.
Network privacy settings – Everyone wants a secure network don’t they?
Advertisement display control- What ads can you filter, what sizes can you display, can you turn them off?
Portable Data – If for some reason we want content to be bundled and posted elsewhere.

Cost of the package

This hardly requires an introduction and it is a reason the public has taken a love for open source platforms – because they are free. But when one would like far more options than what’s put up and doesn’t have the time to personally wait for others to offer them solutions, one has to invest in a platform that offers custom service at a price. The price should justify the features offered. The other factor related to price is the bandwidth or spacing offered by the platform. Some self hosted platforms offer limited space for files and content to be uploaded while others seem to offer large enough storage spaces for media. Other smaller factors would be what is the file size limit for sharing and uploading and whether access controls are provided to make them public or private.

Popularity
Who is using it? How many people recommend it? What is the user database. All valid questions to ponder over and consider as a measurement factor.

Extensibility.
Cross API integration/management is something that fast requires looking into. With many different functions required out of a social network and new terms like lifestreaming coming into the picture, a robust community platform would have to provide or have a vision of what the future might be like and model their platform to incorporate that. In keeping with the times and technology, one ensures users don’t migrate as soon as something new comes out.

Analytics/Tracking at the backend
Almost a given pre-requisite to monitoring member usage and traffic to a website hosting the platform, analytics give us a good flow of information, tracking and statistics on user behaviour. This also lets us know what features are relevant, what aren’t good enough, what must be enhanced and the like. While powerful analytics tools like Google Analytics are available, a custom made one measuring not just the traffic but many other things would prove very useful.

Mobile, web, desktop clients.
I predict that in 5 years time, we will have almost no need for the computer and everything we do will be in our hand held mobile systems which would be powerful mini computers in themselves. A community platform that lets people stay connected with a mobile enhanced version so it works across browsers of the mobile OR allowing for a mobile version of the download would most definitely push them up the points ladder in the community platform rankings.

In the course of the next few weeks, we’ll take all the tools we have found (a large number giving us an extensive view of the space) and categorise them broadly on these parameters. We are eager for comments as well and sharing your experiences with various community platforms too!

Community Platform Review : ELGG

Posted on 20. Oct, 2009 by karthick in Reviews

In our first series of Community platforms, we are going to dwell deep into the world of platforms (and tools) that give people the power of forming communities and groups. The first part is targeted at open source social platforms. If you are thinking about forming a community and would like to know which platform would suit your interests best, then these series of posts are for you.

Our first community platform – ELGG.
ELGG gets its name from a town in Switzerland and also means Moose in many languages. It (Website) is an open source social engine that helps you build and form your community.  ELGG has been in development since 2004. What does a 5 year old product (latest version being  1.6.1) have to offer us? Quite a lot of features.

Unlike a lot of other platforms, ELGG started off with a vision to integrate the best of Web 2.0 and all popular social media tools integrated into one community platform. While version 1.0 included RSS feeds, forming groups, uploading pictures and avatars a lot has been added since then.  The ease with which one can use ELGG has made it a popular platform and the Education sector has particularly taken a liking to it. Recognising its efforts, Infoworld awarded ELGG its Bossie Award for the best open social networking platform.

What does it offer?
At the start, it is an open source platform freely available for download. The download is relatively small and anyone can install it on their local domain or server. To someone who wants to sample the product before using it, a free demo version is hosted online.  ELGG is a feature rich platform with some of its offerings being –  user and file management, multiple view and access controls for administrators, event plugin and APIs, OpenId and OpenSocial login options and use of multiple databases.

As soon as you set up your profile, ELGG offers you immediate access to various features such as subscribing to RSS feeds of pages and groups, OpenID logins and API integrated logins (you can login into the install with your twitter account for example).

Forming groups (sub communities) and updating your profile is relatively easy and intuitive.  Some standard widgets are available to display various chunks of information. The Dashboard available at the start gives anyone logged in an overview of their activity, their friends activities and your bookmarks.ELGG offers customization in terms of functionality. Access controls allow you to privatize your page or group. You can also alternatively allow only logged in users to view your document or open it up to the public.

ELGG brings with a concept of Pages and subpages which are fully customizable (provided you know HTML and CSS) and this can be open to viewing by a whole group or all your friends.

Why would we recommend ELGG?

Uploading multiple file type formats: An area where they really seem to excel is giving members the option to upload files of all types. So whether it’s a .ppt, .zip, .rar or .docx you can upload them. Enabling a plugin gives you the option to auto zip the file after uploading.

Multiple Author Blogs: And a second area we see ELGG edge out competition is the ability to co-author a blog and set permissions for multi users to collaborate on one blog.

The Wire: ELGG introduces something called the wire. This is like your personal twitter messaging service. You can use this to post messages through the wire on to your twitter account or just keep it limited within the community. Tandy but not too original. They use 140 characters as a limit too.

Bookmarks are a great offering that allow you to bookmark “pages” or “groups” that you would like to visit often or straight off from your homepage.

Messaging: Private and group messaging and the ability to instant message someone online are welcome features as well.

Why not ELGG?

Installation not for non technical people: While ELGG seems to tether on breaking the cliché “something too good to be true probably”, there is a large problem to be addressed- that of the installation. A primary need is to simplify the installation on a private server. The documentation available does not offer much information on how to go about the whole matter painlessly.

Default plugins insufficient:  To harness the true power of the installation many plugins are required to be installed and setup. This is easier said than done. The alternative of skipping the plugin installation leaves you with a very bare framework.  The overall time spent to setup the installation is far longer than one would ideally want to endure.

Too much information on home screen: The dashboard is an information overload for a first time member. What others are doing, what you did, who uploaded what are all strewn over the home screen and navigating through all of this is tedious. We’d suggest better information cataloguing.

User specific access to page not available: The option to allow select members (from different groups or from your friends list) to view your pages isn’t an option. That means choosing a sub page on motorcycles that I want only 2 of my friends to view and not the whole group is something I’d personally like to see in its future versions.

Themes aren’t diverse: Theming and customization is not something that is easily available or is easily achieved by non-techie people. There is this green bar that can get to be a bit annoying and last we checked the option to remove it isn’t easily available in notifications.

For everything else?
ELGG is a fine choice of a software platform. Get on it, get used to it and spread the love.

Who is using it?
Being free is one of ELGGs biggest selling points. A lot of communities have adopted the ELGG platform. There are user communities that have even taken it to extreme customization like the SwatchtheClub, Budokin (martial art website) and iJedi.

The university of Brighton has over 40,000 members actively engaged in the platform and were one of the first to embrace the ELGG platform. There are lots of other academic institutions that have also embraced this platform and the list of admirers include – Victoria University (Australia), University of Leeds, Kingston University, Columbia University and Claremont Graduate University among others.

In summary
So if you want to look for a good platform that requires a relatively large investment in the installation but smoothens the ride thereafter, we’d recommend you look into the ELGG platform. We understand that there are many developments happening in the version and would be looking forward to reviewing them again in the future releases.