we are arck » social network

Arck’s first pro-bono project: A global social intranet for the Homeless World Cup. Made with love and Elgg.

Paul — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 17:52:43 +0000

We’re ecstatic to announce the start of our very first pro bono project: a global social Intranet for our favorite non-profit organization, The Homeless World Cup. We’ll be using the popular open-source social platform, Elgg, to create a hybrid content management system/social network that will be used to connect the organization’s 70 global partners. The network will enable central communication and allow the organization to share best practices, files, photos and other media to help develop internal projects across the globe.

For those who are unfamiliar with the event, The Homeless World Cup is an annual, international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever. It has triggered and supports grass roots football projects in over 70 nations working with over 30,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.

What’s possible with a free, open-source social networking framework called Elgg? The Wiley Faculty Network, for one.

Paul — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:00:59 +0000

We’ve been using the open-source social framework Elgg on nearly all of our social development project over the past two years. Never heard of Elgg? I’m not surprised. It hasn’t been given the attention or the visibility that it absolutely deserves. Hands down, it’s the best framework for developing custom social networks.

That said, I’d like to share our latest Elgg development effort, a faculty network for John Wiley & Sons, that we developed in cooperation with Garfield Group Interactive.

The Wiley Faculty Network is a global community of faculty, connected by a passion for teaching and a drive to learn, share, and collaborate. Members connect to collaborate with colleagues, join professional and peer groups, find mentors, attend virtual and live events, and view a wealth of resources all designed to help them grow as educators.

Site functionality included: one-click login integration with Wiley’s existing faculty system ProfVal; role-based access with custom profiles; intelligent dashboard widgets that suggest content to users based on their professional and personal interests; a custom content management system plugin allowing Wiley to deliver context and discipline specific content to users; a complete events management system; custom file/resource (documents, videos, audio) sharing; granular analytics and reporting; blogs, user groups and forums.

You can read the complete case-study on the Arck Interactive site, here:

http://www.arckinteractive.com/work/wiley-elgg-development/index.php.

The live Wiley Faculty Network web site is available here:

http://wfn.wiley.com/home

We just launched our third enterprise class social network for Wiley & Sons Publishing!

Paul — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:43:32 +0000

Working for Garfield Group Interactive over a period of 6 months, we developed a scalable social network based on Elgg. Functionality included: one-click login integration with Wiley’s existing faculty system ProfVal; role-based access with custom profiles; intelligent dashboard widgets that suggest content to users based on their professional and personal interests; a custom content management system plugin allowing Wiley to deliver context and discipline specific content to users; a complete events management system; custom file/resource (documents, videos, audio) sharing; granular analytics and reporting; blogs, user groups and forums.

Check out the case study here.