Social action. Honest exchange. Grounded learning.
The future of Ning and making networks work
Our Society runs on a platform provided by Ning, in common with many others in the community, voluntary and social enterprise fields. It allows us all to provide good online services, at modest cost. Currently CDX covers the £169.95 cost of the plus plan, and you see here what we get for thathttp://www.ning.com/compareplans
As I think we all know, this is a hugely competitive and volatile field, increasingly dominated by Facebook, and Ning has just announced that it is being taken over by Glam Media. This is an advertising-based platform for fashion, entertainment, health and wellness. Here's the announcement, with discussion from people running Ning sites
http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/ning-and-glam
The good news is that the acquisition probably means that Ning will continue to offer its current services, and maybe some improvements. From discussion online, we don't have to take any adverts. The founder of Glam, Samir Arora, looks to be an interesting guy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samir_Arora.
At the same time, we will of course be concerned to find out, for example, what the terms and conditions of use will be. Those for Glam Media http://www.glammedia.com/about_glam/legal/terms_of_use.php raise potential issues about ownership of content.
Glam position themselves closer to Facebook than blogging
http://www.glammedia.com/about_glam/our_story/index.php
This could be a wake up call for all of us to put our heads together and see how we can ensure that there are sustainable social spaces for people to share stories, ideas and experience.
We are proud of what we have achieved on Our Society over the past year, and also applaud the work of fellow Ning users like
National Community Activists Network http://nationalcan.ning.com/
ABCD Europe http://abcdeurope.ning.com/
Fiery Spirits http://fieryspirits.com/
Social by Social http://socialbysocial.net/
RSA Fellowship http://rsafellowship.com/
… to name just a few.
However, it is a struggle for volunteers to put in the time needed to maintain online communities. Only a small percentage of people in a community will contribute actively, so communities with maybe 500 members, like ours, will have a few dozen people posting and commenting. Some of those may be spreading their effort across other networks.
Is this a time for those managing other Ning networks - and similar communities of interest or practice - to get together and see what we can achieve collectively? That needn't mean merging communities, but it could mean more effort to connect discussions, cross-feed news and use the many tools we have for sharing.
Together we might also be able to negotiate some support from Ning at a time when they will no doubt be concerned to re-assure their nonprofit customers of their continuing good intentions.
If we have doubts about the direction Ning is taking, we could work together to look for alternatives.
These online platforms give us a more powerful voice, and the means to collaborate. Let's see how we can make the most of them.
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Jeff Mowatt on -
I thought I'd give it a test drive
A little more flexible than the previous version in the ability to create pages. Moving toward a website creation tool.
The linking with Facebook groups and pages got me thinking. There's a Facebook app for RSS which can take a feed from whatever network being used and keep Facebook constantly updated with new responses. That might well draw more attention to the network which is still fairly small in its membership.
-
Permalink Reply by Matt Lent on -
A common frustration I have is commenting or adding a feature on one network that I participate in, and wanting it to be visible to other relevant social media spaces that I also contribute to.
I must have a dozen Ning profiles spread across the web, it would seem to me to be a fairly simple piece of coding to allow all my profiles to be visible in one central space to other Ning users, should I wish it to be so, and to create a Ning user dashboard, allowing me to view all my networks and contributions in this central space, and to manage this information from there. A central space in which I could also select the postings I would like to add to whichever networks and forums I should like to add them.
Perhaps it may also be possible to bring similar discussions and debates together across forums and networks into one space, organised by theme and tag words.
-
Permalink Reply by Roxanne Persaud on -
Hi folks
Another technical option - you might also consider Xenforo, as used by Urban75. The Urban75 Forums (which has never called itself hyperlocal, by the way) run on a handful of very part-time volunteers. I'm happy to share more of the inside scoop on our decision to transition from vbulletin to Xenforo btw, a lot of similar practical and ethical issues came up. I know studentmidwife.net were considering it too but it doesn't look like they've made the leap.
-
Permalink Reply by julian dobson on -
Matt, Roxanne - many thanks for these comments. Matt, I share your frustration and think a lot of these forums would work much better if people could access them from a single social dashboard. David might have some thoughts on this. The Xenforo platform looks interesting but again there's an issue of how we bring together related discussions on different forums (in the case of Our Society, think this Ning, the RSA 'big society' group, various related LinkedIn groups, the National Community Activists Network.... I could go on.
