Private online network for professional interaction
February 13, 2018 8:27 PM   Subscribe

I'm working in a nonprofit/educational setting, and we are brainstorming ideas about how to create a social network for participants to ask questions to us and amongst themselves. We are not knowledgeable in this area. What should we be considering?

A Google+ group is an option that we have discussed (as it's free and we know it exists), but we are wondering if there are other free or monthly subscription platforms that may have advantages. In descending levels of importance, the community must be (a) closed to the public to permit honest conversation between members, (b) permit interaction between individuals via some sort of question/comment interface visible to the entire group, and (c) must seem "facebook-like", so they're more likely to use it. The individuals do not all have email addresses from the same domain name, which may exclude some corporate solutions (?).

Thanks so much!
posted by bessel functions seem unnecessarily complicated to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would use a private Discourse forum.
posted by third word on a random page at 8:56 PM on February 13, 2018


Private facebook group. Invite only and hidden to public.
posted by TestamentToGrace at 9:04 PM on February 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Slack.
posted by Miko at 9:12 PM on February 13, 2018 [5 favorites]


Use what they will use. Maddening to put work into a thing and people just won’t use it.
posted by Iteki at 9:16 PM on February 13, 2018 [1 favorite]


Our workplace uses Yammer and it's terrible. But it is very Facebook-like in the interface. And the people at work who love Facebook also don't seem to hate Yammer as much as the rest of us. (My main gripe with it is that formatting and including images/video in posts works very counter-intuitively - it seems to only ever post media as a linked attachment and strips out formatting so posts are too often big walls of text. Also there's some secret combination of keys that I accidentally hit too often that deletes everything you just drafted with no way to recover it.)
posted by lollusc at 1:01 AM on February 14, 2018


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