Communities

Communities

Once you have found others with similar interests - or perhaps you are part of a research groups or a course/class - you may want to have a more formal community setting. This is where Elgg's powerful community building features can be used.

• You can create and moderate as many communities as you like
• You can keep all community activity private to the community or you can use the 'make public' option to disseminate work to the wider public.
• Each community produces granular RSS feeds, so it is easy to follow community developments
• Each community has its own URL and profile
• Each community comes with a file repository and blog

Once a community has been formed, those who join the community can contribute to the collective blog and file repository. This is an excellent way to share ideas and to collaborate together.

Technically, a community has all the same properties and abilities as a user. That means it's got its own blog, wiki, profile, resources and file repository. The difference is that anyone who's a member of a community can upload content to those spaces, and the owner of that community has the ability to edit and remove content.

Creating a community

In SciSpace.net, anyone can create a community.

1. Click on Network
2. Click on the 'owned communities' submenu option
3. At the bottom of the screen is a 'create community' form. You need to give the community a name as well as a username; the name is the full descriptive name throughout the system. The username is the short name that will be formed when you create the community
   
4. Click 'create' to complete the process
   

Access restrictions

You can restrict access to your communities. For example, you might want to vet users before you let them in.

1. Click on your community's profile
2. Select the edit community details submenu option
3. Select your moderation type

Transferring community ownership

Community administrators can change the ownership of a community. Ownership is set from the community settings, and just involves typing the username of the user who will become the new owner.

Ad-Hoc communities

You can build ad-hoc communties around shared interests within SciSpace.net. For example:

• As you fill out your profile, the system will create links between you and other people/resources within SciSpace.net, based on keywords you enter. Selecting one of these links will produce a page with all of the people and resources which share that same keyword. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed that is produced, and can then follow all developments based on that interest.
• You can also use the search interface to find both people and resources for a specific keyword. When the results of the search are displayed, an RSS feed will have been produced. If you put this feed into your aggregator of choice (such as in Resources), it will now be possible to follow all activity that happens on SciSpace.net relating to the specific interest you have chosen.

SciSpace.net makes use of its extensive tagging architecture to create these linkages.

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Content adapted from Elgg documentation

 

iframe, 15-Oct-2007 14:36 (GMT)