-
Permalink Reply by Matt Lent on
-
It's possible to create and add discussions across a selection of LinkedIn groups, this is a function I like and use, if LinkedIn can do it I'm sure Ning can as well. Although it doesn't go far enough in that it doesn't collate responses across networks, I can see this could be a problem as not everyone is a member of the same networks, but how about about building a link to 'see all responses'.
I do believe that this (simple) functionality can also help to empower people across communities through a rather elegant solution of sharing expertise and offering support and guidance more intuitively and instantly between interest groups. I'd be interested to read David's thoughts (but I guess only on this page for now).
Thinking about it, one thing this site can do pretty simply, as a starting point, is to collate interesting and relevant blogs together in one space.
-
Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on -
Thanks Julian, Matt, and also Roxanne for Xenforo.
I think one difficulty, even when there are tech solutions, is to get enough energy and support from volunteers and an occasional-use community to make the investment for both setup and a different way of doing things. The usual "why bother?"
Here's an idea that might get over that.
John Popham, Drew Mackie and I have just started a piece of work for Big Lottery Fund and their People Powered Change progamme - details here. ppchange has some big national partners: NESTA, Unltd, Your Square Mile, Media Trust, Young Foundation ... and us as Social Reporters.
The aim is to use a mix of mapping, social reporting and local community reporting to help join things up at the national level, and to help local groups gettting Lottery funds (and others) tell their stories and share experience. Our role is as network builders, demonstrators, facilitators.
In some ways the challenge for ppchange joining up is just a bigger version of what we are talking about here. We are already getting some great responses from the other partners - but it needs some bottom up drive as well. Given that, there a real opportunity to stitch together a networked communication infrastructure that joins up some of the silos.
BIG's Village SOS is a rural network involving BBC and substantial central tech. There nothing equivalent for urban ... or connecting urban and rural interests.
So - would it possible to get together with some of the other online community managers (whether Ning or not) to do two things:
- Look at some immediate technical connections that Matt mentions. I met the UK MD of Ning the other day - through someone else's kind intro - and he might help explore the options on their side.
- See whether we could collectively some up with some ideas to pitch at BIG to make People Powered Change a bit more people-led:-) I have a meeting there next Wednesday, so I could test their enthusias.
Funny how stuff connects up, isn't it!
PS I've just remembered that Nick Wilding of the Ning-based Fiery Spirits has, earlier in this thread, offered Carnegie UK as a host for a get-together.
-
Permalink Reply by Jeff Mowatt on
-
Ah Matt, how to communicate information across discrete networks. More a £12.7 billion than $64,000 question today perhaps?
Not just a technical problem but also a silo mentality. My reason for creating a social enterprise group on Facebook for example, more an issue of being almost alone when joining the SEC to network alone on their forum.
I've been participating in the Village SOS forum recently, having entered the 2009 competition and still trying to leverage support for local information driven development.
-
Permalink Reply by Jeff Mowatt on
-
It looks like the end of the road for my hyperlocal efforts as SocialGo the platform I've been using to build it since 2010 has all but vanished returning a 'domain removed' message.
As we know, this platform has been chosen for Your Square Mile
The SocialGO owners site has been in maintenance mode for the last 3 days, so now we can't even ask a question.
Doesn't look good for communities who put considerable effort into sharing information.
According to the Your Square Mile community map, I live in a lonely place, a desert in social capital terms.
Worse still, I can't do anything to help populate it, other than send an email.
Jeff
-
Permalink Reply by Jess Steele on -
Hi Julian.
Interesting discussion about nings.
I was a little bit sad not to see the Meanwhile Ning here. Just did a quick comparison, shown below. Obivously it's not all about the numbers, but...
ABCD Europe 122 Social by Social 550 NatCAN 545 Our Society 616 Fiery Spirits 1062 Meawhile ning 1209 RSA fellows 1739
-
Permalink Reply by julian dobson on
-
Fair point Jess, but the list was naming 'just a few'. Clearly any thoughts and experiences from the Meanwhile group would be very helpful.
-
Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on
-
Hi Jess - I too would be interested in how you are finding Ning management. It takes some effort to facilitate - so congratulations on Meanwhile. Can we keep them all going? We are reviewing Social by Social
- ‹ Previous
- 1
- 2
- Next ›
Groups
Our Supporters
Our Society logo by:
Supported by:
Creative Commons
Our Society is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
By registering for Our Society you agree to our terms and conditions.
© 2012 Created by Sophie Ballinger.
Powered by
