NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoup.org - online community

CT EarthNet: Empowering Community-based Environmental Management

brenhan — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 12:58:32 -0400

Sobering Truth or Cyber-Heresy?

Glauco — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 19:29:05 -0400

Tom Watson at onLine discusses many of the frustrations that led to the development of Throngz.

Are Online Social Networks Just A Fad?

kanter — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 17:12:07 -0400

Asks Andy Carvin in a recent blog entry that response to C|NET News article debating whethe ror not online social networks are just a trendy trend or here to stay. In contrast to the C|NET article that looks at it from the business perspective and suggests that the jury is still out, Andy reviews the history of online community building, from the earliest bulletin board systems to community networks to online social networks. Definitely worth a read!

Guest Bloggers on Cybersoc.com

Susan_Tenby — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 20:32:38 -0500

If you have never been to Cybersoc.com or if you have never read the Cybersoc blog, this is a great time to start. Robin Hamman, of Cybersoc, is hosting guest bloggers all next week.

Here's the info:

Each day next week (20-24 March), cybersoc.com will be publishing posts by a series of special guest bloggers to help mark the one year anniversary of cybersoc.com (the blog, not the site which is 10 this year).

The guest bloggers are all leaders in their respective areas and should have some interesting ideas to share. Each of them will use their blog entry here to look back at the highlights of their chosen topic area over the past year and to look forward to give us a glimpse of what developments or changes they're excited, or worried about, happening over the coming year.

Civic Space

Paul Treadwell — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:43:51 -0500

Project Screenshot

URL

civicspacelabs.org/home/

Project Description

"CivicSpace is a free open-source software platform for grassroots organizing and civic activity. It allows individuals and organizations to build online communities that communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations and communities."

CivicSpace has built it's software on top of Drupal, which is an open source content management platform with very well developed categorization abilities and a broad array of modules available to enhance core services. What CivicSpace does is take that core framework and enhance it with some specific capabilites for grassroots organizing. By extending Drupal with a specific class of features the developers have provided an "out of the box" solution for grassroots organizations to deploy a useful and usable site within an hour or so.

Having said that....it helps to have a tech/web person and access to your server. Being a web person with open access to my servers , I cannot give any mileage variances for hosted installs of CivicSpace. I do know that for me to fire up a new install of CivicSpace requires minimal time and effort with pretty immediate rewards.

CivicSpace incorporates blogging,forums, file storage,pools and surveys and a number of other features to spark the process of community egagement online.

My first install of CivicSpace goes back a while and I've watched and upgraded over time, always with a positive improvement in features and stability. That, combined with the highly developed categorization tools build into the Drupal core, encourages me to believe that this software can facilitate online community building and sustain development both on and offline.