Communities made from eclectic parts?

March 25, 2008 8:46 AM

Examples of online communities assembled from free social tools?

Following Miko's comment about the Brooklyn Museum's community I thought it would be easy to find other variations of this model of community building from freely available social services. Specifically, I like the Brooklyn Museum's one but I think it could benefit from two additional tools: a space gathering all contributions and allowing contributors to interact (easily done, like a forum or a collective blog) and a way to find all contributions from any member (like Mefi's member profile). I wondered first if other communities were using this kind of strategy: to aggregate rather than building your own, and to provide the minimum of communal space and tools. But although I am sure a lot of people are taking advantage of all this free stuff for building communities, I am not finding them.

posted by bru to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Northfield.org - built using Drupal, Google Tools, and various other FOSS bits.
posted by unixrat at 9:20 AM on March 25, 2008

Probably fully half of everything ever built on Drupal. All of everything ever built using Ning.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:37 PM on March 25, 2008

Thanks.
These are good answers for my question.
But I realize that I have not written it clearly.

I am not looking for a platform. With Drupal or Ning, members post directly on the site.

I am looking for examples of websites which produce their own content, like the Brooklyn Museum (or, I suppose, any show or mass media output), and which simply aggregate the content that their visitors (audience) have posted elsewhere. In this way, the Brooklyn Museum aggregates the content posted on their members' blogs, flickr account or MySpace or facebook page or on youtube or blip.tv.
posted by bru at 7:28 PM on March 25, 2008

I am looking for examples of websites which produce their own content, like the Brooklyn Museum (or, I suppose, any show or mass media output), and which simply aggregate the content that their visitors (audience) have posted elsewhere

Northfield.org does both (original content and aggregation): http://northfield.org/aggregator/sources

We aggregate dozens of feeds, sort them into X number of categories. It's far and away the most popular part of the site.

Aggregated feeds are run through the front page and good posts are highlighted weekly in new content stories. Users can also post directly to the site if they wish.
posted by unixrat at 8:19 PM on March 25, 2008

I am not looking for a platform. With Drupal or Ning, members post directly on the site.

We just launched the new FastCompany.com site on Drupal, and it's a mix of aggregated content from around the web, user-generated stuff, and editorial content from the in-house CMS they produce the print publication with.

At least on the Drupal side there are a lot of tools (like FeedAPI and SimpleFeed) designed to pull in stuff from sources like ATOM and RSS feeds, Twitter accounts, etc and turn them into full-fledged content that you can manage and present like any other stuff on the site.
posted by verb at 7:41 PM on March 27, 2008