RE:

But what I also see is that people who tag “Biking” aren’t linked to people who tag “Mountain Biking”. People who like to “Blog” are categorized differently than people who are into “Blogging”. I know, that’s the nature of the ‘tag’ game, but it is a frustration nonetheless.

I’d actually say it’s more the nature of language than the tag game, but that’s more semantics than anything else. The thing that might sort out some of these details is an implementation of the Porter Stemming algorithm — but, like all development (on an open source project or on proprietary code) it takes time and/or money. Perhaps I sense an opportunity for sponsored development

Also, if you want a sense of the direction Elgg is going wrt finding communities, take a look at the wireframes for .7 — these mockups are intended to show what the new UI will look like when the .7 release is finalized. Given your statements in this post, it should align pretty cleanly with what you are looking for.

Currently on elgg.net, you can filter blog posts in a variety of ways, including by community. This feature is included in the .65 release, which is currently available for download at eduforge. Filtering by community lets you get a sense of the more active communities, which is also a factor in joining a community.

agreed on the tagging issue. it would be nice if it worked for synonyms. same problem with wikipedia actually. and edublog is a good example. Currently if you put edublog into wikipedia you will get a site… try EduBlog or edublogger, you get nothing. S. Downes talked about the weakness of ‘flat’ tagging on the show a few months ago. I’m not sure what the alternative would be however. Metatagging is too time consuming… the ‘amazon’ model tends to go towards a sanitized model… The only thing, thus far i think , is to do what people do at wikipedia… and that’s make a link between similar words…

As for, ‘how do people join my community?’ Post a blog message to ‘all signed in members’ saying ‘i’m starting a community. That’s what we’ve been doing. It seems to work well. Like you say, you find a bunch of ‘blogging’ tags, which makes you realize that the community is needed, and then post a post that says “hey, i formed a blogging community,” tag it ‘blogging’ and see what happens.

Open Source, collaborative project. All input needed.

I do see how people can be connected through the tags. But what I also see is that people who tag “Biking” aren’t linked to people who tag “Mountain Biking”. People who like to “Blog” are categorized differently than people who are into “Blogging”. I know, that’s the nature of the ‘tag’ game, but it is a frustration nonetheless.

And once again, there’s still no way for me to find the communities that I want to join. I’d like to join a community of EduBloggers that are using the site. Is there one? I can click on the “Blogging” tag, but that shows me a list of people. Then I need to click every profile and see what communities they’ve joined to see if they happen to belong to a blogging one. Of course, I can create one, but how will anybody else find it? Unless they happen to stumble upon my profile, they can’t.

Therein lies my biggest problem with Elgg. Believe me, I do find it promising, but as the title of the blog post says, I’m going to suggest that most people wait for the next version. In my opinion, Elgg isn’t quite ripe yet.

Of course, that being said, I haven’t found anything better. So I may wind up using it anyway

Funny, i feel like posting the same thing here i posted on Dave warlick’s site. http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/08/17/the-elgg-experience/

I’ll give you a challenge instead. The key to getting started with elgg is filling out your profile, from which you can really get around and find out what people are doing. http://elgg.net/teach/ http://elgg.educationbridges.net/teach These are your profiles from the elgg site and from the educationbridges site. Go back, when you’ve got a few minutes, and fill those profiles out. That will give you a much better sense of how things connect in elgg. It will automatically connect you to other people that have your interests. It is, to some degree, designed for tag navigation… and in order to do that, you need to do some tagging yourself.

http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=65 and here’s my ‘newbie to elgg’ start guide if that helps.

That being said, i’m by no means saying that elgg is perfect… it’s still at 0.6 and the nav has a way to go. And it’s not a kill-all solution, but we’re using it for ‘my space’ style situations for k-12 and for teachers (like the educationbridges one) and it seems to work.

cheers. dave.

So I had to do a search for people by interest, choose random profiles, hope they had communities and keep picking random people until I found one with communities listed there and then hope they were communities I might be interested in.

As to your second point, you’re half right. It’s not a Catch 22 because even being a part of a community doesn’t make it any easier to find new ones. Joining Digital Storytelling didn’t help me find similar communities. In order to find others, I still had to keep picking profiles and hoping that people had other communities listed that might suit my needs.

I greatly look forward to the next release in hopes that this becomes much more friendly to the end user. As it stands right now, I don’t think new users can realistically find communities they want to be a part of unless they have direct help from somebody on the inside.

Very much looking forward to learning more about OpenAcademic! Sounds promising.

1. When viewing a user’s profile, look in the sidebar. You will see a list of community memberships. Click on one of these communities, and you will be brought to the community page. From there, you can join.

2. Search tags. For the linked example, I used the tag “curriculum.” At the bottom of the page, you will see a section called “Matching Users.” These users are actually communities.

Within the current version of Elgg, Communities and Users work in the same way: both are organized and categorized around common interests. It’s one of the things that make Elgg different than many of the other apps out there. The ability to make connections is driven by overlapping areas of interest. However, in response to constructive feedback from the Elgg user community, the bext release of Elgg will contain a feature that allows searching of communities to be separate from users.

RE:

It’s a Catch 22. In order to join a community, you have to be a member of a community.

From within any screen in Elgg, you’re never more than three clicks from joining any community, using either of the methods I described above. The statement in your original post is wholly inaccurate.

@ Chris Craft: Sakai is a larger application with base functionality more closely aligned with the needs of institutions. To get the eportfolio piece, you will need to install OSP. The Sakai/OSP installation requires a Tomcat server. I have installed both, and found the Elgg install an easier proposition. However, I always recommend looking at the different available options, as this allows for a more informed choice.

@ Jamey: I’m the project lead on OpenAcademic — it’s an open source project, so the code will be freely available to download. We will offer hosting, as well as installation services.

We will also offer (for a miniscule fee) training in how to find communities

Recently on the moodle forums, I noticed discussions about OpenAcademic (see openacademic.org). This new endeavor will combine Moodle, Elgg and Drupal as a package to set up for educational use. Looks promising, but I don’t know anything about pricing.

Have you checked out Sakai?

http://www.sakaiproject.org/

I haven’t, but intend to. Not sure if it is a quality replacement for Elgg, seeing as it is missing some of the features, but I will give it a more thorough look through.

Thanks for your hard work on this, you’ve saved me some work.

Chris Craft
http://www.opensourceclassroom.com