Newspace - a social networking site for new students
We've just create a social networking site for new students at the University, http://newstudents.newport.ac.uk. It's based on Ning - it's early days yet, but so far it's been pretty interesting, so I though it worth talking about some of the technical and management issues.
Lets's start with what we wanted to do. The brief was to create a social place for students coming to the University to meet online before they join the University, and to be able to contact the student mentors. We'd done this the year before with our own MyCommunity forums, and it worked pretty well, but this year we wanted to provide more functionality, and, well, provide something a little more 'cool'.
So our options - do something ourselves (our usual default position I guess), piggy back onto an existing service (eg Facebook), or go with one of the new wave of 'create your own' social network sites, like Ning.
After about 10 minutes playing with Ning it was pretty apparent that it would do the job, and we could get the site up and running, customised etc, in a very short amount time. In particular, it was great for showing people's photos and profiles, we could add our own profile quesions (what course, interested etc), users could create their own groups, own events and so on, so take ownership.
So what were the barrier to just launching it? We were actually looking at doing this for next academic year, so if we just launched it we'd be a year ahead of schedule.
So..
1) Are we comfortable with Nings T&Cs? Yes, we retain ownership of content. Hosting location is ambiguous, but the data isn't that precious.
2) Ning isn't completely free. You get 10Gb of storage and data, but how much we would use? And the tools to monitor usage aren't there. It doesn't seem much to add extra ($10 a month), but how much would it actually cost? I don't know the answer to this, but my estimate is that we can afford it...
3) No single sign-on. But we are all used to managing multiple user accounts now.
4) It's got adverts. Hmmm. We can pay to get rid of them, but organising regular payments by credit card isn't that straight forward for us. Strangely, must people didn't notice the ads until I pointed them out, at which point they wanted them removed. The ads are provided by Google - rightly or wrongly that makes them seem trustworthy, so we've left them in for now.
5). It doesn't have a Univesity URL. Should we make it look like a University provided service? For a few dollars we could host it in under our own domain name, and no-one would know it was a Ning space. But we decided this wasn't necessary. Ning is new enough that nobody is suffering Ning-fatigue (I think a Facebook group would have been met with groans all round...).
6) Could we get enough people on board? - after all, no student wants to be the first to join an empty community! This was surprisingly easy. A few chats, emails, and message board posting and we've got over a hundred staff and student mentors ready to meet our new students - we'll start inviting the students this week, although some have found it already. Staff at all levels have been very positive about the whole thing.
So, it's a slight risk. I guess I feel most uncomfortable about not knowing the costs, but it's not going to cost very much. And because it's targeted at new students there's a straight forward exit strategy when they are no longer new students. Or maybe not.. staff have already started to feel comfortable in the space, we've got a virtual staff room, and our first subject group created.
Probably the biggest discussion was whether to make it open or closed - ie visible to everyone on the net or not. We've gone with closed - we feel we need to protect our users privacy given we are inviting them into the space, and having a closed space makes it feel a little more special.
We won't know how much value it's really added until the start of the term, but at the moment it's looking good - maybe it will turn out to be one of our more valuable contributions, and for very little technical effort.
It's certainly given me food more thought about how we provide services in the future. If we had created the site ourselves it would have taken months. If we had bought in software it would have still taken weeks. This took days. And no worrying about upgrades, downtime etc. What have we lost? We can't control the development of the service - our users probably don't understand this, and have already started suggesting functionality improvements.