A new social platform for VUB students?

For the same course that saw the birth of this blog, we were given the assignment to develop a new, original didactical concept with the use of (educational) technologies that incorporate the theoretical principles and best practices as discussed in the course meetings. Though the assignment in itself was simple, the implications weren’t ... in a group and the class as a whole,  where the level of ICT knowledge is limited to the USE of (the most common) technology.

Although frustration is not always the best of guidelines, our idea to develop an ‘alternative’ platform to the VUB's PointCarré for online collaboration and discussion grew (in part) from a few observations that arose in class when we - as students - were talking about the VUB’s online system's pros and contras.

On the other hand, we did not have the means, time nor the resources to complete a full systems analysis that would be customary before embarking on a more serious undertaking; we thus had to rely on ‘gut feeling’ and ‘previous experiences. 

We felt that we needed to be able to offer - and deploy - a serious platform in a minimum of time (two months between ‘order’ and ‘deployment’ is incredibly short) without compromising on the guiding principles (see hereafter) and potential future expandability. 

In brief, the system should:

1. provide (at least) the same functionalities as the existing one 
2. provide a more familiar environment than PointCarré 
3. provide for the possibility to have ‘private’ conversations between members 
4. allow for easy mobile access 
5. allow for cross-platform sharing of information 
6. be open source 
7. be easy to build, maintain and administer 
8. be tried-and-tested

Once the idea for an ‘OpenSource Social network’ was launched, the choices of packages became limited...

1. The world’s eyes are all on ‘Diaspora’ - hailed as the alternative to facebook but the platform still has to prove its worth in practice and the installation is incredibly complicated. 
2. Another - visually attractive - OpenSource alternative is ‘Appleseed’ but, though announced in 2004, it has not left the beta-testing stage 
3. and then there is Elgg - tried-and-tested for a couple of years now. A stable (though sometimes slow) platform that has been able to do what an OpenSource platform should: 

• A loyal and productive community of developers 
• A tried-and-tested, stable architecture 
• Ease of installation and maintenance

We finally settled for Ellg, because it features all of the pre-requisites we put forward - and then some more... Elgg is fully open source, and thus free to download and use. It is dual licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 as published by the Free Software Foundation and the MIT License. 

It is also a widely-used platform, used by governments, educational institutions and big communication agencies.

Furthermore, there is a very active support community, documentation and a myriad of plug-ins to enhance the functionality of Elgg.

We would invite you to test the platform for yourself.

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