University of Washington Emerging Technology

Per our 2008-eTech roadmap for social software, some of our team members have been heads down over the past few weeks working on the evaluation of a few community platforms. The evaluation is specifically targeted at a UW Technology project to revamp the design of our current web presence.

Our current web presence is at http://www.washington.edu/computing and I think we can all agree it’s time for a fresh look and design. Rick Ells and his team in the communications group have been hard at work on a richer interactive design for quite some time now.

The new site design specifically calls for community features. This led us to explore a handful of community platforms that help websites either revamp or augment their current site to be rich communities and allow for peer-produced content. The introduction of these community platform products suggest that social networking and online communities are not destinations, but features which can be integrated into any website.

So what do I mean by social networking vs. online communities on the web?

Social networking to me is building your online profile and your network, searching for people you know, sustaining relationships, and building new relationships. Online communities are ways individuals can participate on a website such as comments, wikis, blogs, and voting as a community.

The eTech technology evaluation of community platforms is specific to the latter, however we are seeing an evolution of these platforms to include more social networking features like “Friends” and “Social Graphs”. We also see focused sites like our new UW Technology web presence serving niche communities desiring a community voice outside of the huge and generic social networking destinations (e.g., Facebook and MySpace).

Platforms we are actively exploring include:
* Movable Type’s Community Solution;
* Telligent’s Community Server; and
* UW Sharepoint Community Kit.

Common features of these community platform involve blogs, forums, user voting/rating, comments, profiles, tag/tag clouds, user activity news feeds, etc.

These solutions take the best features from various social web 2.0 sites like Digg.com, Flickr, Facebook and Delicious.

So what’s the big deal here?

As we all know social software and web 2.0 is big part of our computing lives such as socializing on Facebook, writing and reading blogs, uploading files and videos, voting on ideas, and participating in rich conversations on forums. The benefit of having these rich interactions on any website is helping attract a larger audience and involve visitors with a set of very rich interactive features. A community platform is one way a website can evolve from one-way read-only pages to ensuring our community around us feels like we engage with them actively over the web. Of course, communities on the Web are not the only way we pursue community development but it is important that being a technology organization, we have a strong, rich, interactive web presence for our UW community.

Will these solutions really allow campus websites to become a rich interactive location for our UW community? Is there any value and hope in moving away from email for communication and unto blogs and forums?

I guess only time will tell but for the time being we are hosting some brainstorming and eTech talk sessions around campus and we will be talking to Kexp.org, OIM, Catalyst, UW Technology and others. Please email me ttchang@u.washington.edu if you are interested in learning more or have questions. Also please comment away on this post if you want to discuss further.

In my next post I will share with you what we have learned so far with the evaluation of these products.

Tags: community server, community solution, sharepoint, sharepoint community kit, social software

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 7:41 am and is filed under social software, web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.