*** Democracies Online Newswire - http://DoWire.Org ***
To access links, see Steven Clift's blog: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=301 Post: Start an Online Group - DoWire Thanks OnlineGroups.Net Thank you OnlineGroups.Net. As you may have noticed, a number of the DoWire Groups online communities of practice are open and quiet active. They include the e-participation online community of practice called "Consult" for short, the E-Democracy and E-Government Researchers Network, and the new UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange. I've received a number of queries about the platform we use for our "best of class" e-mail and web participation integration. Those hosting online groups via web forums often exclude those who prefer e-mail participation and vice versa. The secret to why web-centric forums fail is their poor "location." It's location, location, location - e-mail boxes (or RSS feeds) are where it is at if you are trying to keep an online community visible to participants over an extend timeframe. On the other hand, a large minority hates e-mail - often your most wired folks, so for inclusion sake web participation should be more than a clunky old e-mail list archive with no web posting abilities (e.g. Mailman). It should allow full web style participation. On top of that, an online group needs a space to store and share files, "who's who" member information, etc. and the web is the best way to keep that information organized and accessible. Our online groups are hosted by OnlineGroups.Net using the GPL open source GroupServer platform. In the past, I had to send people who just wanted groups to the source code and say, have your own server? Good luck. :-) Now with OnlineGroups.Net ( http://onlinegroups.net ) you can register and Start a Site (small groups are free) and even have them host yout groups site using your own domain name (i.e. forums.e-democracy.org) for a small fee. This is huge because you can then "own" your site and not find your content stuck in YahooGroups or under some other providers copyright policy, etc. For government, non-profits, etc. with branding concerns, hosting with an advanced service simply makes a lot more sense. And because GroupServer is open source, with the right technical skills and infrastructure you have future hosting yourself options you will never have with proprietary systems. I encourage you to kick the tires/tyres on some of the sites they host and to start your own site and group(s). The more groups that join this family, the more feature demand that will be generated. This will benefit DoWire Groups, E-Democracy.Org forums, and anyone who hosts their own installation of GroupServer. While DoWire.Org, E-Democracy.Org and I personally, have no financial stake in OnlineGroups.Net or GroupServer, I am bullish on the use of this tool for e-participation and the fundamental importance of investing in open source tools to bring down the technology costs of effective e-democracy. Steven Clift http://dowire.org http://e-democracy.org *** Democracies Online Newswire - http://DoWire.Org *** To comment/for links: http://dowire.org/notes/?p=301 To network: http://groups.dowire.org Submit posts: http://dowire.org/submit Member profile for Steven: http://groups.dowire.org/main/contacts/stevenclift ----------------------------------------- Group home for Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail: http://groups.dowire.org/main/groups/newswire Replies go to members of Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail with all posts on this topic here: http://groups.dowire.org/topic/142318 For digest version or to leave Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail, email [email protected] with "digest on" or "unsubscribe" in the *subject*. Newswire - Steven Clift's blog posts by e-mail is hosted by Democracies Online - http://dowire.org.
