Blog: Online Community

Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups

We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group.  Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.

To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients.  It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.

Included in the spaces suite is a core set of feature definitions that provide features for things like the blog and book modules. Additionally there are feature definitions for a calendar, a shout-box, and a case-tracker. When you create a group with Spaces enabled it changes the creation a bit, limiting the kind or group you can create to simply 'public' or 'private' and allows you to select what features should be available inside that group. If it's only appropriate for your group to have a blog, you can limit it to that. If your group needs a more substantial feature set, say a blog, book, and calendar, you can configure that for the group.  Spaces also lets you change labels in a group, so if a set of users doesn't want a 'blog', but needs a 'discussion' they can have it without need to to change any code or use the locale module. Here  is how the setup looks:

Creating a Success Online Community that Gets Returns

Premal Shah, the president of Kiva, talked yesterday about some of the ways that Kiva's online platform engages people and has created a community of microfinance lenders and borrowers.

Kiva connects small business owners in developing countries with micro lenders around the world through an online platform. The business owners, usually working through their micro bank on the ground in their country, post information about their business, their business plan, and the amount of money they want to borrow to make it happen. Lenders around the world can go to the site, decide who they want to lend to, and then lend the money using their credit cards (and in amounts as low as $25). Borrowers then pay the money back to the lenders over time. 

It's a simple idea, and it's run on an online platform that facilitates the whole business. Premal ran through some of the strategy behind the system. Much of what he said echoes what we tell our clients who are trying to engage a community online and is relevant to every organization trying to do so. Here are a few of the points I find most important.

• Highlight the people in your community. Kiva posts big pictures of its small business owners along with their background, their business plan, and the amount they want to borrow, and lenders can create a profile that the business owners and other lenders can see. This goes a long way in helping people get to know one another and bridging the physical gap between them.

  It also shows off some of their successes.

Flickr's Release of "Find Your Friends" Allows Organizations to Build their Network Faster and Be Smarter Communicators

Now it's easy to find and talk to "your friends" on Flickr. On March 31st Flickr opened up a new tool that allows people search their Yahoo!, Gmail, and Hotmail address books to find Flickr users with those email addresses. This really blows open the communications windows for organizations that host photos on Flickr and have large email lists of friends and supporters.

Organizations can now build relationships on Flickr with the same
people they send emails and e-newsletters to. This is a big step. I
have seen and helped a lot of nonprofits start using Flickr as a
community outreach tool, but aside from staking a presence and
regularly posting photos that are integrated with blog posts,
communication directors haven't really known what to do with the
service.

All they have to do to further connect with these people - and engage in a two way dialog with them - is to do a large address book import in to Google from their mail program and go to work. It's that easy with a CSV file dump (Comma Separated Values), which Google supports.

Flickr has a ton of great communications features - like commenting on photos, tagging, friending, etc - that organizations and supporters can now use to simply talk to each other. For many organizations, this may well be the very first time they get to see the faces of their supporters. 

This is a great way for organizations to embrace pull style communications (i.e. let supporters pull in their pictures rather than always pushing them out to them). Who knows, maybe organizations will start subscribing in mass to their supporters' feeds to see what they're posting and glean information about them this way. It will give them a very personal window into their membership base. I think this is where the real magic will happen. Maybe even just doing some lightweight automated text analysis based on tags will generate some great information and low lying fruit. 

UN Millennium Campaign Reaches Out to Facebook Community

Facebook became one of the most talked about social networks in the United States when they opened up their API this summer, and new Facebook applications have been popping up like crazy ever since. In addition to all the super poke and zombie applications, some interesting organizations and causes have entered the mix like the UN Millennium Campaign, who launched a Facebook application a couple weeks ago. (Disclaimer: They’re a client of ours and we recently built two websites for them, although we didn’t do any work on this application.)

This is how the application appears in my Facebook profile. As you can see, it’s a big old clock counting down to the campaign’s deadline to end global poverty. I picked this image because I think it’s powerful, but there are two other options you can choice from as well – a countdown clock to the next Stand Up Against Poverty event and a photo of the day, which is pictured below.

I particularly like the share button that’s on all of the profile widgets, which lets your friends add this application to their profile with just a click. This is a great feature to help spread the application virally, and one that I haven’t seen on too many other Facebook applications. Also there are links to the application’s main page and some of its main features, like blog, events, and friends hall of fame, which are good to get people interacting with the application.